A dialectical heuristic that can be used to guide students through the stages of writing about a literary experience is discussed in this paper. The first section of the paper provides a working definition of literature as an area of discourse and divides the process of reading and writing about literature into three general phases: progressive,…

The teaching-questioning strategy developed in this paper, based on reader-response criticism and Kenneth Burke's pentad, can be used by teachers to elicit responses to any literary work and is designed to help students participate in a work's dramatic context, discover meaning as they read, and assure that their critical essays are based on an…

Provides a sequence of assignments, and the theory upon which they are based, for composition courses that include film. Includes ordering information and an abstract for the film "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," upon which the assignments are based. (TJ)

A series of 13 questions is offered for sequencing student writing activities according to a problem solving model of the composing process. The questions are organized in a cyclical framework for approaching any problem solving task that writing students may face. The questions fall into four progressively developed categories, including…

Suggests two shifts in perspective that will help turn writing across the curriculum courses toward aim and away from mode as a central organizing principle. Suggests a theoretical shift from "mode" to "topic" and a practical shift from single to plural textuality, combining several textual paradigms as demonstrated in the…

Rather than replace the modal methodology approach to writing with an aim or purpose-oriented pedagogy and criticism, it would be profitable for writing across the curriculum teachers to recycle the modes, using them as topics of generative and analytic invention. The move from mode to topic can be applied to the texts of contemporary science…

Writing can be taught most effectively when teachers build the disorienting characteristics of reading literature into the inventive stages (prewriting and revision) of writing literary interpretations. The reading of literature and the process of composing interpretive essays are both different and similar. They are similar because they are both…

A theory of interpretation developed from the composition scholar's reading and revision of literary theory can effectively serve as a core theory in writing across the curriculum programs. For example, recent composition theory, with its emphasis on close study of students' texts and the process of their writing, provides the writing teacher with…