Offers suggestions on ways to introduce a workshop audience (of faculty, teaching assistants, or new composition instructors) to composing as women. Discusses classroom structure, teaching the composing process, the rhetorical situation, designing writing assignments, teaching expository form, using peer review groups, responding to drafts,…

Presents a title-writing exercise which can be completed in class in 20 to 30 minutes. Asserts that the exercise works for many writers as a strategy for focusing and developing. (PRA)

Notes that, although writing instruction is appropriate, students need to have the opportunity to practice daily what they have learned. Discusses a number of ways teachers can developmentally influence students' processes of becoming good writers. Suggests that motivational activities that create, build, evaluate, and edit writing help students…

Describes successful teaching tips for writing instruction from six teachers. (SR)

Argues that writing instruction should lead student writers to find their voice in their writing and that this will only happen if they write often for personal purposes and personal expression. (SR)

Describes a writing assignment based on a teacher-created scenario in which students discover a box (when visiting their grandmother's sister) containing a number of strange items including a written proposal for marriage. (TB)

Argues that, after students are familiar with the characteristics of the five paragraph essay and the expectations of that genre, they can learn to play with those expectations to create lively writing that reveals more individual voice by mixing in other genres. Argues that such a strategy can teach students to engage in academic writing more…

Suggests that the five-paragraph theme does in fact have value, and explains why assumptions about its ills are wrong-minded. (SR)

Using popular culture in my developmental writing course has prompted me to reconsider what it means to create successful developmental writing assignments. Having slipped into the questionable habit of assuming that removing complexity makes an assignment appropriate for developing writers, I pared down a fairly open-ended "media…

A case study examined the collaborative experiences of students in an online business writing classroom. The purpose was to examine the same groups of students working on collaborative writing assignments in both a synchronous (real-time) and an asynchronous (non-real-time) discussion forum. This study focused on examining the amount, pattern, and…

I invite and encourage students to take risks in their writing, to engage innovatively with a wide range of genre, to push limits in order to explore creatively how language and discourse are never ossified, but always organic, how language use is integrally and inextricably connected to identity, knowledge, subjectivity, and living. Informed by…

Describes how one instructor incorporates daily poetry "breaks" in middle school. Explains that students begin by listening to Eve Merriam's "How to Eat a Poem," then imitate poems first in pantomime, then with sound and action. Notes that students later write and trade poems, and end the term with a poetry festival. (SG)

The 1,175 composition topics that appear in this special edition of the "Illinois English Bulletin" are suggested as possibilities for high school student writing assignments. After a brief statement about how secondary English teachers might use the topics in their classes, the topics are categorized by subject matter and types of composition.…

Offers an approach to using film as an object of analysis for writing classes having no previous knowledge of film terms and techniques. Provides 19 study questions to stimulate identification and a description of a director's techniques to facilitate an interpretation of what the film means. (JG)

Being "unfailingly conscious" of one's subject position (and performing it in a formal writing assignment) are the tenets of "initiation pedagogy," the intertextual analysis behind D. Bartholomae and A. Petrosky's "Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts," and their subsequent composition textbook "Ways of…