The late Donald C. Stewart's assertion that "the era of the cognitive psychologists is waning; the era of the social constructionists is just beginning" drew attention to a major ontological and epistemological shift in composition studies. This shift demanded a methodology to accommodate it. Some composition researchers have considered…

The New Journalism, which uses literary techniques usually restricted to fiction, has been categorized and analyzed from a number of perspectives, but little effort has been made to delineate its intellectual and philosophical roots. The New Journalism arose from the intellectual tradition of Romanticism, as opposed to Classicism, the movement…

The net effect of the early experiences of writing "compositions" which involved either describing the circumstances of a student's life or recounting the kinds of events encapsulated in that proverbially hack title, "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," has been a tendency for older teachers to devalue nonfiction as an object of…

The debate between objective and new journalism centers upon the question of which approach factually depicts reality. Both genres, however, are part of one fact/fiction matrix in which all narrative forms since John Locke have been based upon factuality. The difference between the genres is that new journalism relies upon the sensory data of…

In the interest of applying reader response theory to journalism this paper posits that readers of newspapers, like readers of literature, take an active role in making meaning from the articles they read, rather than passively accepting news as a finished, static product. Additionally, it proposes that journalism textbooks pay little attention to…