For many students, grammar represents a baffling set of capricious rules wielded by "sadistic" English teachers for the sole purpose of making their lives miserable. To combat this misconception and to dispel the mystery and empower students with the ability to use the conventions of standard written English, a series of student…

Calling for a radical reexamination of the traditional foundation of composition instruction--the thesis/support form, this book argues that the essay, with its informality, conversational tone, meditative mood, and integration of form and content, is better suited to developmental, epistemological, ideological, and feminist rhetorical…

A study determined the effect of shared writing activities on reading comprehension. The subjects, 40 second- and third-grade students from a suburban school in Mercer County, West Virginia, completed the Reading Comprehension Subtest of the Comprehension Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) for grade 2 as a pretest. A control group of 20 students were…

The goal of teaching philosophy is to develop philosophically literate students and to ensure that students develop philosophical literacy by design and not by chance. Perhaps the best method for teaching philosophy to beginning students is the public model, in which the practice of defending positions in the public arena forces students to become…

Use of group story writing in second language classes is discussed, and specific instructional techniques are outlined. In this activity, students sit in a circle and each begins to write a story. The story beginning is passed to the next student, who adds a portion and passes the story on. This pattern continues until stories are completed and…

The contact zones in teaching writing are connected in multiple ways. A principal concern is how students learn to write for the disciplines, but the focus is the relationship between composition specialists and their colleagues throughout the disciplines. In the early days of writing across the curriculum (WAC), writing was seen primarily as a…

According to author David Roochnik, the "tragedy of logos" refers to the condition of having a "logos" (meaning a view of the rational structure of the world) and colliding with its limits and limitations. The tragedy of logos arises when some event or experience shows that things are otherwise, because tragedy entails the…

The technical writing teacher discovers two things about his/her students: they do not like to write and they do not like to read. They are not in the class because they are motivated, but because they must be there as part of a technical or vocational degree. One of the most common complaints about the class is, "I don't need to know how to…

This paper focuses on ways to include collaborative learning experiences in reading/writing courses as a method of addressing the demands for improving the communication skills of college students. It includes suggestions drawn from methods used in a college developmental reading class (which can, however, be modified for other types of classes),…

This "Hot Topic Guide" on mythic-archetypal methods for the language arts (which address students' inner lives to promote sharing of feelings, intuition, and imagery production in the classroom) is designed for implementation either in a workshop atmosphere or through individual study. Included are suggestions for using the guide as a…

An activity has been used successfully for several years in a middle-school computer class to integrate writing instruction with computer science. Taking approximately five class periods, the activity consists of three phases: (1) the 6th-grade students use paper and pencil to write a story in any literary format; (2) 11th- and 12th-grade…

In six parts, this research panel report focuses on numerous aspects of an institutionally-supported project in Writing and Problem Solving across Disciplines conducted by four teachers at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon. The report's first section, "Introduction," is descriptive and gives some background on the research…

Despite accompanying drawbacks, the Internet information system known as Gopher presents a rich variety of potential benefits to writing pedagogies and to educational administrators. Writing teachers need to overcome tendencies to think of exploration of the Internet information resources as something to be uncritically adopted and as something to…

This paper describes "The Huck Finn Experience," a high motivation interdisciplinary unit that takes students on a 6-week journey back to the life and times of Mark Twain through the fictional character of Huckleberry Finn. The unit described in the paper was designed for eighth-grade students but could be easily adapted to be successful…

A teacher at Western Illinois University, who had resisted using the portfolio system in a writing classroom, developed a shorter portfolio unit to incorporate the best aspects of portfolios without many of the disadvantages. By the beginning of the fifth week of the semester, the students had written three papers, participated in a peer exchange…