Place plays an indelible role in the way people perceive and come to understand the world around them. Place influences their interactions by shaping the genres, texts, and languages they use as writers and readers. Therefore, writing that's tied to place and community encourages students to seriously consider the effects of these interactions,…

For the past 20 years, the authors have been reading and teaching literary memoir to students of all ages. In the mid-1980s, they began looking for ways to incorporate more nonfiction into their literature classes, hoping to find a fresh genre unflattened by instruction. They wanted to explore with students a genre that literary critics had not…

Preparing students for life outside the classroom is the whole point of education. The process learners use to take what they have learned in one context and apply it to another is called "knowledge transfer". To help students transfer literacy-based knowledge from high school to college, the author asks students to investigate the kinds of…

The purpose of a prominent feature analysis is to describe the stylistic flexibility that a young writer, or a group of young writers, exhibits on a given day, with a given prompt. In prominent feature analysis, there are no guidebooks, no rubrics--just student papers and the expertise of teachers. Teachers come to the papers individually and yet…

In this article, the author narrates his lifelong relationship with a major American poet, Walt Whitman. He describes how Whitman's "Song of Myself" and poetic idea influenced his life and way of thinking.

About 10 years ago, Robert J. Connors's article "The Erasure of the Sentence" questioned the disappearance of writing style and examined the validity of some of the reasons given for its disappearance. Since that 2000 article, the study of style has undergone a kind of renaissance, with numerous books and articles on its uses in composition theory…

The need to teach students strategies for handling the various nonfiction texts they encounter has never been more pressing than in this digital age. Growing up in this digital age, students have a tenuous grasp on the differences between fiction and nonfiction, which can result in a lack of critical thinking about important political and cultural…

In order to consistently give quality feedback to students, the author introduces the revision and automation tools in Microsoft Word 2007. These features, Comments, Tracking, and Changes, are part of the Review group in MS Word 2007. Additionally, the AutoCorrect feature can be used to enhance and support editing endeavors. This article offers a…

Pressure for students to produce writing perfection in the classroom often eclipses the emphasis placed on the need for students to practice writing. Occasions for students to choose, challenge, and reflect--to actually risk risking--are too often absent from conversations among students and teachers in countless English classrooms. Tom Romano…

Writing, reading, and dramatic performance have long been powerful means for representing and contending with thorny problems, and the authors see much promise in engaging students in authoring the dramas and solutions that represent their fears and their hopes for resolutions. In this article, the authors share a series of writing activities and…

Writing plays an important role in adolescent literacy development, but school writing is often too rigid to accommodate their personal needs, not allowing them to write for different purposes and different audiences. Studies of writing generally focus on learning to write or writing to learn. Using a sociocultural lens, the authors focused on…

Imagine two classfuls of American high school students, separated by 1,500 miles and profound differences in local cultures (East Coast urban and Midwestern rural) as they correspond and collaborate in writing between their geometry classes. Reading the students' observations, one sees authentic voice, specific detail, precise language, what…

Students seem to believe that novels appear whole cloth; the writer just types away, channeling the muse in the attic. Poetry is pure inspiration--one has the gift or one does not. Students need to know that writing is hard work, and that the blank page stares down every good writer, even authors whose books have won critical acclaim and graced…

In this article, the author offers a user-friendly approach to semiotics that engages students in critical examination of the popular culture they are already immersed in. She defines semiotics as "the study of signs" and explains how asking students to analyze cultural objects and practices from ordinary life and popular culture can engage their…

In an effort to introduce students to a relatively new genre and allow them to evaluate it in the context of how they had been taught in the past, the author created an assignment about graphic novels and literacy that guided students through four short papers, forming a longer research paper for a final project. The students would begin with a…