This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka's approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka's pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes…

In this article, the authors explore the corpus of literature on creative thinking and applied creativity in higher education to help composition teacher-scholars and writing center practitioners improve the application of creativity in written, visual, and multimodal composing practices. From studies of creative thinking investigated across…

Discusses factors that interfere with students' effective use of heuristic procedures for invention in composition. (HTH)

Modern writing textbooks tend to offer no heuristics, treat heuristics as if they do not have different impacts on inquiry, or take the view that heuristics are ideologically neutral pedagogies. Yet theory about language demonstrates that ideological neutrality is impossible. Any use of language in attempting to represent reality will inevitably…

Argues that since invention in scientific research is discovery of the unknown, and since invention in writing is discovery of ideas within existing knowledge, then scientific research cannot be viewed as a part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. (KEH)

The paper presents and demonstrates a heuristic for helping students learn how to read and understand figuration in literature. The heuristic contains elements from linguistics, New Criticism, and rhetorical analysis in a recursive process which enables students to see how features of words combine into figurative patterns. Beginning at the level…

As a result of public pressure to assess student learning, college administrators are becoming more insistent in their demands that faculty members become involved in learning outcomes assessment. Most faculty members, however, think of assessment as another name for standardized testing--a procedure with little to do with the critical thinking…

Recent research has invited critiques of the authoritative descriptions of composing found in many rhetoric textbooks. The concept of "convention" may be especially useful in rethinking the teleological basis of these textbook descriptions. Conventions found in composition textbooks need to be unmasked as arbitrary concepts which serve…

An assignment given to students at the end of an advanced composition class empowers students by helping them grasp principles and develop abilities that allow them to get beyond needing teachers. The crux of the assignment is a heuristic for analyzing any particular type of writing for the purpose of learning to produce it. The students are…

Technical writing instructors lack a framework for evaluating pedagogical materials. One framework for classification divides the pedagogical materials into three groups: those locating their heuristics in form, context, and method. Formal pedagogies (the modes, sentence generation) can produce generic writing, separated from audience, purpose,…

Describes assignments that integrate ideas from student journals into expository and deliberate essays. (HOD)

As a by-product of a study concerning how university level writers develop new genres of discourse, a study was undertaken to examine what factors or dimensions affect the composing process of university writers. Six undergraduate students at Carleton University in Ottawa participated, making available to researchers information about how they…

Discusses a means of differentiating pedagogical materials on the basis of heuristics and theory. Discusses and evaluates three pedagogies that locate their heuristics in (1) form, (2) context, and (3) method, and suggests that materials combining pedagogies are the most adaptable. (FL)

Describes a heuristic conceit, "the writer's stance," to help students overwhelmed by the complexity and possibilities of a writing task regain control of the process. Stresses the need for writers to select vantage points and frames of analysis for their academic writings. (SR)

Teaching invention strategies on the computer offers solutions to the problems of selection and presence by providing a variety of invention strategy alternatives. These strategies inform the teacher of the rhetorical task at hand and allow communication to exist at all stages of writing. A writer using a computer and a pool of heuristic…