It is likely difficult for academics to think of a college or university that does not have some program of general education (GE). Over the past century, GE's model of liberal learning has become so entrenched in U.S. universities that it is widely seen as the core of the national undergraduate curriculum. In a series of distributed courses that…

This article describes a day in the life of Charley Hoce, a teacher and poet. Hoce starts each day with at least an hour and a half of writing and revising before leaving for his teaching job at the National Trail Elementary School in New Paris, Ohio where he teaches reading and writing to first, second, and third graders, as well as Title I…

The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…

Tracing the literature on writing conferences during four tension points in higher-education enrollments--the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s--the author suggests that conferences have been championed primarily at those moments when students were both more numerous and more diverse, an urge countered, however, by faculty working…

This article begins with a "snapshot" of a fifth grade writing workshop and its study of op-ed writing to show an inquiry in action. The framework for this inquiry involves immersing students in reading multiple examples of the kind of text the teacher would like them to write, studying closely how the texts are crafted, and writing their own…

A survey of recent texts affirms there is no single, correct way to respond to student writing. The latest discussion reveals variations in what students want, systems instructors use to respond, and types of comments instructors may write.

This article describes a series of assignments that models the process of writing a manuscript for publication. While completing the assignments, students worked to improve their writing as they graphed, interpreted, and explained patterns in data from a local river. They reviewed published articles and each other's papers to become more critical…

The purpose of this study was to learn whether there have been any changes in writing instruction across K-12 education in the past three years. A three-year time frame was chosen to structure the study as it included the time period subsequent to the College Board's first announcement of the SAT writing section (the 2002-03 academic year). The…

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary…

This article explores the literacy lives of students enrolled in English Composition courses at two open-admission universities in Central Appalachia and the complex role of immediate and extended family members as sponsors of literacy in these students' lives. Some relatives emerged as both sponsors and inhibitors-or perhaps more accurately,…

Teachers often test course materials by using them in class. Usability testing provides an alternative: teachers receive student feedback and revise materials "before" teaching a class. Case studies based on interviews and observations with two teaching assistants who usability tested materials before teaching introductory technical writing…

The University of Florida is a large research institution with a freshman class of more than seven thousand students out of a total enrollment of about fifty thousand. Although a partnership with the University Writing Program has allowed the Libraries to reach almost four thousand students this past academic year, certain barriers still exist.…

In our summer 2006 issue, we ran a comprehensive overview of how postmodernism has degraded composition on our campuses. Steve Kogan enlarges that indictment and charges that the movement has deliberately corrupted every area of English instruction--from the acquisition of skills and knowledge to the more fundamental mission of developing in…

This study examined the effect of changing the instructional set for written disclosure on psychological and physical health reports among traumatized college students with current posttraumatic stress symptoms. Eighty-two participants were randomly assigned to one of three writing conditions that focused on emotional expression (EE), insight and…

For teacher educators, genre-based pedagogies offer a valuable resource for assisting both pre- and in-service writing instructors to assist their students to produce effective and relevant texts. Instead of focusing on the process of composition, the content of texts, or the abstract prescriptions of disembodied grammars, genre pedagogies enable…