For the past few decades, composition researchers have devoted critical attention to studying the ways that African American students employ Africanized linguistic and rhetorical patterns successfully in expository writing situations. More recently, research has focused on the use of African-based rhetorical patterns, since the use of African…

Rhetorical grammar analysis encourages students to view writing as a material social practice in which meaning is actively made, rather than passively relayed or effortlessly produced. The study of rhetorical grammar can demonstrate to students that language does purposeful, consequential work in the world--work that can be learned and applied.

Gleason uses a prose form that is a written analog to Davis' new music. This prose form may be called surrealistic writing." An analysis of the prose style follows. (Author/SP)

Uses the critical perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of language and Lev Vygotsky's theory of language learning to examine the polyphonic texture of writing workshops, the dialogic classroom, the teacher's role as writer and authority figure, and the student's search for voice and role. (RAE)

A method for analyzing connected discourse beyond paragraph length is demonstrated. (JH)

One approach for encouraging students to develop their sense of audience is for them to record an interview, transcribe it, and then edit the written form for different audiences and rhetorical purposes. (HOD)

A discussion of how one perceive YsI form versus formlessness in discourse." (Author/RD)

Report of an analysis of the prose of five British and five American authors which seems to refute Francis Christensen's contention that the cumulative sentence" is the typical sentence of modern English." (Author/RD)

This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students' vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may,…

An approach to written composition built upon knowledge of the linguistic environments of inner-city blacks is described.

A teacher's developing awareness of his college students' dependence on jargon as the expression of their culture is portrayed with the aid of quotations from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Parallels are drawn between Prufrock's attitudes and student language in the classroom. (AF)