Americans are obsessed with heroes, and they seemingly create them from anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere. This predilection is also clear in American histories. Their belief in heroes shows their connection to their society and culture, their willingness to follow someone in their social settings, and their belief that good people who…

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…

Provides a set of criteria for acceptable use of the comma splice. (DD)

Many students occupy a minimal space between the profession of composition studies and larger social and institutional constructions of composition, writing, and literacy. For most people outside the field, writing is viewed as a set of skills, rather than a substantive area of study. If students would only learn the rules--and if composition…

Describes a study which showed that rewriting had no significant value in improving students' composition skills. (DD)

Contends that the genitive apostrophe is losing its grammatical significance and its utility and will eventually be dropped. (DD)

Presents rhetorical invention as the process of finding the best available means of persuasion, not as generating the chaos upon which to make order. (DD)

Although college English teachers train students to produce "literature," most professional writing in America does not fall in this category. (DD)

Describes several exercises useful in helping students learn to revise when they write poetry. (DD)

Offers evidence suggesting that the styles of famous authors--and probably most writers--are less distinctive than popular opinion allows. Proposes tentative hypotheses concerning the convergence of fundamental styles and the confusion in distinguishing between style and subject matter. (RL)

Describes a method of teaching students how to make connections between sentences that they write or read. (DD)

Student writing ability is improving not declining, but writing teachers must value their students' work. (DD)

Describes one college teacher's approach to teaching freshmen composition courses. (TO)