When writing teachers at any level get together to assess student essays, they often disagree in their evaluations of the writing at hand. This is no surprise as writing is a complex process, and in evaluating it, teachers go through a complex sequence of thoughts before emerging with an overall assessment. Critical thinking, or the complexity of…

The relationship between cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and composition has been a topic that has received much attention in rhetoric and composition's disciplinary conversations, even if current pedagogical practices used to address these matters lag behind in progress. In this essay, the author focuses on how to address linguistic…

Multimodal writing is considered as a "new" way of composing, or, somewhat cynically, as a strategy for adding relevance or interest to a required composition course. Jody Shipka's "A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing" suggests that "students' uptakes of a much wider, richer repertoire of semiotic resources,…

Portfolio assessment has become the predominant best practice in writing assessment at the college level. Despite its clear superiority to previous methods of assessment, portfolio assessment has brought its own collection of challenges. Although the stated goal of much portfolio grading is to create an overall, or holistic, judgment of a…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

This article explores the use of scoring rubrics in the context of deteriorating material conditions of writing instruction. The author hopes to offer a consideration of rubrics that enables a revision of rubric designs, in order to facilitate teacher response to student writing, and that offers suggestions for uses of rubrics that account for…

Argues that poststructural literary theory raises concerns about the validity of holistic scoring. Concludes that, in the case of large-scale writing assessment, failure to consider the implications of poststructural theory can result in reliable but hardly valid readings of students' essays. (PRA)

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students' essays. To study the relationship between writing-faculty workload and comments that faculty write on students' essays, the author sent an eleven-question survey to 30 English…

Describes a system for grading student compositions that evaluates the central idea, support material, organization, expression, and literacy, as a supplement to written comments from the teacher. Contains a copy of the grade and comment sheet. (HTH)

An authentic assessment embedded in a course becomes a teaching tool integral to the aims of the course, not simply a mandated test. The following are appended: (1) Our Initial Rubric for SUNY GE Assessment: Critical Thinking; and (2) Our Revised Rubric for SUNY GE Assessment: Critical Thinking. (Contains 4 notes.)

Outlines one instructor's criteria for compositions at each letter grade. (HTH)

Describes an "improvement gauge": a cumulative chart providing a numerical analytic comparison of student and teacher evaluations for every graded writing assignment. Maintains that its use improves teacher effectiveness, grading efficiency, student/teacher conference productivity, and student reflection on writing strengths and weaknesses. (SR)

Offers heresies about reading, grading, and commenting on student papers which may relieve teachers from constant paper grading. Recommends using peer audiences, deemphasizing grading, expanding and elaborating the stages of the composing process, and modeling effective writing behaviors for students. (RAE)

Describes the attempts of the Writing Task Force to shape an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing curriculum model at the City University of New York. (PRA)

A survey of recent texts affirms there is no single, correct way to respond to student writing. The latest discussion reveals variations in what students want, systems instructors use to respond, and types of comments instructors may write.