Describes how the author, in 3 to 4 50-minute class sessions of an entry-level composition course, uses popular culture to help students understand and appreciate the use of irony. (SR)

The author writes that his experience in teaching has taught him that the perfect text simply does not exist, however the closest approximation to perfection lies in the direction of the classical world. Hal McDonald says that he cannot see how one can teach rhetoric without passing through pedagogical territory first cleared by Aristotle,…

Mary Louise Pratt's reading of "contact zone," which she defines as "those social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power," enables an instructor to think in terms of naming and autoethnography. The "contact zone" has become a way to…

The decision to organize English 112 courses around a research project entitled "A Survey of the Freshman Composition Requirement at Richmond Area Colleges and Universities" resulted from concerns as the fall of 1993 approached. English 112 emphasizes the study of literature and the production of a research paper that presents an…

Administrators at both state-funded and tuition-driven private institutions are now adhering to a bottom-line approach to education. In many cases, budget-minded administrators refuse to move forward on any educational initiative until this question is addressed: "What are you doing to encourage retention?" It is becoming clear that…

Citing the revolutionary ideas that Theodore Baird brought to his freshman composition classes at Amherst College (Massachusetts)--ideas such as requiring students to write often and from experience--this book examines the innovative work and groundbreaking ideas of Baird and his staff. The book focuses on Baird's pedagogy and his belief in a…

Radical composition teachers see a need for democratic learning methods such as classroom dialogue and collaborative research, but ultimately the constraints of classroom life prevent the use of such methods. As a result, many leftist teachers end up practicing strategies that seem to be taken from traditional rhetorics. Donald Lazere, one leftist…

Kenneth Burke suggests that language operates from ultimate motives centered around "god-terms" through terministic screens. God-terms represent the strongest terministic screens in any culture: they screen attention to selected realities while screening or deflecting away others. A model of composition can be constructed from these…

Despite the stereotype of today's undergraduates as having an inadequate literacy level, a teacher of English at a large midwestern university was surprised to find that students' literacy autobiographies reflect what might be called a conventional literacy success story, one that represents a strain of American autobiography dating back to…

Situated between academic discourse and that kind of personal writing that is only for the writer herself, autobiographical writing could serve as a middle ground in which first-year college writers render and describe personal experiences yet at the same time explain and analyze them. In "Lives on the Boundary," Mike Rose offers some…

Composition instructors need to explore the idea that the value of the discourse they teach students is not in its similarity to--but rather in its difference from--the discourse of most of the professionally-oriented departments. Scholars in fields as diverse as composition and engineering ascribe profoundly different meanings to "academic…

A study examined college freshmen management students' views about the social implications for their writing in terms of themselves as writers, the way they view their audience and their audience's reaction to their writing, and about the actual text itself. Seven self-selected students in the management class were interviewed after each of three…

Creative problem-solving can be used successfully in the writing classroom, for the problem-solving process involves three distinctive stages of thinking activity that remarkably parallel the prewriting steps in the composing process. Similar stages include: (1) data generation and preparation to write; (2) data manipulation and incubation; and…

A study explored the complexities of audience adaptation by examining the relationships between writer/audience proximity, register, and overall quality in essays written for assigned audiences. Subjects, 100 college freshmen, each wrote one essay in response to two audience-specified tasks in which subjects were to write persuasive letters to…

Graduate teaching assistants are too often given only "survival training" to prepare them to teach freshman composition. For the following reasons, the focus of teacher preparation in this area should be on rhetorical theory: (1) the study of theory informs the practice of teaching, (2) the study of theory is likely to give the beginner…