A technique called the "do now" illustrates how it is not the method, but the purpose, that creates effective teaching techniques. Beginning the first activity of a freshman composition class with moments of silent reflection, or "do now," includes brief instructions to students to respond to whatever word or phrase the…

Adjunct professors are used widely to teach the great number of elementary composition courses for freshmen. Too often, they are underpaid, overworked, and undertrained. One sad result of this is that the experience for students in these classes varies from class to class as novice teachers cast about for a way of handling a writing curriculum…

Students may forget that writing involves a relationship between writer and audience--a relationship foregrounded by speech-act theory. The writer should focus on what the audience is to be led to see about the subject. To be distinguished are "locution" (saying something), "illocution" (performance of an act in saying…

A year-long departmental evaluation at one college English department revealed that most sections of both pre-college English and regular English 101 emphasized form over content, structure over ideas, surface features over global, and this, at the expense of meaningful intellectual growth. When freshmen are plied with basic grammar books and with…

A series of five studies examined factors that influence how students respond to questions on a writing apprehension test. In the first study, the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test was administered 4 times to 34 students in 2 freshman composition classes. Conventional scoring of test results were inconclusive--the total score for all students…

Noting that too many people, including college teachers and administrators, view literature as entertainment and, thus, impractical in the "real world" of employment, a teacher at North Hennepin Community College in suburban Minneapolis supports requiring literature as the primary reading in Freshman English classes. After remarking that…

A study investigated whether some level of writing apprehension or some expressed attitude toward writing might result in better essay scores. Subjects, 255 freshmen composition students at two campuses of the California State University system, were administered instruments designed to comparatively measure the quality of students' writing, gauge…

An ethnographic study investigated conversations during planning meetings and placement rating sessions for selecting and rating freshman composition placement exams. Planning meetings involved the administrative coordinator and two assistants selecting model essays, discussing the rubric, and confirming the final plans for the rating session.…

Babson College (a school of business and management in Wellesley, Massachusetts) attempted to make a group of first-year students computer literate through "clustering." The same group of students were enrolled in two courses: a special section of "Composition" which stressed word processing as a composition aid and a regular…

Journal writing on literary topics is an ideal activity in a classroom that emphasizes the transformational role of education, bringing together the creation of meaning between the reader and the text on the one hand, and on the other hand, the creation of expressive or reflexive writing. An activity, in a freshman literature and writing class for…

A study examined the influence of two different writing tasks on the ways in which students evaluate arguments on one controversial issue. Subjects, 20 first-year college students, evaluated 2 argumentative articles on the issue of drug legalization. Subjects rated the strength of the argument of each paragraph as they read. Ten of the subjects…

Satirical writing offers a means of encouraging students to criticize those forms of victimization and inequality that trouble them most without that overt, dogmatic indoctrination of a political agenda that many would consider an anathema to democratic teaching. The indirect, satirical jab provides students with an intellectually challenging and…

A first-year composition instructor designed a 3-week unit on folklore that fulfilled a requirement that students produce writing based on field research at some time during the semester. The unit begins with a discussion of the concepts of folklore, folklore genres, and the role that folklore serves in folk and ethnic groups and cultures,…

A study examined whether teachers in different personality type groups respond to student writing in different, possibly predictable ways. Nine teaching assistants at Florida State University responded to student essays and took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which measures several personality preferences. Using the MBTI scores, the…

Efforts by a writing specialist at the University of Maine at Presque Isle to implement a learning center there were based on methodologies adapted from Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." In keeping with Freire's call and decoding stages, the specialist began meeting with the necessary personnel to create guidelines and split…