Computer assistance in the task of recordkeeping for freshman core instructional programs can be an instructional asset. (Author)

Procedures for setting up a student-centered, student-managed freshman composition class are described. (JH)

The issue of social class rarely injects itself into assignments in honors English composition courses. The students take few chances with structure, analysis, voice, or audience invocation. Clearly bright students, they seemed baffled when asked for complication in their thinking or to take a chance with an unconventional structure. It was time…

The "Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric" is an annual, annotated, descriptive bibliography of work in rhetoric and composition. Its first volume contains 3,853 citations for titles appearing in 1984 and 1985. The bibliographers received assistance from important authors and editors of publications in rhetoric, who stressed…

This critical review of the speeches, journal articles, and books written by community college presidents examines themes, styles, and information sources, and attempts to define standards by which the presidents' writings could be judged. The first section indicates that community college presidents are as prolific as any other group of two-year…

This paper explores the emergent and polyphonic character of voice in adolescent writing. It proposes a model, derived from M. M. Bakhtin's work on discourse, to account for how adolescent writers borrow voices from various speech communities and communication domains and combine them in complex overt and covert ways in order to construct their…

This educator's guide to the California Assessment Program's English-Language Arts test describes what California's new reading and editing tests do and do not measure. The guide states that each test form consists of one reading passage from literature, science, or history-social science followed by a variety of questions on word meaning and…

This English Language Arts Achievement Test was designed to evaluate the writing skills of third grade students. It includes instructions in which students are asked to write their own stories after reading a "story starter." The test instructs students to use their imaginations to finish the story and encourages them to do a prewriting…

A research review examined approaches on how to tap into writing so that students will be motivated to want to express their thoughts on paper. In addition, interviews were conducted with a well known principal and teacher of an inner city school in Chicago, Illinois and with a professor of writing at Murray State University in Kentucky. A writing…

A discussion of journal writing in an English composition class at a Japanese university focuses on how, why, and with what results students were assigned the writing of a lengthy journal as a course requirement. The first part of the discussion presents the rationale behind the decision to give students the assignment. The second part describes…

Intended for use as a college text, this book teaches the fundamental thinking, reasoning, and language abilities that students need for academic success; presents foundational thinking, reasoning, and language abilities in a developmentally sequenced way; engages students in the active process of thinking; provides context by continually relating…

Of the many women who have contributed to the making of knowledge in composition, three theorists in particular are excellent representatives of a feminine rhetoric that is changing the rhetorical tradition from hierarchy and authoritative achievement to a relational, collaborative, and integrated process. Mina Shaughnessy is the quintessential…

Intended for teachers of college composition, this history of major and minor developments in the teaching of writing in twentieth-century American colleges employs a taxonomy of theories based on the three epistemological categories (objective, subjective, and transactional) dominating rhetorical theory and practice. The first section of the book…

This short 3-page article presents four examples of innovative higher education programs that failed because the ideas were imported from other institutions without understanding the substructures that were needed for success. In the first case study, a Writing Across the Curriculum program was implemented through writing-intensive courses…

This collection of articles focuses on the use of word processing software programs as instructional tools for students learning writing composition. Section 1 discusses the use of word processors as a composition tools within the process model of writing instruction and includes articles entitled "Should Students Use Spelling Checkers?,""A Recipe…