While Richard Weaver, R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Robert Streeter have been most identified with rhetoric at the University of Chicago and its institutional return in the 1950s, the archival record demonstrates that Frederick Champion Ward, dean of the undergraduate "College" from 1947 to 1954, and Henry W. Sams, director of English…

As part of the development of a Department of Writing Studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, the 99-year-old Department of Rhetoric in the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences was dismantled. The bulk of Rhetoric faculty have been shifted to this new department of Writing Studies. The…

Style is very important in writing. When a style matches a subject, the subject can be well expressed. The author of the article "World Leaders Pay Tribute to Reagan" succeeds in using the right style to reflect the unforgettable solemnity of the state funeral for the former president and people's deep memory of him. This paper intends…

This article is a collaboration between WAC/WID and second language acquisition (SLA) specialists. It examines alternate disciplinary notions of the place of writing among other skills and adapts concepts from SLA theory and pedagogy with the goal of providing new interdisciplinary options for WAC/WID research and classroom practice.

This study examined the relationship of holistic scoring with handwriting legibility, spelling accuracy and number of T-units within compositions written by children in grades 3 through 6 using path analysis. A sample of 223 compositions was rated for handwriting legibility and composition quality, and coded for number of T-units and percentage of…

English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important contributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can…

Of the vexed issues confronting teachers of the first-year writing sequence, none is more frustrating than that of getting students to write in the drafting stages. And not just "to" write, but to write the right thing. The solution that the Composition literature offers to the problem of fluency and content development is process. That…

In 1970, the author learned a simple step in making essays from his advisor. His advisor used a drawing of the Parthenon to illustrate the creation of a five-paragraph essay. It was obvious that his advisor was hesitant on teaching them a very simple concept of essay writing because it was pretty mechanical. Like his advisor, a lot of teachers…

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of undergraduates' metacognitive beliefs about writing and knowledge, ways that those beliefs may change during the semester, and the relationship of beliefs to their persuasive writing. Scales assessing epistemological and writing beliefs were given to students in lower-division…

This essay argues for the value of an ecological metaphor in conceptualizing, designing, and enacting research in writing studies. Such a metaphor conceives of activities, actors, situations, and phenomena as interdependent, diverse, and fused through feedback. This ecological orientation invites composition scholars to research rhetorically: to…

America's colleges and universities have long been the envy of the world. But it would be hard to think of a time when the public has viewed American higher education with greater skepticism. It is a tragedy that colleges and universities are increasingly characterized by their high costs, not their high standards. This fifth edition of…

This study investigates the rhetorical organisation of English and Chinese research article introductions in the field of educational psychology using (Swales, 1990) and (Swales, 2004) framework of move analysis. A corpus of 40 research articles (20 Chinese and 20 English) was selected. The English research articles, written by first-language…

Writing and the teaching of writing is changing at a rapid pace. How can educators understand writing assessment "as" and "with" technology in the 21st-century classroom? Michael Neal contends that new technologies are neither the problem nor the solution. Instead, educators need to tap into digital resources only inasmuch as they promote writing…

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory--"intersectionality," "copresence," and "disidentification"--are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk…