The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The…

Although in recent years there has been an increase in the research and development of resources for workplace English, work in this field is still rather limited. This article reports a study which combined a text analytical approach with a social perspective to consider the ways in which certain thematic choices construe different meanings for…

Success in higher education depends on students' ability to meet the writing requirements of their chosen courses, and in many cases this involves adapting to the literacy practices of particular disciplines. While research into professional academic discourse suggests that it may reflect differences in disciplinary culture and epistemology, there…

This article describes midterm assessment techniques that helped students tap into their process as emerging writers, and how the author used this feedback to realign the course at a pivotal time to reach resistant students.

The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of the style of exemplary first-year writing in order to establish and understand those features of written discourse that first-year writing teachers most value and reward. Having established the stylistic features of exemplary first-year writing, the paper goes on to provide first-year…

This essay examines the writing done at the University of New Hampshire in the period between 1928 and 1942. It argues that while there was extensive writing from personal experience, this writing did not perform the "turn" where the writer claims a new form of self-understanding. It goes on to suggest that work with this largely observational…

The implications of the "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution on classroom teaching and practices point to a continual need to reevaluate how communicative actions--linguistic diversities--of students are central aspects of the work within composition courses. This article revisits the historical significance and pedagogical value of…

Responding to mandates from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission to eliminate "remedial" or "developmental" courses from state-funded, four-year institutions, the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) Department of English developed a college-level pre-first-year writing program for entering students identified as…

The nature of written and oral peer feedback will be described as it occurred in seven writing courses, each with a different design of peer assessment. In all courses, peer feedback was focused on evaluation, which is one of the four feedback functions. Feedback on structure was hardly provided. Relating feedback to design features, we suggest…

This essay describes a special topics creative writing course designed for nursing students, and argues that creative writing strategies work to improve nurses' compositional skills. Also discussed are other potential benefits from creatively writing patients' lives, notably, the blending of arts and sciences, and the ways in which medical schools…

This article argues that traveling and working as a writer in Vietnam yielded metaphors that changed the author's pedagogy as well. The article first describes how the experience of crossing the street taught her to move on the terms dictated by local conditions. The metaphor of "moving in traffic" that grew out of this experience…

This narrative inquiry reveals some behavior of digital-era students learning writing in a new digital classroom. The teaching methods, the physical design of the classroom, and the impact of the new technology are observed, along with the pedagogical theories in use. I suggest that a basic and significant change in students' writing behavior has…

I invite and encourage students to take risks in their writing, to engage innovatively with a wide range of genre, to push limits in order to explore creatively how language and discourse are never ossified, but always organic, how language use is integrally and inextricably connected to identity, knowledge, subjectivity, and living. Informed by…

Mel Livatino had stopped attending Conferences on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), but this year one came to his hometown, so he attended and now reports back. Where once the 4Cs had offered helpful insights into teaching kids how to write, today frivolity and radicalism reign. Professor Livatino's notes paint a very precise, largely…

Grading papers may be one of the most stressful, most time consuming, and least rewarding activities in which professors engage. Although effective grading techniques for papers have been widely researched, especially within the "Writing" or "English" scholarly arenas, has this information been put into practice? The goals of this paper are…