The University of Washington is developing a mandatory teaching portfolio system for its writing program teaching assistants (TAs) to help graduate students in the job market and to create a fairer and more useful way to review teachers while they are working in the writing program. Implementation of the 3-stage program is taking place over 4…

Letting the life stories of students or parts of those stories into composition courses not only helps students improve their writing skills, but also helps many of them connect with themselves--who they are, who they are becoming, what they want to become--in ways that enhance their abilities to learn in their own fields. Students who fail to ask…

An instructor is interested in the ways that ethical inquiry can shed light on theoretical and practical concerns that are raised by composition's interest in postmodernism and cultural studies, specifically in whether difference can be negotiated while still allowing for rhetorical agency. Inquiry into ethics and composition can offer a new…

The lures and the risks of using personal stories in research and pedagogy are considerable. One danger of using experience as evidence is that "an experience" becomes the foundation for the construction of an essentialized identity: for example, a woman's experience becomes woman's experience. Despite the risks, however, telling stories…

Writing must receive major emphasis in teaching-learning situations. There are important differences between creative endeavors and those that involve role learning and exact answers. Creativity emphasizes the novel, the unique, the original, and the open-ended. Creativity should stress writing across the curriculum, and should involve reading and…

Modern writing textbooks tend to offer no heuristics, treat heuristics as if they do not have different impacts on inquiry, or take the view that heuristics are ideologically neutral pedagogies. Yet theory about language demonstrates that ideological neutrality is impossible. Any use of language in attempting to represent reality will inevitably…

This book describes and discusses the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) study of writing in Sweden. The chapters are as follows: (1) Introduction; (2) Content and Planning of the Study; (3) Schools, Teachers and Pupils in Sweden 1985; (4) The Teaching of Writing; (5) Compositions and Scoring; (6)…

Students must learn to maintain authority over their texts as they attempt to deal with the chaos they encounter when they approach a writing task. The authority with which Jacques Derrida deals with chaos in his essay, "...That Dangerous Supplement," suggests some strategies. In his essay, Derrida seems to be able to move the reader…

A writing center serves freshmen and sophomores at Casper Community College in Casper, Wyoming and upper level classes at University of Wyoming/Casper College. The arrangement raises questions about the effectiveness of peer tutoring. Tutors were labeled "writing assistants" and those who came to the center for help were called…

One way to "reinitiate" possible productive responses to the question of the subject for composition theory and pedagogy is to defuse the terror of the "impossible," to "negotiate" with the impossible, and to ask impossible questions. Although there are dangers associated with any critical theorizing about the subject…

Designed to help teachers develop a collaborative writing community in the intermediate grade classroom, this teacher's resource and support package gives teachers what they need to apply process writing principles to five of the most popular student writing forms or genres ("memorable moments,""interesting…

Designed to assess teachers' attitudes toward teaching writing, evaluating writing, and teaching course content through writing, the first part of this two-part measure is a Likert-type scale containing 35 items representing the instrument's three purposes. The second part asks for professional opinions in 12 categories, including extent of…

Computers, if programed to respond to writer-generated content with heuristic strategies, can guide the writer in the prewriting stage. Heuristics are problem solving strategies that can aid the writer in exploring a topic either through a systematic posting of relevant questions or through an unsystematic process of free-association. To date the…

Emphasizing the writing product rather than process, this paper presents two writing samples each for three students and evaluates them using five questions: (1) What are the strengths of the paper? (2) What are the weaknesses? (3) What are the apparent differences between the two writing samples? (4) What other information do you need about this…

A study was conducted at Union County College to compare students who successfully completed a developmental writing course with those who did not in terms of their achievement in a college-level English course. The study population consisted of students who enrolled in English Composition I in spring 1981; 61 of these students had successfully…