Duquesne's "Saturday College" program in the Greater Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) area began in the spring of 1992. This is a program designed specifically for the working adult who wants to complete a bachelor's degree in 4 years by attending classes on Saturday. The format of the program and the concerns of the adults in it required…

This paper proposes that a metaphor of linguistic levels, similar to that used in general linguistic theory, be applied to the study of levels within an essay. The linguistic conception of levels in a piece of writing is not sentence-paragraph-essay (which might be characterized as a rhetorical division) but rather (or in addition to)…

Currently, many college and university English departments are reviewing the purpose of their departments. Are they still departments of literature? A writing program is best served by staying in an English department, with the caveat that the department move towards a cultural studies curriculum--the writing program within an English cultural…

The abandonment of face-to-face voice conversations in favor of the use of electronic conversations in composition classes is an issue to be interrogated. In a recent push to "prepare students for the 21st century," teachers are asked to teach computer applications in the humanities--and composition teachers, who will teach writing in…

In an effort to provide students with instruction in academic writing early in their college careers, a project was undertaken to link a developmental composition course to an introductory psychology course at Washington's Bellevue College. The two professors designed a sequence of four papers offering practice in two of the more common academic…

This paper discusses the emergent perspective in composition studies that sees discourse forms as producing material effects and writing classrooms and programs as part of an apparatus for producing subjective forms, which individual students are then induced to inhabit. The paper suggests that the closed circuit of the classroom is overdetermined…

A literature review traced a major theoretical shift in the understanding of how people read--from the passive reader who receives and decodes information to the strategic reader who actively chooses what, when, and how to read, reads interpretively, and interprets a text (such as a newspaper article) as an organized structure. The result is a…

Administering a writing program has never been easy, and the issue of political correctness has added a new dimension to this difficult task. At the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), a controversy began when a cluster of statues, presented to the school by the graduating class, was attacked as being sexist and racist. According to the…

In a creative writing workshop of seven male and nine female graduate students, two female students became increasingly aware of a sexual bias. Though the male instructor made an effort to create a non-hierarchical, student-centered environment, informal hierarchies developed among students that granted the male instructor and the male students…

This book employs a whole language-critical thinking approach to teaching reading, writing, listening, speaking, and thinking using Caldecott books (with their story-enhancing illustrations) as the literature base. The book uses 15 Caldecott books to model specific instructional strategies, critical thinking strategies, and extended language…

Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of the medieval carnival--a time when life is turned upside down, social hierarchies are lifted, and the lines between performer and participant are blurred--provides a useful framework for understanding both liberatory and potentially threatening aspects of writing workshops in elementary schools. An experimental…

This paper attempts to explain the relationship between publication and professionalism in the culture of the American research university. To act, order, and believe in relation to the dominant image in contemporary composition studies is to understand published, professional discourse as the sacred well of the culture. The published discourse of…

Developed by educators from the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, this teacher's guide presents an 8-hour course in writing for police officers. The course is designed to help officers improve the accuracy and appearances of their reports and to help them take responsibility for becoming more independent writers. Each of the four lessons in the…

Learning disabled writers are unable to incorporate text structures to plan their writing; they stop writing before their point is stated; their writing includes redundancies, irrelevancies, and many mechanical and spelling problems. Studies indicate that learning disabled writers use simplistic and/or ineffective planning strategies while…

The "Writing Buddies" program is designed to allow students from one grade level to write, edit, publish, share, and celebrate their success with peers from another grade level. Students also benefit from the strengths of two teachers and parent volunteers. The role of the teacher is to provide the atmosphere conducive to writing, and to…