Outlines a team game, designed to help students learn to organize the material they have collected for a paper, in which the teacher provides scrambled topic sentences that are to be put into a reasonable order. (TJ)

Suggests ways student reviewers of rock music groups can write better reviews. Among the suggestions made are that reviewers occasionally discuss the audience or what makes a particular group unique, support general comment with detail, and avoid ecstatic adjectives. (TJ)

Shows how photography and photographic processes can be used as a metaphor for describing writing and writing processes and, thus, can be a useful teaching tool. Discusses subject, focus, arrangement, and style. Describes how a writing teacher can use all this as a means of illustrating various aspects of the writing process. (SR)

Presents three brief articles written by teachers that 1) describe a collection of approaches that utilize newspapers and magazines as the "excellent teaching tools they are"; (2) plunge students into critical analysis through the use of advertisements in magazines; (3) present ideas on how to teach students to create writing prompts…

Analyzes the rhetoric of history as it functions in Robert J. Connors'"Teaching and Learning as a Man" (published in the February 1996 issue of "College English"). Shows how Connors' historical account of a shift from agonistic to feminist values in composition studies reveals unexamined political and ideological positions that…

Discusses recent use by scholars of the term "negotiation" in critical discussions of teaching writing to talk about how students might have a hand in shaping the world of difference of which they are part. Advocates discussing not only positive associations but also negative associations of negotiation, thinking about political and…

Solicits the opinions of W. Ross Winterowd, the educator/scholar who established the Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literature Program at the University of Southern California in the early 1960s, as to the current state of the profession. (PA)

Argues that rhetorical theory enables a constructivist critique of activist pedagogy. Considers two prominent formulations of activist teaching--by Dale Bauer and James Berlin--examining both the underlying assumptions and descriptions of practice in rhetorical terms. (PA)

Describes a four- to six-week project for high school sophomores in which students create pamphlets and in the process learn basic research skills and practice several elements of the research paper. (SR)

Describes several ways in which the newspaper is a useful resource for teaching reading skills and for allowing students to model just about all types of writing. (SR)

Points out that a carefully developed checklist is a valuable writing aide that can help students and instructor focus on successful writing throughout the writing process. Shares five how-to steps as a guide for developing a writing checklist. (SR)

Examines how macro-level social and political structures affect micro-level literate actions in classrooms and vice versa. Synthesizes Yrjo Engestrom's systems version of Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory with Charles Bazerman's theory of genre systems to understand the relationship between writing in school and writing in other…

Discusses the Russian master, Leo Tolstoy, and the fact that he wrote pedagogical treatises besides novels. Talks about his free school for children on his estate and his research on education. Discusses two of Tolstoy's essays which recount interactions with the peasant children. Links this to teaching an adult writing workshop at a soup kitchen.…

Voices concerns with isolated exercises in grammar. Offers an alternative, in which teachers collect sentences (mostly from literature) and use them to point out or teach skills for writers. Offers numerous examples. (SR)

Describes how a fourth-grade teacher made poetry part of the daily ritual of her class. Describes how students began to read poems, write poems, and love poems enough to work persistently at reading and writing them. Describes a poetry festival that the class prepared. Describes the many effects, both cognitive and affective, of daily poetry. (SR)