In the many different stages of the writing process, teachers of composition need to be sensitive toward cultural differences which may exist between them and their students. Large numbers of foreign students participate in writing courses in American colleges, and research indicates that the minority student population will increase sharply in…

Talk is central to what writers do--it is the collaborative activity that underlies most, if not all, individual acts of composing. Writers compose through inner speech while walking, by speaking aloud at the word processor, when discussing a work-in-progress, or as they share ideas during conferences in writing centers and classrooms. But this…

Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes a philosophical hermeneutics that sheds light on the ways in which scholars have envisioned the history of teaching writing. Offering an alternative to a linear model of history, in which events are viewed as links in a chain, Gadamer's hermeneutics regards a text as a locus or web through which other texts are…

Like the narrator of Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall," instructors need to ask what is being walled in and walled out of their composition programs when categories such as process vs. product, expressive, epistemic, current traditionalism, and social constructionism are constructed. When divisive categories prevent theorists from…

To become writers, students must see themselves as writers and be treated as writers by their teachers. Students need to find the motivation to go beyond formulas, to grapple with messy, often inchoate ideas, to find their own particular angle of vision. What rhetoricians call "invention" or "discovery" is difficult to pin…

New technologies brought about by the computer are causing writing to take on more and more the features of orality. The computer's emphasis on speed reduces or even eliminates distance, which is one of the key features of orality. Orality is immediate and relies on assumptions, on gaps to be filled in by the auditor. It is also "socially…

The primary goal of a project was to encourage students in adult basic education, General Educational Development, and English as a second language to express their thoughts and feelings through writing. Its objectives were to collect and publish exemplary student writings from adult education programs throughout the state of Pennsylvania and to…

If "logic" is defined as a means to create good reasons for accepting clear and unambiguous conclusions, then feminist instructors of composition should use it not only to dismantle traditional male notions of combative discussion, but also to build their own paradigms based on an acceptance of difference. Those feminists such as Sally…

This book has an easy-to-follow-format. It supports teachers through six workshops by sharing specific strategies, procedures, and materials that worked best for students and teachers in classroom writing workshops. The book discusses the routines that helped organize and support a workshop; and presents strategies for anecdotal record-keeping,…

Drawing on the work of Virginia Woolf, feminist instructors of college composition can help their students to develop their own voices by encouraging innovation and revision of mainstream discourses and ways of expression. If Woolf believed that women cannot escape the language of men, which not only constitutes the symbolic realm of phallocentric…

The connections between art therapy and the teaching of writing are many. The process of art therapy is essentially art making followed by talk--a process that parallels the process of writing and reflecting about writing that is encouraged in writing classrooms. It is a process aimed at self discovery and consciousness, whether in a writing…

It is difficult for an instructor to designate his philosophy in teaching composition when it is derived from a background in cultural studies at one school and from an "expressivist" program at another school. Furthermore, in naming his approach, he must take into account the influence of his feminist instructors as well as his own…

If social constructionism would seem to encourage collaborative learning, it is not hard to understand why feminist instructors would align themselves with this philosophical position. In "Women's Ways of Knowing," however, M. Belenky, B. Clinchy, M. Goldberger and J. Tarule present quite different feminist justifications for…

A student was able to overcome flatness in his writing when he focused on the process of writing rather than the product. The student's draft of an essay about a symbol the student found meaningful contained spelling and grammatical errors and was also "flat." The essay had no apparent thesis, demonstrated lack of success in issues of…

A study investigated whether peer tutoring in writing would lead to writing improvement. In a kindergarten-first grade classroom three children were tutored by fellow students, while three other students worked alone. The children's writing samples were collected and evaluated in three areas: spelling, longer sentences, and greater number of words…