To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Mina Shaughnessy's groundbreaking book, "Errors and Expectations," a roundtable discussion was held at the March 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York City. This article, based on the earlier discussion, examines the question of CUNY's multiple…

This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student…

The study of composition is in need of a methodology to teach students about the creation of evidence and the epistemological role that it plays in all writing. For many students "evidence" is an absolute, an assortment of facts found in encyclopedias, graphs, tables, census studies, surveys, almanacs, and so on. For most instructors,…

The power that writing centers have to change their institutions lies in their working with faculties across the various disciplines, starting conversations about the nature of teaching and the role of writing in education. Engaging in this adventure requires some change, some adaptation, in the way a center operates--in at least a practical,…

"Frame alignment"--the conscious process of creating correspondence between one's own "frame" (ways of making meaning out circumstances) and someone else's--is a necessary condition for participation in organized social movements. Frame alignment processes may offer a generative and useful alternative to the reductive…

The stories composition teachers tell their students about "what an essay is" are significant because they affect the work teachers do in the classroom. Questions about these stories, the cultural narratives the stories reflect, and implications for students can be answered through an examination of contemporary writing texts and texts…

Borrowing from Heidegger and following Pamela Caughie and Victor Vitanza, the work of Virginia Woolf can be linked to composition pedagogies to ask: "What are composition instructors still not thinking in relation to the postmodern?" An answer may be found through postmodern rereadings of Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and…

Chaos theory provides a powerful lens for re-seeing a number of issues in composition studies ranging in scale from achieving a generative model for text production to articulating the very nature of the discipline. Chaos systems are nonlinear, have complex forms, manifest recursive symmetries between scale levels, have feedback mechanisms, and…

Missing apostrophes, misplaced apostrophes, and unnecessary apostrophes are all common occurrences in many forms of written American English. The fact is there is no adequate explanation--in traditional grammar or in any other grammar--that accounts for all the functions and transformations that grammarians have crowded under the heading of the…

Dissertations are products of the places and times in which they are written. For one graduate student, enrolling in the doctoral program at State University of New York (SUNY) Albany, however, not only demonstrated how creative writers, composition teachers and theorists can mix together, but also illustrated that dissertation writing is not a…

Arguing that document design had its origins in the 1930s but that much of its development in theory, research, and practice has occurred in the 1980s, this paper provides a snapshot of the evolution of document design. The paper defines "document design" as the theory, research, and practice of creating comprehensible and persuasive…

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. While theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with the way many teachers try to teach writing. The works of Roland…

While tutoring on a one-to-one basis is not in and of itself a magic way to teach, it can realize many potential benefits. The tutor must learn to operate effectively in at least three roles: as coach, as commentator, and as counselor. As a coach, a tutor is a trainer, an encouraging helper who tells learners what they need to know in order to…

Students tend to think of writing as reporting the topography of their minds and souls guided by the assumptions that reality is "out there," that reality is relatively unproblematical, that the concepts they use are common to everyone and are therefore self-evident, and that they should and can abstract themselves from the processes of the worlds…

Grammar and style contribute to a matrix that expresses the writer's thinking and the values of the academic community. Writers uphold the matrix while presenting their own ideas through a system of "deixis" (to refer to or point to things or ideas not actually present or stated). Nonlinguistic deixis coordinates expression and context…