The authors discuss a scholarship of teaching and learning project conducted in three first-year writing seminars of different disciplines. The goal was to introduce students to academic inquiry, which they define as the process of critically analyzing class materials, engaging with the larger body of knowledge on a topic, using evidence to…

In April, the "New England Journal of Higher Education" ("NEJHE") launched its "New Directions for Higher Education" series to examine emerging issues, trends, and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs, and practices. In this installment of the series, DiSalvio speaks with Richard Arum,…

Using great literature to clarify and to improve students' writing is like using the unknown-literature to explain the only slightly less unknown--the writing of compositions. An alternative is to study films to foster an awareness of technique, for films contain many of the same rhetorical and structural devices as literature. It is possible to…

This paper demonstrates the compatability of Aristotle's Four Causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) and George Campbell's Four Forms of Discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) and synthesizes them to form an ordered yet flexible writing model that can be used in composition instruction. Within the context of…

The introductory essay of this book states that the value of formal and generic analysis must be tested heuristically, in application. With that value as the keynote to the essay collection, the theoretical perspectives of form and genre in rhetorical criticism are discussed, and five critical essays give evidence of the constraints and creative…

A dialectical heuristic that can be used to guide students through the stages of writing about a literary experience is discussed in this paper. The first section of the paper provides a working definition of literature as an area of discourse and divides the process of reading and writing about literature into three general phases: progressive,…

Describes what 300 titles of published works reveal about the process of writing titles and about writing in general. (DD)

A text is the locus of many intersecting processes, the origins, character, and operative principles of which should be the main focus of its discussion in a writing class. These processes can be classified into the four major components of the communicative act: the writer, the reader, the social conditions of communication, and the historical…

Suggests encouraging students to use three or four steps to disintegrate their original objective descriptions of an event in a novel as a way to experiment with writing and to develop some critical observations about the author's fictional world. (TJ)

Suggests how teachers of writing can use the concepts of Kenneth Burke to revise discussions about words and thereby better empower the "wordlings" they teach. Argues for a Burkean concept of writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process to be used in the writing classroom. (HB)

Students' use of "I think" and its variants when writing about literature reflects an avoidance of close observation of the literary text. (DD)

The traditional basic writing model (giving students manageable writing tasks like narratives and descriptions of familiar places) has been criticized by both Mike Rose and David Bartholomae, among others, for not moving the basic writer far enough toward the goal of academic writing competence. Rose's schemata are reassuring and helpful to basic…

Written to encourage imaginative approaches to teaching writing, this paper contains ideas for developing writing skills by encouraging creative writing, formal analysis, and criticism despite the traditional lack of literary analysis in the creative writing classroom. In addition to including teaching techniques for practicing literary skills…