Answers basic questions that teachers in various departments have found useful while thinking about their writing assignments: (1) the role writing assignments play; (2) whether to abolish them; (3) what students should be able to do in their writing; (4) intellectual skills students should learn; and (5) how students can be helped in…

Presents seven practical and two abstract problems encountered when composition was removed from an English department by the dean during the spring of 1998. Lists four main reasons for moving composition out of English including: organization; quality; lack of commitment; and pedagogy. (SG)

Encourages the Yale English Department to put an end to the unnatural separation of the teaching of literacy and the teaching of literature. (DD)

Describes the development, the purpose, and the accomplishments of the writing laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. (RB)

Examines long-held assumptions and raises questions about the practice of using tests to evaluate the performances and abilities of students taking English composition. (RB)

Encourages English teachers to consider student themes as real texts, and discusses the bond between the teaching of literary works and the teaching of composition that would be forged thereby. (DD)

Three key areas of confusion in the English department--composition, curriculum, and humanism--can be resolved by marshaling ideas from social dramatism, games theory, and sociobiology. (DD)

Literature, which deals with truth, should be the focus of the English department instead of writing, which is a trivial technology. (DD)

Describes and evaluates the exit assessment for writing at Simpson College. Provides background, reflection, results, a numbers analysis, and thoughts about the next steps. Argues that portfolios are a feasible means of large-scale and high-stakes writing assessment. (TB)

Presents the flaws and errors characteristic of the writing of undergraduates as an art that cannot be reproduced--except by other undergraduates. Ridicules the language of textbooks. (HTH)

Discusses "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" by John Locke, and Charles William Eliot's Inaugural Address to the First Papish Church in an attempt to arrive at a coherent ideology on teaching composition. (RB)

Suggests that the act of writing is a process of discovery in which students become aware of their thoughts and acquire knowledge by making their ideas take shape on paper. (RB)

Argues that studying English can equip students to grapple with the abstractions, concepts, and vague or ambiguous utterances they encounter in other endeavors. (RB)

Examines Basil Bernstein's principles on language as set forth in "Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language" and applies them to the teaching of English composition. (RB)

Describes a writing program, as a major area of study, at the University of Puget Sound. (JM)