In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay "Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from…

In this article, the author discusses how difficult it is for psychology college students to learn to write multiple disciplines of references. It is hard for students to understand why all details have to be written in the right order and the right type-style--depending upon which reference system is used. In this article, the author proposes…

When instructing reading and composition, teachers should have students write down dictated vocabulary, short phrases, simple sentences, etc., occasionally modifying these, in order to deepen their understanding of how "kana" (i.e., phonetic characters) and vocabulary are used. This can be broken down into the following four activities: (1)…

One associate editor's perspective on classroom experiment articles is detailed in this article. The associate editor provides recommendations for manuscripts for the Instruction (those that describe new classroom experiments) and Research (those reporting studies into the efficacy of classroom experiments as a pedagogical tool) Sections of…

In this article, the author talks about the use of punctuation and describes a study that confirmed her growing sense that all students need exposure to and instruction on the full repertoire of punctuation. In an attempt to assess how much of the eleventh graders know about the way professionals use punctuation, all teachers at Webster Thomas…

Entering into a century of conversations from "English Journal," the authors read, and reread, the words of many mentors, colleagues, and friends, discovering some voices they did not know and rediscovering many voices they did. In surveying "English Journal", the authors highlight voices from the past, of the present, and for the future to offer…

In this high-accountability era--one in which there is an expanding movement to condemn teachers for the failures of their schools--teachers teach students who believe writing is primarily an act of complying to a prompt, likely for a state accountability assessment or the troubling 25-minute essay that constitutes less than half of the writing…

Central to the future of rhetoric and composition (or writing studies or whatever label we use) is the service mission of composition: to teach students to write. But that term "service" has not and will not serve us well. This essay examines the limitations and dangers of a service mission and explores a different model, that of a franchise, a…

Toward the end of his life, Donald Murray felt that his approach to writing instruction was no longer appreciated by journals in his field. Nevertheless, his emphasis on encouraging students to surprise themselves through informal writing still has considerable value. (Contains 1 note.)

This article discusses the work of Lucy McCormick Calkins, an educator and the visionary founding director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Begun in 1981, the think tank and teacher training institute has since trained hundreds of thousands of educators across the country. Calkins is one of the original architects of the…

Teachers of writing know that published writers write sentence fragments, use passive voice, begin sentences with "and" and end them with prepositions, use the first-person pronoun "I," contract their words, and splice their sentences with commas. Even so, most instructors advise students against these elements of style. As a result, school…

This article discusses creative writing which promotes literacy and content learning in a social studies classroom. In this article, the author states, that educators must encourage students' creative energies and enable them to engage with content in new and stimulating ways. One way to help students really learn about the concepts inherent in…

Describes the strategies used to encourage two friends--professed nonwriters--to write about the stories of their childhood days. The sequence of the process shows how a teacher can build confidence in beginning writers. (JOW)

Explains how a teacher used tape--pieces hanging from her hair, her desk, and student desks--to help students remember some of the principles of writing represented in the acronym TAPE: topic, audience, purpose, and elaboration. (TB)

Although socio-cultural awareness is an important element of discourse, freshman composition's primary obligation is to provide students with instruction in and practice "owning" a process of writing that foregrounds writing as a rhetorical art. Students should leave the course more aware of and better able to employ powerful, flexible…