In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student's subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written…

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…

Analysis of essays by first-year college students on humanities and social science subjects suggests that problems in style and structure stem from student misunderstandings of discipline-specific assumptions and conventions concerning critical analysis and "argument." Discussions and models can help students create new, academically…

The rhetoric teacher's aim is to make the native English speaker cognizant of the thought processes he or she has been taught to use by the culture. This approach does not work with foreign students because perception, imputation of meaning, and construction of reality appear to be bound by the logic and grammar of the language we speak. The…

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…

The contexts and purposes for civic writing may influence the composition process as well as text features, and an analysis of the purposes and audiences for civic writing might yield an insight into the way that such writing stimulates the personal and moral development of both its readers and writers. An examination of two related pieces written…

The 23 original essays on sentence combining in this volume range in focus from classroom methodology and effectiveness, through theoretical issues and syntactic constructions, to current issues in the field. The essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "The Role of the Elaborated Dominant Nominal in the Measurement of Conceptual and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 16 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) a study of the meanings of experience of ten published feminist women writers; (2) the composing activities of computer literate writers; (3) the informational…