This article presents a written version of the address the author gave at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) meeting in San Francisco on March 12, 2009. In this address, the author talks about the wonder of writing and discusses how writing has been considered sacred. Reading and writing are associated with inwardness…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

This volume presents a compilation of approaches, theory, processes, and experiences for teachers of writing and, by extension, student writers at all levels. The following mixture of theory and consistent applications amply answer this criticism and provide a generous blend of cognitive, metacognitive and affective realms of creativity as well as…

In the act of revision a writer seeks what Joyce Carol Oates calls "points of invisibility": things not in the text that should be and things in the text that should not be. Composing process research on revision has articulated several aspects of the revising process, but study of creative writers' composing habits remains an…

Research suggests that basic writers are willing to edit but reluctant to revise their writing. In other words, they make surface-level changes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation but tend not to re-conceive content, structure, style, and cohesion. This paper argues that we need more instructional strategies that will help students understand…

Three studies examined the effectiveness of teaching an unfamiliar prose form using prose modeling (duplicating defining characteristics of a model text using different content). First, English department instructors at four universities were surveyed and of the 70 who responded, 76% stated that they did use modeling in their classrooms. In the…

Writing instructors who would like to move beyond the collaboration provided by workshops and peer-response groups might consider asking groups of students to write a collage together. According to Peter Elbow, a collage "consists not of a single perfectly connected train of explicit thinking or narrative but rather of fragments: arranged how…

The goal of persuasive writing is to move the reader to action or to get the reader to refrain from action, and most of the secrets of persuasion can work either way. To get readers to take action, a writer has to appeal to the emotions as much as possible. To get readers to refrain from action, a writer must appeal to the intellect. The secrets…

"Inkshedding" grew out of a process of trying to make "freewriting" into something dialogically transactional. The idea was to give writing a social role in a classroom, and thus to create a situation in which the writing was read by real readers, to understand and respond to what was said rather than to evaluate and "help" with the writing. In…

Describes a first-year composition sequence of assignments using the topic of family to allow students to write essays based on their own experiences. Notes that the sequence eventually requires that students also address connected ideas and then reflect on the convergence of the personal and analytical. (PRA)

Although the FCB (Foote, Cone, & Belding) grid was never intended to serve as an educational tool, it can be applied successfully in advertising classes to address the three areas that S. E. Moriarty considers to be the minimum for writing strategy. To demonstrate the superiority of the FCB grid as a pedagogical tool, a study analyzed…

Although socio-cultural awareness is an important element of discourse, freshman composition's primary obligation is to provide students with instruction in and practice "owning" a process of writing that foregrounds writing as a rhetorical art. Students should leave the course more aware of and better able to employ powerful, flexible…

Students must learn to maintain authority over their texts as they attempt to deal with the chaos they encounter when they approach a writing task. The authority with which Jacques Derrida deals with chaos in his essay, "...That Dangerous Supplement," suggests some strategies. In his essay, Derrida seems to be able to move the reader…

One way to "reinitiate" possible productive responses to the question of the subject for composition theory and pedagogy is to defuse the terror of the "impossible," to "negotiate" with the impossible, and to ask impossible questions. Although there are dangers associated with any critical theorizing about the subject…

With the recent interest in the fifth century B.C. theories of Protagoras and Gorgias come assumptions about the philosophical affinity of the Greek educator Isocrates to this pair of older sophists. Isocratean education in discourse, with its emphasis on collaborative political discourse, falls within recent definitions of a sophist curriculum.…