This article argues that graduate programs at large research universities do not prepare new WPAs for the realities of administrative work in small colleges. It first presents and then challenges a series of assumptions about the nature of WPA work, the resources available to facilitate that work, and the rhetorical strategies that are most useful…

The 2003 annual meeting of Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) opened in New York concurrently with the US invasion of Iraq on March 18, and many conference participants discussed the relation between rhetoric, the teaching of writing, and the war. This article presents some of the more memorable reflections on rhetoric and…

The arrival of large numbers of "non-traditional" students in higher education has led to rethinking the idea of the university itself and of the role of writing within it. This paper contributes to that debate by considering student writing within a broader framework than that of simply study skills or academic socialization, as in dominant…

How can students be encouraged to use writing to learn, as well as to think more critically, communicate better and build cooperative relationships with fellow students, under conditions of university expansion and underfunding? This article describes an action-learning project carried out at the University of Sussex investigating the use of peer…

The paper that follows is part of a larger project aiming to examine the textual production of writers having access to more than one set of representational resources. It is premised on the notion that access to such dual or multiple resource-bases permits the production of texts that are 'marked' in salient and systematic ways. (Contains 1 table…

In the early 1970's the author of this article decided to dedicate his life to two tasks. The first was to write politically and creatively in popular literary genres such as the detective novel for a larger public than one was likely to find through academic writing. The second was to write politically and inventively within the genres of…

In this article, the author advocates the use of literacy narratives--assignments in which students are asked to describe and reflect upon their experiences with reading and writing. Among their other uses, she believes that they provide a sense of students' prior literacy experiences and of their general feelings toward reading and writing, and…

How should the relationship between immediate interaction and verbal convention be understood? The present article argues that dialogism transcends the distinction between interactionist and constructionist social theories of written communication, as presented by Nystrand and colleagues. The theoretical argument is illustrated by a study of one…

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing.…

In this article, the author describes some of his memories of Phil, one of the students he taught years ago at Bayside High School in Queens. He relates that Phil's true passion was food and not literature. Phil would always bring one his desserts for the author to grade it. Years ago, the author made his classes write an essay about a person who…

This article challenges the assumption that the canon of memory means memorization and transcription, and, as a result, has little relevance for the writing classroom. An examination of the canon's historical legacy and its relationships to literacy and invention open a space for redefining the canon of memory as "rememoried knowing." In brief,…

The effects of a cancer diagnosis can be devastating and far-reaching. Expressive-supportive group therapy has proven useful for treating patients struggling with many of these effects. In addition, individual therapeutic writing methods have shown benefit for many individuals addressing a variety of difficult life circumstances including cancer.…

There are a myriad of writing tasks that confront a director of an early childhood program. Correspondence is one of the most frequent and time-consuming tasks of all. In this article, the author discusses some guidelines for getting started with the writing tasks. The author also offers some practical tips for effective correspondence.

In the fall of 2001 I taught a beginning college composition course at Minot State University, a small state university located in the northwestern quadrant of North Dakota. It is typical of such courses to include a fair amount of reading, and one of the texts I assigned was Ian Frazier's "Great Plains". The book is a travelogue that…

In this paper, the role of computers in writing process was investigated. Last 25 years of journals were searched to find related articles. Articles and books were classified under prewriting, composing, and revising and editing headings. The review results showed that computers can make writers' job easy in the writing process. In addition,…