We take a look at work on writing processes by examining design processes. Design processes offer a greater emphasis on empathy with users, feedback and critique during idea generation, and varied uses of materials. After considering work already done on design and composition, we explore a variety of design processes and develop our own…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

My experience working with first year writers in courses designed to teach critical thinking and composition has introduced me to a mass of young adults who are anxious when it comes to effective written communication in a college classroom. Not only are they troubled about how to write to an audience of college professors, but they are also…

The author explores the place of feminism in teaching through the lens of rhetorical dexterity, providing a case study.

The way people write and communicate has changed both inside and outside the university, and because of this writing instructors are professionally responsible for addressing these changes in the classroom. Technologies have affected writing for thousands of years. From the invention of the printing press to the Internet, challenges to writing…

In a reflection on her teaching practices, Wendy Bishop in "Teaching Lives" suggests that over time she became a "social expressivist," in that by writing about her own teaching she learned "to develop a personal voice within the public matrix of professional communities" (ix). For the compositionist committed to the…

The author writes that his experience in teaching has taught him that the perfect text simply does not exist, however the closest approximation to perfection lies in the direction of the classical world. Hal McDonald says that he cannot see how one can teach rhetoric without passing through pedagogical territory first cleared by Aristotle,…