This article explores how college instructors can use William Blake's unique pairing of image and text -- what W.J.T. Mitchell calls "composite art" -- to encourage students to think and write about the dynamic interplay of image and text in modern communications. Opening with an anecdote of teaching Songs of Innocence and of Experience…

Looking to the possibility that interdisciplinary, thematic courses can build student confidence in the writing process, this essay argues that a first-year writing course that combines close attention to rhetorical skills, readings about an interdisciplinary field, and a carefully scaffolded assignment sequence enhances the potential transfer of…

A central objective of many writing courses is to prepare students to effectively communicate in their personal, professional, and public lives, but writing instruction can seem disconnected from contemporary societal practices that constitute civil public discourse. This project aims to explore the connections between instructors' perceptions and…

Students often ask why technical writing and literature courses are in the same department. Many students also share that technical and professional communication (TPC) courses are new to them. They are more familiar with high school literature courses and first-year composition courses. And given these experiences, they are often unsure about why…

Why are students silent in class? "Silence" refers to those who do not participate verbally in discussions or ask questions, those who attend classes and by the end of semester leave without having said a word. Janice Cools has always wanted to understand the culture of silent students in her writing classrooms but had never directly…

In a world that is fraught with a troubling political climate, Lu believes it is especially important that teachers provide guidance to students not only for their academic endeavors but also for their understanding of the complexities in language and the social implications of language varieties. With such belief in mind, she asks: How can…

In this article, the author discusses a graphic narrative or comic book writing assignment in greater detail to demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of teaching comics in the writing classroom. She argues that by assigning students a comic book project, writing instructors can promote competence in academic discourse by helping students learn and…

This project was born out of my preoccupation with my students' struggle to articulate their ideas at the sentence level. After being assigned an English 102 Honors class, I realized that although the sentences of these advanced writers were grammatically correct, they were stylistically problematic because they were often obscure and evasive…

While a thematic approach to teaching is not a novel idea, the specific needs of the developmental writer and a diverse student body can find the continuity of a theme especially beneficial, and the theme of fear has proven particularly successful. The typical developmental composition course at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University includes a…

Knoblauch and Brannon might suggest I pry loose the grip that ancient rhetorical tradition has on my modern classroom, but I'm not convinced I can so easily abandon the ancient rhetoricians. Learning to embrace the different, more creative, and less frequently acknowledged elements of this tradition may be the way for me to go instead. The ancient…

This essay takes up the question of fostering independent student identities and universal student success by exploring Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the first-year composition classroom. To do so, the author first defines Universal Design for Learning and then attends briefly to contemporary English studies research on UDL. The author…

"Primary research counts, but we don't teach it." This was the sentiment, if these were not the actual words, of Lynee Lewis Gaillet in her critique of the traditional composition curriculum at the spring 2011 annual meeting of the College English Association in St. Petersburg. Gaillet proposes an alternative to furthering students' sometimes…

If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it…

One key difference between successful and struggling college readers is their use of strategies. The former can understand challenging texts due to their knowledge of how to apply a diverse range of strategies. In contrast, the latter are frequently unaware of when and how to utilize strategies, and, as a result, often cannot comprehend assigned…

Freshman composition instructors are challenged to teach students to write, a practice which is easier if they are motivated and interested. This is particularly important for students coming from a lower socioeconomic status (SES) because there are multiple obstacles that must be overcome (Greene and Forster). A real world writing situation with…