Questions traditional composition techniques and their effects on student thinking and problem solving. Demonstrates how one high school English teacher responded to these classroom issues by reading relevant research and supplementing it with a study conducted on her own students. (HB)

Describes the development of a writing assignment using the four discourse types to write about a single, physical object. Reviews specifically how this assignment was carried out to completion by students. Defends the assignment as a framework for the study of writing. (HB)

Proposes combining peer-response exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book "Sharing and Responding" with the series of written peer critiques in Kenneth Bruffee's "A Short Course in Writing." Argues that these types of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom, capturing the struggle between individual expression…

Discusses the early twentieth-century perception that Harvard writing scholars influenced writing instruction and literary scholarship and that individuals of stature at Cornell, Michigan, and Columbia universities thought it was a bad thing and resented it with considerable intensity. Tells the story in personal correspondence, MLA resolutions,…

Discusses collaboration in the peer writing center. Suggests that applying hierarchical and dialogic collaboration to writing centers can help to sketch out the forms of collaboration in peer tutoring, but a more fine-grained rhetorical analysis will result in richer and more precise descriptions and avoid hardbound categories and stereotypes. (RS)

Discusses the struggle between competing epistemologies. Warns of problems that arise when a theory or practice states that it is the "true" epistemological foundation for writing centers. Asserts that the stances teachers take toward how best to teach writing are determined by their view of where truth is located and how best it can be…

Highlights a peer response group in which students were given greater autonomy. Suggests that negative elements like adversity, tension and frustration can contribute to the success of response group activity, because they instruct students in the realities of group dynamics. (RS)

Describes a technical writing assignment in which students write two different papers on the same topic--one directed toward a lay or executive audience, and the other toward an operator or technician audience. (SR)

Considers the benefits that professional, "real world" writing instruction can have in the English classroom. Describes the objectives, methods, curriculum, and results of a graduate seminar entitled "Writing for the Public." (HB)

Describes the transformation of the Colgate Interdisciplinary Writing Program into a department. Notes that, as the members of the program strove to lose their subordinate status, they worked against the temptation to do so in a militaristic spirit of antagonism, for that would undermine the collectivism that characterizes the program's…

Recasts and expands the working assumptions of the National Writing Project to make explicit their applicability to technology-related issues. Discusses levels of involvement, levels of use, the Writing Project/Technology Project Alliance, and the futures of new technologies in the writing classroom. (RS)

Discusses the thinking of the Greek Sophist philosophers, particularly Gorgias and Protagoras, and their importance and relevance for contemporary English instructors. Considers the problem of language as signs of reality in the context of Sophist philosophy. (HB)

Describes Kenneth Burke's theory of the relationship between discourse and reality in the context of the Sophist philosophers. Defines and discusses the Greek concept of "kairos" as context and shows its presence in Burke's philosophy of language. (HB)

Maintains that writing teachers, and thus also their students, have become obsessed with revision as an end in itself. Suggests that the writer-computer relationship is displacing the writer-audience relationship in the rhetorical situation and may often function to isolate writers. (SR)

Describes a program of the Adirondack Museum in which local students learn about their cultural and natural heritage, listen to Adirondack stories, and learn the techniques of writing historical fiction. Includes samples from student stories. (SV)