Discusses creativity and the teacher's importance in providing a context that encourages creative thought. Contrasts the author's success in teaching technical writing to college juniors and seniors with her experiences in using the Macintosh personal computer to teach first year composition. Notes that computers alone cannot stimulate creativity.…

Provides discussion and critical analysis of three key models for teaching freshman composition courses. Discusses approaches centered on writing as product, writing as process, and writing as system. Considers what might be the common ground that these three approaches to writing instruction share. (HB)

Finds that visualization techniques were effective in guiding the revision process and that students remembered both specific details about the pictorial information used to guide the composing process and the underlying principles informing the techniques. Discusses visualization techniques in terms of their potential usefulness in reducing the…

Discusses problems with freshman research paper assignments. Describes how one teacher has adapted cooperative learning techniques to research assignments, allowing students to work together in "base" and "expert" groups. Describes four structured writing assignments on a single subject of general public interest that lends itself to specialized…

Describes ways in which freshman composition classes can be made more interesting, such as the use of cliche analysis. Defines cliche, and provides some appropriate examples for classroom use. (PA)

Relates a teaching assistant's experience of assigning student journals in a first-year composition class. Discusses the assignment, responses to journal entries, discoveries, and dilemmas. Concludes that they are worthwhile. (SR)

Discusses problems with first-year composition in higher education, primarily the marginality and the tenuous hold writing maintains within the academy. Reconsiders the English department's role in serving the general curriculum. (SR)

Explains the dynamics of the interaction between the English department and Freshman Writing at the University of Southern California (USC). Asserts that the ideal relationship between Freshman Writing and the English department would be an academic partnership that acknowledges their differing priorities but accommodates these differences by…

Discusses the separation of the Freshman Writing and English department at the University of Southern California (USC). Advocates reengaging the English department with first-year students and with writing. Suggests a move from amicable separation toward reunion, but a reunion defined as reengagement, not remarriage. (PRA)

Reviews the cultural and academic-ideological forces that keep first-year English as the only universally required course in the American academy. Reflects on the author's work with the Wyoming Resolution. Suggests an institutional alteration to first-year English that could disrupt some of the ideological work now being done by the course. (RS)

Describes the effects of two prewriting strategies for the generation and storage of ideas (external storage and heuristic) on freshman English students' compositions in honors and basic writing classes. Both honors and remedial students produced the best essays when writing under conditions closely approximating their usual prewriting behavior.…

Provides responses by various scholars to two articles on teaching conflict and struggle and its relevance to the field of basic writing published in the December 1992 issue of "College English." (HB)

Argues for a broadening of the range of rhetorical positions to which writing students are presently assigned. Envisions current practices of composition from the political left. Proposes a rhetorical position from which writing might become a means of cultural transformation. (HB)

Explores the relation of essays to canon theory, explains why the only essay canon to be publicly identified in the 20th century is a powerful teaching canon. Shows "where essays live," how they arrive in the teaching canon, and why they stay there. Examines how essays are taught. Looks at the future of the essay canon. (SR)

Describes a program that gives first-year students the chance to have a small course, 15 to 20 students, taught by a full-time faculty member on a special topic conceived by the professor. Notes that their program set an implicit parallel of time and value between teaching at the most advanced and at the most introductory levels of the curriculum.…