Poetry provides language that is most likely to amaze, astonish, and delight reader and hearer. And children, before school spoils it for them, seem to have a natural affinity for poetry and verse. This paper discusses the ways in which children respond to poetry. The paper notes that relatively little research has been done to determine how…

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…

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism has applications to rhetoric and composition instruction. Dialogism, sometimes translated as intertextuality, is the term Bakhtin used to designate the relation of one utterance to other utterances. Dialogism is not dialogue in the usual sense of the word; it is the context which informs utterance, and…

Voice can be considered as the writer's attitude toward the reader (the rhetorical function) and the writer's attitude toward the subject or object being written about (the epistemic function). Voice is expressed by such things as word choice, rhythm, sound, and juxtaposition of words and sentences. Moreover, the writer's attitude toward the…

Writing in the first person is not usually tolerated in academic writing under the illusion that the third person insures some kind of objectivity. But writing in the first person is honest, permitting the reader to know that what is being said is a matter of opinion. It is a direct way of speaking about what a writer sees or feels or thinks, and…

Dreams can be used to draw students into an authentic expression of their creativity and to give them some validation for what they are as persons. A "dream seminar" in a writing course could have students read and discuss Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; log, report, and discuss their dreams during the course; and explore other…

Used the language intensity/message affect coding metric developed by R. Rogan and M. Hammer to evaluate variability in the language of 160 Euro-American and African-American college students responding to a free-response scenario. Results indicate significant differences in the level of affect present in messages communicated by the two groups.…

A survey of 112 editors from magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses was conducted to obtain their judgments about prose style, the best prose stylists, and representative works by those stylists. Of the 112 editors surveyed, only 22 responded with useful data. The results indicated very little consensus among editors, and almost no…

A study investigated whether expressive writing facilitated abstraction in language use, thereby improving reading comprehension. Ninety students enrolled in four required basic skills reading courses at a suburban community college in New Jersey were divided into a control and an experimental group. Students in the experimental group wrote…

It is the role of schools and colleges to teach certain truths that can enhance the quality of one's life in society. Yet often these truths are not learned at school because many students do not accept them as truths, because they are not actually included in the curriculum, or because they are mistaught. These truths revolve around eight…

The reading habits by which students formulate a critical analysis of a literary work should focus attention on the choices that a writer makes when putting words on paper. These choices include sound, diction, language, imagery, organization, metaphors, sentence structure, transitions, allusions, and patterns. Discussing these choices does not…

Two research studies conducted at the bilingual Hostos Community College of the City University of New York suggest that the classroom performance of adult, advanced, and post English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students benefits from the students' participation in tutor-led groups that focus on a particular course's content and employ talk and…

This paper presents a state-of-the-art examination of the literature addressing humor in leadership. A theoretical rationale is developed for the importance of humor as functional communication, especially as it relates to leadership. Research from several disciplines relevant to the use of humor in leadership is organized and synthesized.…

In devising an inventional scheme for considering black communication behavior with possible implications for a more general theory, four constituents must be considered: frame of mind, scope of context, structure of code, and delivery of message. The concepts of rhythm and styling seem indicative of the black frame of mind, while the contextual…

A Writing Anxiety Scale (WAS) was developed. A literature review and interviews with writing instructors identified nine components of writing behavior (Empathy, Expression, Evaluation by Others, Motivation, Organization, Procrastination, Self-Esteem, Technical Skills, and Writing Anxiety). A pool of 146 items were written to reflect the…