This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called "Open World Writing," consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing…

In this Teaching Issues contribution, six instructional strategies to address culture in second language (L2) writing are discussed. These strategies have been conceptualized as a set of heuristics to enhance student awareness about various cultural and linguistic resources in L2 writing. Each teaching strategy is based on challenges that student…

This program profile describes a restructure of the PhD exam intended to enhance graduate-level instruction and advisement within the Rhetoric and Composition program at Georgia State University. We explain how a mix of institutional constraints and mentorship opportunities drove revisions to our doctoral exams and processes of doctoral…

Researchers in the field of composition studies have spent a great deal of time, energy, and scholarship proposing and debating strategies for collaborative pedagogy. While these discussions can be generative, many overlook what should have been central all along: the student collaborators. With this in mind, this essay seeks to focus our…

This program profile explains and illustrates a pedagogical application of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to a one-semester, upper-division online Professional Writing course. We explain our use of a heuristic, which we liken to "night-vision goggles," that enables students to systematically analyze field data that they gather from a…

Thus far, pedagogical discussions about comics in the college classroom have focused primarily on "reading," with less attention paid to the complementary potential of "composing" comics. This essay advocates using narrative theory alongside comic studies to provide students and teachers with a flexible, transferable vocabulary…

To teach effective business communication, instructors must target students’ current weaknesses in writing. One method for doing so is by assigning writing exercises. When used heuristically, writing exercises encourage students to practice self-assessment, self-evaluation, active learning, and knowledge transfer, all while reinforcing the basics…

Through the regular use of what Donald Schon has termed reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, students can learn to improve their "reflection-in-presentation," in Kathleen Blake Yancey's term. Students are often asked to do this type of reflection-in-presentation as a capstone to first-year or basic writing courses. However, a number of…

The past four decades have seen dramatic developments in the study and teaching of writing. The result is a body of knowledge about writing that has profound practical and pedagogical implications for teaching, thinking, and learning across the curriculum. This article discusses five things about writing that can have an effect across the…

Mobile Internet-based technologies have created the opportunity for many students to view writing and research as an everyday activity. While many students use these kinds of technologies on a daily basis in and outside of the classroom, not many writing pedagogies reflect this shift or capitalize on how beginner writers use them to effectively…

Of the vexed issues confronting teachers of the first-year writing sequence, none is more frustrating than that of getting students to write in the drafting stages. And not just "to" write, but to write the right thing. The solution that the Composition literature offers to the problem of fluency and content development is process. That…

This paper describes the conflicts Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) face such as: personal, departmental, institutional, regional, and national, and presents possibly solutions for reducing the stress related illnesses attendant with the work. Often administrators' responses are somatic: conflict becomes a physical trope and administrators…

In this article, the author notes that it is not an uncommon scenario for a student assigned an argumentative paper in the composition classroom to appropriate a "hot" topic from the currency of public discourse, one for which they often already have a pre-formed opinion that becomes codified simultaneously with the need to formulate a…

Reviews 34 computer programs designed to help freshman writing students and their teachers either by providing instruction, supporting the composing process, or helping to manage classroom activities. Most of the programs run on microcomputers and are currently available; a few are included because they indicate interesting trends. (MBR)

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…