The author has been tutoring and teaching writing for fifteen years, but has discovered that few people outside of academia know what it is that she does. Despite the rise in composition graduate programs and the improving market for composition specialists, even within the university, faculty from other disciplines frequently have vague notions…

This paper describes a writing assignment given in an introductory literature class at an open-admissions university. In what can be called "the paper of many parts," students write six short pieces in which they do different things with a poem. The paper begins and ends with response statements: an initial one and one at the end that…

Because most undergraduate students have two main interests--personal relationships and getting jobs--first year composition students respond positively to a series of career-based assignments which are both personal and pragmatic. "What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers," by Richard Nelson…

Based on the observation that freshman composition students associate writing with pain and unpleasantness and have been given little opportunity to engage in enjoyable writing, this paper advocates a method for making freewriting and the journal central and integral dimensions of the writing class. After discussing the techniques and the benefits…

Describes a scavenger hunt assignment in a freshman orientation course. Uses the idea of the scavenger hunt as a way to locate and utilize campus resources and gain insight into the grading and self-evaluation process. Contains four resources, with sample assignments appended. (NB)

During the 1994 fall semester, an instructor taught an English 101 section at Central Arizona College-Superstition Mountain Campus that used readings from Graham Flegg's "Numbers: Their History and Meaning" as the basis for 3 of the assigned readings. Only 3 of the 5 assigned essays were based on math--as opposed to all of them--for…

Satirical writing offers a means of encouraging students to criticize those forms of victimization and inequality that trouble them most without that overt, dogmatic indoctrination of a political agenda that many would consider an anathema to democratic teaching. The indirect, satirical jab provides students with an intellectually challenging and…

Allowing, or encouraging, students to write fiction has not received much attention from college composition teachers, despite recent attempts to bridge the gaps between composition and the study of literature. Based on experiences with a number of students in a variety of writing courses, a college composition instructor questions assumptions…

Reviews a study examining the influence of rhetorical specification in writing prompts on the writing quality of 7th-, 9th-, and 11th-grade students, and college freshmen. Analyzes the main and interactive effects of topic, purpose, and audience on writing quality. Indicates that students use different kinds of rhetorical information at different…

This paper focuses on freshman-level students expecting to major in teacher education. In their long apprenticeship of observation as students, preservice teachers have acquired both a mass of information about schoolteaching and a subjective warrant to teach. In the introductory teacher education course, "Exploring Teaching," the…

Progress in travel, technology, and other domains has contributed to the breaking down of barriers between countries and allowed for the development of an increasingly global society. International cooperation and competition are now pervasive in areas as diverse as business, science, arts, politics, and athletics. Educating students to navigate…