"Teaching English in the Two-Year College's" series "What Works for Me" is a unique artifact in the development of composition as a field. In this article, the author claims "What Works for Me" as a valuable genre, a hybrid of new and old disciplinary forms. In the spirit of Derek N. Mueller's "Views from a Distance: A Nephological Model of the…

For many writing teachers, helping students discover, explore, refine and, most importantly, inhabit their "voices" is both the teachers' greatest challenge and pleasure. Voice, they tell them, is what their writing "sounds" like when someone reads it; it is their personality on the page; it is the writer "speaking" to the reader. But what happens…

The purpose of this article is to present a case for building racial literacy in students. The author offers support for her argument by foregrounding a three-month study she conducted in her community college first-year composition (FYC) classroom. She hopes that this article will contribute to the growing body of research that emphasizes the…

A brief review of composition theory shows metaphor is often underused and misrepresented in the composition classroom. Approaches to teaching metaphor in composition courses do not go far enough in acknowledging the key role metaphor can play in argumentation, and very little composition theory heeds Andrea Lunsford's call to teach metaphor as…

To writing, painting, drawing, and photography as artistic media, the author would like to add teaching as a creative endeavor as well. Especially in a classroom where English is not the first language for many students, the writing teacher needs to be creative with assignments and activities that address nontraditional ways of learning. Her…

In this article, the author traces the history of the five-paragraph theme and the views about it, along with arguing for its elimination in writing instruction in favor of problem-based, "rich-task" writing experiences for students. She intends to bring together various voices on theme writing across time along with some key bits of the history…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

Intertextuality is a vital component of college reading and writing. In order to write a paper that requires the synthesizing of readings, students must recognize the intertextual connections among all their sources. Instruction that fosters intertextual awareness in basic writers can help them overcome their tendency to compartmentalize what they…

Each semester the author asks her first-year composition students to write a profile essay. The assignment, based on one in "St Martin's Guide to Writing," requires that students develop a thesis ("dominant impression" or "angle") about a place that they visit. The author is convinced that this essay is one of the most valuable and challenging…

In this essay, the author describes her own attempt at incorporating Web 2.0 technology into her teaching: a wiki project that she used in her English as a second language (ESL) composition course. The theme she traces throughout the rest of this essay is the wiki's ability (or inability) to make "connections" of various kinds. Like any text, the…

Effective writing happens when the values of a genre and the desires of a writer match. Studying the blog entry as a genre has strengthened the author's assumptions about the possibility of using blogs as examples of emplaced, agency-granting writing and as bridges to academic writing. Because blogs are a relatively new form of communication, the…

Because Dominique (or D-Mon, as he liked to be called) had drill before class, he would sometimes come in late in the author's class, his army boots silently moving across the tile as though he were trying to sneak by a sentry. The army fatigues that he wore were supposed to help him blend into a desert landscape, a tan-and-brown world of sand. In…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

In this article, the author offers a new strategy for working with sentences in college composition that prompts students to access and apply their native grammatical abilities. The chunking strategy that she advocates is based on meaning and rests at a level of analysis that transcends varieties. It builds on the grammatical competence that…

Like many compositions at majority schools, the author felt disturbed by his students' lack of racial awareness. During the 2007-08 academic year, the author tried a completely different approach to teaching composition that targeted white racial awareness. Identifying race as the course theme, he developed a curriculum that teaches rhetorical…