By analyzing Zen guided meditations, I argue that literacy researchers can improve the field's conceptual tools by investigating experiential knowledge. Using work on procedural knowledge and the emotional bases of perception, cognition, and decision making, I show that experiential knowledge drives perceptions and action, thus shaping…

Explores an insight offered by Plato in his "Seventh Letter" to explain why the traditional mode-based approach to teaching composition is so attractive and how it can be expanded upon to teach students productive inquiry. Shows how the process-based approach promotes that sort of productive change and suggests how to engage students in…

Presents three comments on David Dobrin's article, "Is Technical Writing Particularly Objective?" and Dobrin's response. (FL)

Questions the current expectation that writing theory will serve pedagogy in direct, immediate ways, because of the extraordinary variety and complexity of the writing process. (DD)

Students should be taught to make judgments of literary values, to discriminate between works, to discern the graces or faults in literary texts. (DD)

Tells how the traditional Anglo-American literary cannon has historically functioned as a paternal edifice, erected on a "plot" that has contained and maintained itself by either keeping women out or keeping them in secondary and dependent positions. Considers revision as a solution. (EL)

Presents a criticism of Clayton W. Lewis's analysis of Burke's "A Rhetoric of Motives" arguing that Lewis risks overstressing act and neglecting the necessary connection between agency and act in Burke's theory of dramatism. Includes Lewis's response. (HTH)

Analyzes passages of Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in support of the plea that English teachers work toward a new paradigm which allows the examination of the ways language sharpens and directs critical analyses of the historical situation. (DD)

Outlines what an adequate theory of the writing process would include, with special attention to the fact that the writing process is both linear and recursive. (JL)

Insisting that student writers always use definite, specific, concrete language when they write can prevent them from using language to understand, transform, and relate immediate experience to everything else. (DD)

Advocates a model for the teaching of writing in which the response of the reader is of central importance, and contrasts this model with models focusing on the centrality of the writer or the written product. (DD)

The passion for a return to the basics is a form of nostalgia for a nonexistent past. (DD)

Students should learn to critically evaluate their relationship to literary works and to cultivate "analytic neutrality" so that they can better understand what occurs within themselves when they read a literary work. (DD)

Assesses the benefits and limitations of writing as a cognitive process. Discusses the cognitive process model of writing, then proposes an ecological model of writing, where a fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems. (EL)

Disagrees with the contention that the differences in approaches to teaching writing can be explained by attending to the degree of emphasis given to universally defined elements of a universally defined composing process, arguing instead that different rhetorical theories define these elements differently. (JL)