This article seeks to theorize the pedagogical work disabled instructors navigate to create accessible writing classrooms. Through retroactive analysis, I introduce the concept of Access Negotiation Moments (ANMs) as limited, low-stakes contexts where disabled instructors define the limits of their own access needs. Ultimately, I theorize a…

Critical analysis of the literacy narrative assignment within the context of the other genres in a basic writing course complicates understandings of the political import of the assignment. While several advocates of the literacy narrative have argued that it has the power of what Jean-François Lyotard has called petits récits, the authors argue…

This article describes an assignment piloted in spring of 2008 called the Rhetorical Analysis Project, which required students to analyze three different texts addressing a common issue, compose an argument about the representation of that issue as illustrated by those texts, and revise that argument to match a rhetorical model they chose from…

Examines the differences in quality ratings that 20 teachers in each of three high school curricular areas gave samples of written argument by college freshmen and investigates the relationship between the three groups of quality ratings and eight syntactic and mechanics-of-writing variables. (FL)

Describes an assignment for a business writing course which helps students learn to focus on the reader in persuasive writing. (SR)

The addition of an interpersonal element to the rhetorical devices offered students as they learn how to construct persuasive messages can enhance their writing by helping students discover why they produce the writing they do. To do so, teachers must help students to become more sensitive to the audience and involve them more in the…

One way of giving students a sense of audience in their writing is to combine speech communication and written communication in the classroom. If students can be taught to write as they talk, they can perceive their audience to be real people rather than the amorphous "indefinite other" they typically write for in the traditional writing…

Reports of classroom research on the effectiveness of sentence combining as a teaching technique. Notes the value of in-class research. (RL)

In the spirit of the Texas Hill Country Writing Project and in response to the requirements of the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills, this guide presents writing assignments reflecting a commitment to a unified writing program for kindergarten through grade twelve. The framework for the assignments is adopted from the discourse theory of James…

To make introducing logic to college students in speech and expository writing classes more interesting, letters to the editor can be used to teach logical fallacies. Letters to the editor are particularly useful because they give students a sense of the community they live in (issues, concerns, and the spectrum of opinion), they are easily…

The Service Learning Writing Project at Michigan State University links service-learning and writing instruction. Students read and discuss American literary and historical texts, write academic analyses of ideas, and practice peer editing and revision in small workshops, while working in service placements in community and nonprofit…