This study examined the relationships between first semester participation in a community college developmental writing course and persistence and goal attainment. The study examined whether developmental writing course participants completed more of their credits, enrolled for more semesters, and completed degree/certificates and/or transferred…

The study of composition is in need of a methodology to teach students about the creation of evidence and the epistemological role that it plays in all writing. For many students "evidence" is an absolute, an assortment of facts found in encyclopedias, graphs, tables, census studies, surveys, almanacs, and so on. For most instructors,…

In the act of revision a writer seeks what Joyce Carol Oates calls "points of invisibility": things not in the text that should be and things in the text that should not be. Composing process research on revision has articulated several aspects of the revising process, but study of creative writers' composing habits remains an…

Electronic tutoring can be valuable for writers and should be offered in more university settings, not just in computer labs. Among its advantages is the speed with which commentary can be returned by e-mail. Other advantages were evident in a reciprocal tutoring relationship carried on by two academics in different states. They chose not to edit…

"Frame alignment"--the conscious process of creating correspondence between one's own "frame" (ways of making meaning out circumstances) and someone else's--is a necessary condition for participation in organized social movements. Frame alignment processes may offer a generative and useful alternative to the reductive…

The stories composition teachers tell their students about "what an essay is" are significant because they affect the work teachers do in the classroom. Questions about these stories, the cultural narratives the stories reflect, and implications for students can be answered through an examination of contemporary writing texts and texts…

Borrowing from Heidegger and following Pamela Caughie and Victor Vitanza, the work of Virginia Woolf can be linked to composition pedagogies to ask: "What are composition instructors still not thinking in relation to the postmodern?" An answer may be found through postmodern rereadings of Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and…

Cultural approaches to composition, such as those forwarded by John Trimbur, John Schilb, and James Berlin have come under strong criticism for attempting to indoctrinate students into instructors' political beliefs. One attack on writing as cultural criticism has been voiced by Maxine Hairston, who has questioned its ethicality. At issue in…

Text linguistics, a recent development in the study of language, moves the focus of inquiry from the sentence to the text and examines texts as acts of communication rather than individual, static sentences. It investigates textuality rather than grammaticality, the relationships between sentences and between text and context that make text…

Much revisionist scholarship has focused on sophistic epistemology and its relationship to the current revival of epistemic rhetoric in the academy. However, few scholars have recognized the sensuous substance of words as sounds, and the role it played in sophistic philosophy and rhetoric. Before the invention of the Greek alphabet, poetry was…

The question of whether "Hamlet" belongs in a freshman composition classroom is one that institutions are making easier to answer, though perhaps for political rather than pedagogical reasons. This article describes a project in which Marie Fitzwilliam and her colleagues were asked to engage in a dialogue with the administration on…

While models of expressive writing are supposed to encourage individuals to look within and release what is good and true, growing up with such a model may be counterproductive in that writers may never learn to take advantage of social interaction that might be of help in the invention and prewriting stage, and thus fail to realize the benefits…

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. While theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with the way many teachers try to teach writing. The works of Roland…

Designed to assist beginning technical writing teachers with little or no training in the discipline, this annotated bibliography is limited to material available in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and primarily to material published since 1970. The first section contains articles from periodicals and selections from books on (1) the…

Designed as a supplement to traditional writing texts, this workbook contains activities that allow students to form grammatically sophisticated sentences without having to study formal grammar. The 68 lessons in the workbook progress from relatively simple to complex, with each stressing a particular way of combining sentences. The various…