This book features more than 70 stories about the wide range of the Black experience, including traditional tales from Africa and the West Indies. Collected in the book are family stories and moral fables, ghost stories and tales rich in humor, as well as raps and rhymes, memoirs and songs, recipes and riddles, and stories and poems about freedom,…

This paper analyzes the mission statement of a small liberal arts college: (1) to establish a rationale for examining a mission statement from a postmodern perspective, which will aid in the understanding of the context within which the mission statement and accompanying goals were developed and produced; (2) to clarify the multiple voices and…

This paper discusses the emergent perspective in composition studies that sees discourse forms as producing material effects and writing classrooms and programs as part of an apparatus for producing subjective forms, which individual students are then induced to inhabit. The paper suggests that the closed circuit of the classroom is overdetermined…

A literature review traced a major theoretical shift in the understanding of how people read--from the passive reader who receives and decodes information to the strategic reader who actively chooses what, when, and how to read, reads interpretively, and interprets a text (such as a newspaper article) as an organized structure. The result is a…

The purpose of teaching speech is to give students enough basics and practice so they can become more confident and effective at the podium. Theory may be useful but there is no substitute for practice: students in a speech class taught at a community college gave six speeches during the semester, three of them solo speeches and two in groups. The…

Critical thinking skills are inherent in limited preparation forensic activities which, with some modification, can be successfully incorporated in virtually any classroom situation. Furthermore, extemporaneous and impromptu speaking provide educators with certain advantages over debate activities in terms of assessment and classroom logistics. In…

Students may forget that writing involves a relationship between writer and audience--a relationship foregrounded by speech-act theory. The writer should focus on what the audience is to be led to see about the subject. To be distinguished are "locution" (saying something), "illocution" (performance of an act in saying…

Based on the two assumptions that there is social value in writing proposals to seek funding and that there is no special mystique about proposal writing, this book provides step-by step guidance from idea to finished proposal. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The Preproposal Phase" deals with the planning and information…

A study investigated whether some level of writing apprehension or some expressed attitude toward writing might result in better essay scores. Subjects, 255 freshmen composition students at two campuses of the California State University system, were administered instruments designed to comparatively measure the quality of students' writing, gauge…

A study investigated what a group of 29 senior advertising students, part of "Generation X," at a midwestern university found "objectionable" in 35 selected contemporary magazine advertising executions. Using a Q-sort, students ranked the advertisements and completed a personal interview. The majority of the advertisements that…

A search of women's magazines yields countless missives on the virtues of female vigilance not only in protecting personal health but also in protecting spouse and family health. Indeed, the face and content of women's magazines has changed remarkably little from their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, which circumscribed the ideology of…

One of the greatest myths or fictions of nonfiction is that it contains no fiction. Ben Franklin's flight from Boston to Philadelphia illustrates how changes occur in the retelling of the "facts" of a life. In his "Autobiography," Franklin writes that his friend, Collins, arranged for a ship's passage for Franklin by telling…

During the summer of 1990, a university English education professor in Indiana responded to the writing of 20 fourth through seventh graders via a computer installed in his home. The students wrote daily anything ranging from a 3-line haiku to 10-20 computer-screen stories. The classroom teacher took the students through the steps in the writing…

A writing workshop held during a school holiday in an urban center in Southern Africa illustrated the premise that writing experiences with literary patrons can result in benefits for young authors. The workshop was planned with the purpose of encouraging children to write in a setting that emphasized the establishment of a children's library, a…

In addition to the variety of programs, activities, scholarships, and brochures included in Memphis State University's (MSU) minority recruiting program, the institution uses two approaches to the use of media not normally used in recruiting African-American students. The first is a newsletter aimed at historically African-American churches and…