Argues that teachers knowingly or unknowingly use grades to reward and punish students for their behavior, attitude, appearance, family backgrounds, and lifestyles, as well as writing ability. Describes how the author has been suspicious throughout her career of her own grading biases, and how she attempted, through an experiment in anonymous…

Draws on Gerald Graff's work on conflicts over canonicity, pedagogy, and academic institutional structures to investigate ways of handling teacher-student tension over the use of popular songs in the classroom. Discusses two versions of a writing assignment dealing with such tension and what each assignment implies about the course's underlying…

Two experiments involving 153 college students indicated that, given enough time, students studying graphic organizers learned more hierarchical and coordinate relations. As a result, they were more successful in applying the knowledge and in writing integrated essays than were students studying outlines or text alone. (SLD)

Provides a complete text of David Bartholomae's speech on the debate with compositionist Peter Elbow regarding the pros and cons of teaching either academic discourse or personal writing modes to undergraduates. (HB)

Reprints a 1980 article from this journal on an experience the author had as a college freshman that aptly illustrates the adage, "Write what you know." Updates the article with an Afterword commenting on the earlier writing. (SR)

Reprints a 1986 article from this journal in which the author reminisces about his first teaching encounter with bright, agreeable, but wary freshmen writers who taught him about half of everything he knows about composition instruction. Updates the article with an Afterword commenting on the earlier piece. (SR)

Claims that the field of rhetoric and composition is in need of a feminist "remapping" by which new scholarly projects might be plotted. Gives an overview of Patricia Bizzell's methodological suggestions for doing this remapping. Applies this methodology to a study of the ancient rhetorician Aspasia. (HB)

This study compared 10 gifted and 10 average children in each elementary grade for higher level cognitive writing processes and lower level transcription processes. Results indicated that gifted and average children differed in the higher level cognitive processes but not in the lower level writing processes. Results have implications for…

Argues that composition teachers should drop outmoded requirements that perpetuate the discourses of hierarchy and exclusion. Instead, they should articulate the study, practice, and teaching of writing; devise curricula in writing that aim at the achievement of critical public literacy; and abandon the institutional discourse of student need, the…

Presents three ways of understanding literacy and literacy studies: literacy as the technology of cognitive change, literacy as basic skills performance, and literacy as communicative competence. Maintains that each of these understandings suggests something very important about how society, or at least how academic society, construes the value…

Outlines the approaches to "computer composition" and questions the efficacy of such models. Argues that in order to come to terms with the great revolutionary "beyond" posited by some theorists, the computer must be first of all conceptualized as transformative. (HB)

Discusses concerns about literature and composition in the English curriculum. Looks at the traditional place of literature in the curriculum since the 1960s. Discusses the increased emphasis on writing instruction and the need to include nonprint media in the curriculum. (SR)

Describes an interactive inservice program designed to show teachers that children are capable of writing long pieces of discourse with appropriate conventions if motivated through instruction or internal interest. Suggests that writing should be filled with multiple opportunities for discovery and play. (RS)

Discusses how a professional writer and teacher of writing helps children write better by incorporating specific images taken from their "screens"--the places where they see things in their heads. Presents numerous examples of students' poems. Notes the "screens" can also be used in writing stories or essays. (RS)

Synthesizes major findings of writing research into 10 basic principles: grammar, correctness, feedback, positive reinforcement, formative evaluation, quality of learning, specific devices, sharing, student interest, and reading. Applies the principles to business communication classes. (RS)