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…

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…

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…

In this article, the authors explore the corpus of literature on creative thinking and applied creativity in higher education to help composition teacher-scholars and writing center practitioners improve the application of creativity in written, visual, and multimodal composing practices. From studies of creative thinking investigated across…

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…

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…

Discusses factors that interfere with students' effective use of heuristic procedures for invention in composition. (HTH)

Describes several strategies to help journalism students avoid "writer's block," including front-end editing, brainstorming, clustering, notetaking, freewriting, and journal writing. (MM)

Modern writing textbooks tend to offer no heuristics, treat heuristics as if they do not have different impacts on inquiry, or take the view that heuristics are ideologically neutral pedagogies. Yet theory about language demonstrates that ideological neutrality is impossible. Any use of language in attempting to represent reality will inevitably…

The paper presents and demonstrates a heuristic for helping students learn how to read and understand figuration in literature. The heuristic contains elements from linguistics, New Criticism, and rhetorical analysis in a recursive process which enables students to see how features of words combine into figurative patterns. Beginning at the level…

Recent research has invited critiques of the authoritative descriptions of composing found in many rhetoric textbooks. The concept of "convention" may be especially useful in rethinking the teleological basis of these textbook descriptions. Conventions found in composition textbooks need to be unmasked as arbitrary concepts which serve…

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…

"Cognoter(tm)" and "CB" software, two new computer-based writing tools that rely on shared texts and real-time communication among participants and support collaborative invention, have implications for invention pedagogy and research. Cognoter improves on current invention aids by combining a brainstorming tool, a graphical…

Technical writing instructors lack a framework for evaluating pedagogical materials. One framework for classification divides the pedagogical materials into three groups: those locating their heuristics in form, context, and method. Formal pedagogies (the modes, sentence generation) can produce generic writing, separated from audience, purpose,…

Describes assignments that integrate ideas from student journals into expository and deliberate essays. (HOD)