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Despite the individualised, empowering, and political nature of early developments in the instruction of creative writing, once creative writing instruction gained traction in higher education in the U.S., especially at the University of Iowa, teaching creative writing became more about the written product than the writing process. That shift made it so that today, the acceptance of a written artifact identifies one as a writer more than the act of writing itself; therefore, many students are now subject to curriculums that generally define them as writers through the completion of written artifacts and not the process of writing creatively. This article details an alternative curriculum, one informed by discussions on the writing process – including moments of inception and methods of creation – and not just the successful production of a written artifact, the very last (and not always necessary) stage of writing creatively. This project accomplishes this task using a lesser popularised history of creative writing, largely detailed in the histories of writing composition, writings from the extracurriculum, and best teaching and assessment practices in composition studies. Students in my open-access curriculum come away with over 30,000 words of creative writing and writing in reflective practice in a single semester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there have been several studies on primary and secondary English education in Singapore, less research has been done on academic writing courses at the tertiary level. This study presents the results of a survey, which aimed to find out the pedagogical approaches and skills prioritized by tertiary-level writing teachers in Singapore. The project was guided by the following questions: (1) What is the dominant approach to teaching writing courses in Singapore? (2) What are the educational backgrounds of writing teachers in Singapore and does this relate to the pedagogical approaches that inform their teaching? (3) What practices do these teachers prioritize in the work they do as teachers and in their learning outcomes? (4) What are the typical assignments, class sizes, and teaching loads for Singaporean writing/communication classes? The results suggest that most teachers of Singaporean writing classes have a background in linguistics and take an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) approach; however, there was also some evidence of a blended approach between EAP and composition studies. The study proposes that, as Singaporean students become more proficient in English, this blended approach may present the best way forward for teaching academic writing in Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the academic literacy learning trajectory of Farah, an undergraduate anthropology major at the American University in Cairo. In charting her path from the Egyptian public schooling system to a Western-based transnational university, this study offers a perspective in which a writer created and navigated a challenging trajectory and adapted Western-based literacies to aid in the development of an academic and professional agenda based in personal and national interests. This article draws on frameworks in composition studies and transnational literacy studies to suggest that theorizing such trajectories may require new concepts that can account for literacy learning trajectories for writers like Farah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One’s mastery of speech conventions is considered an essential qualification for an educated individual, especially a scholar of English. Teaching writing to non-native English majors, writing instructors feel the burden to adopt the Current-traditional pedagogy. It is a process that stresses students’ internalization of speech conventions and treats students as passive recipients. Current-traditional pedagogy is inadequate to foster future scholars. This article offers a plan for teaching freshman writing inspired by the ideas and values of Protagoras and Isocrates and identified as New Sophistic pedagogy. Good speech/logos lies on good reasoning defined by one’s knowing himself/herself and one’s sociopolitical awareness. Thus, the proposed pedagogy focuses on students’ intellectual and emotional maturity. The writing instructor understands his/her moral responsibility to guide his/her students, and the students realize their leading role in the learning process. It consists of three cycles of deliberative discourse: Monologic argument, Mediation, and Negotiation. Through the different argumentation types, students understand that speech/logos mirrors one’s mind, his/her true essence. Progressively, students prepare themselves as true scholars by cultivating personal and social identity and feeling empathy for the other.

This article reviews literature in composition studies since affective science's emergence in the 1980s. It focuses on composition studies' history of adopting findings and theories from affective science, and distinguishes trends in how the field applies those elements in theoretical versus pedagogical contexts. While composition studies' adoption of affective science in its theorizing has helped the field progress toward a "complete psychology of writing," affective science's influence on classroom practices has not been so clear cut or direct. However, affective science is a fast-growing, liberal, and multidisciplinary field. As it progresses, composition studies continues to embrace its concepts and theories. This review notes the expectations and limitations developing through this dynamic interdisciplinary relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student error analysis is an area of investigation that can shed light on how students learn. It can also serve as a pedagogical tool to increase students' awareness of the most common types of errors to avoid. Quality of student output, however, isn't solely determined by the number of errors students make, but also the extent to which students successfully employ certain other discourse-related strategies to improve their compositions. This paper argues that, aside from grammatical concerns, and at least from a discourse point of view, students already possess much of the knowledge they need in order to write better compositions. Both second (L2) and heritage (HL) learners of Spanish typically already possess some advanced writing skills in English, but we have observed that when attempting to write in Spanish, many of these same students will resort to more remedial means of presenting and/or expressing their ideas. In other words, unaware that so many discourse skills are transferable from English to Spanish, students will not necessarily apply the same strategies, or at least to the same degree, as they would if writing a similar essay in English. This paper, therefore, provides ten tips that students can draw on to improve both the presentation and expression of their ideas in compositions. Recommendations are divided into two categories, the first being aspects a student should always keep in mind when approaching any piece of writing, while the second are negative tendencies that are quite common, but which a student should necessarily avoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other forms of intellectual property, patents have increasingly been the subject of controversy regarding their successes and failures in promoting and channeling innovation. But unlike other forms of intellectual property, patents are constituted and defined in terms of officially sanctioned texts. As a consequence, patents are deeply embedded in communities of composition, interpretation, and practice. This paper outlines how genre analysis can be applied to interrogate the "typified rhetorical action" of the patent system and its constituent communities. It argues and demonstrates that understanding the rhetorical work of patents is key to addressing current criticisms of the patent system.

The research methods landscape has the potential to be quite diverse. However, the paradigmatic battles between the two empirical research camps (quantitative and qualitative) and the more recent embracement of mixed-methods research has narrowly focused many fields' attention, including that of composition studies, away from other sorts of useful methods, such as theoretical research. To address this, this sequential two-part study compares and contrasts the (a) purpose, (b) instruments, (c) data, and (d) structure of quantitative and qualitative research. Drawing on this four-part structure, this study advances composition studies research methods literature by posing and testing a definition of theoretical research through an examination of full-length core composition studies texts (N = 12). The article concludes by explaining the study's relevance to the field and offering directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second (L2) and heritage (HL) language learners face a variety of similar challenges when they approach the writing of Spanish compositions. Practitioners have often suggested peer editing as a prefinal step to help identify student writing errors that can be corrected before submission of a final product. However, some studies reveal that student writers do not always trust feedback from their classmates and hesitate to follow through with peer recommendations to the same extent they will from their instructors. This paper suggests an enhancement to the traditional peer editing process that combines a semester-long training program in peer and self-evaluation along with a research-based instrument for a more comprehensive evaluation of Spanish compositions. The instrument is versatile enough to serve students who place at different levels of proficiency along both L2 and HL learner continuums. The paper argues that by becoming a better peer evaluator, one in turn becomes a better self-evaluator. This new process returns control to students, creates more self-reliant writers, and empowers them to significantly improve their essays prior to submission. The paper concludes with the suggestion that if students adopt this process and continue its use it for future compositions, they can eventually become sufficiently trained to the point at which application of evaluation criteria becomes part of their normal mental routine before submitting any written work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the achievements and challenges faced by the first-generation college students, which differentiate them from continuing-generation peers. It discusses the lack of social networks, academic challenges like under-funded schools and few college preparation courses, conversation in composition on students' marginalization.

In a world of declining institutional budgets, decreasing student enrollments in departments that until now may have had the luxury of separate composition classrooms for heritage and non-heritage students, not to mention individual student schedule limitations, the steady increase in enrollment of L1 or heritage students in composition classrooms which were before primarily geared toward L2 learners has created a new reality and the urgency to rethink the organization, sequence, and emphasis placed on topics and structures in the classroom. The purpose of this case study was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of L1 and L2 student composition error data collected from a sample of fifteen students enrolled in a Spanish Composition (SPAN 302) class at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). Specific objectives for this project were to determine from the data collected: 1) the frequencies with which L1 and L2 student participants committed word- and sentence-level errors in their compositions; 2) how error frequencies compare between L1 and L2 students over a semester's time, and in particular, with the writing of a series of five different compositions, each targeting a more advanced level of writing proficiency; and 3) how knowledge of both similarities and differences between these two groups might be applied to enhance the author's current pedagogical model that could work for future students from both groups in a single classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that research in language and literacy studies proffers multilingual and translingual literacy studies as central to contemporary English studies, English studies can benefit from increased attention to hip-hop language practices. While some linguists have argued for closer analysis of hip-hop nation language (HHNL) because of its relevance to youth identities and promise for critical language pedagogies, I argue that the concept of flow within HHNL studies has been largely overlooked for its value to the rhetorical development of students in English studies. While some linguists have employed the concept of flow to discuss the global movement of Black English across the globe and its implications for English as alingua franca, flow also highlights the manner and means that artists use to move between ideas, concepts and dispositions in their compositions and therefore becomes valuable to the way English teachers may teach, study and discuss with students the possibilities of language. Because, surprisingly, academic writing is still too often viewed as a unified discourse that privileges edited American English above rhetorical fluency, flow provides an interesting way of repositioning writing and linguistic pluralism for students by focusing discussions of language and composing on features such as rhythm, vernacular eloquence, and layering and rupture in ways that press for newer considerations of language and literature within English studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes the author's evolution as a writing instructor toward a career as a librarian teaching information literacy and finally as a scholar and researcher studying information literacy as an academic subject. Changes in writing pedagogy are explored as they relate to changes in the author's instructional practices and how they underlie an understanding of information literacy as a form of literacy practice closely related to writing. Questions about the future of information literacy under current management philosophy are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Currently, higher education is confronting the "myth of the digital native," a term we coined in a previously published article to describe instructors' overestimation of student digital literacy. These expectations, coupled with job market considerations, affect graduate instructors and undergraduate students. Writing program administrators are uniquely placed to intervene productively in this arena in order to create marketable courses, digital portfolios, and to maximize the research experience for both parties. It is argued that proper guidance of such instructors is accomplished by triangulation. The administrative, experiential, pedagogical, and representative significance of social media are integrated via face-to-face meetings and online resources. There are strong pedagogical and practical justifications for incorporating social media into the curriculum of composition courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lynda Barry's bookWhat It Isoffers an alternative idea of composition pedagogy, utilizing an approach that communication scholars might call “invitational rhetoric.” Barry resources the trappings traditionally associated with education and invites the reader to render experiences through his or her own writing practice. This article explores invitational rhetoric as represented in various fields, particularly composition and rhetoric, and examines how Barry'sWhat It Isserves as a model of invitational rhetoric. The article also considers how the book offers a way of teaching invitational rhetoric as a less adversarial form of argument. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ways that creative writing instructors may willingly (or unintentionally) suppress contradiction and indeterminacy in workshop feedback conversations. By suggesting that contradiction and indeterminacy may be fruitful and dynamic sites to investigate craft practice, aesthetics, and authorship, the essay argues for a reassessment of the way teachers facilitate workshop. In addition to drawing on experience in the classroom, the author suggests that workshop become a site where rhetorical and artistic invention are intermeshed in the sophistic pedagogical tradition of antilogikê and dissoi logoi (rhetorical strategies emphasising contradiction and doubt, rather than certainty). The concept of antilogikê is connected to workshop pedagogy through an analysis of William Covino's Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. In the book, Covino suggests that generative magic (rather than arresting magic) provides a lens to analyse language and institutional structures. Using the sophistic concept of antilogikê from Andrea Greenbaum's Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibilities and Covino's analysis of magic, the essay argues that teachers can better encourage the development of apprentice writers by facilitating conversations in the sophistic, rather than the Socratic tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fan studies emphasis on participatory culture, much of the current work on vids (and in fan studies broadly) treats fans more as readers than as producers. To help us examine the relationships between fannish reading practices and fannish creative processes, we turn to composition studies and Marilyn Cooper's concept of an ecology of writing. We argue for an ecological model of vidding, an approach that enables us to explore the collaborative nature of vidding without erasing individual authorship; to investigate the relationships not only between vids and media texts but also between vidders and their audiences; and to treat fan conversations both as responses to mass media and as sites for the generation and circulation of interpretive conventions that guide both the creation and reception of vids.

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition studies have focused primarily on the reuse of past learning and thus have not adequately accounted for the adaptation of learned writing knowledge in unfamiliar situations. In an effort to expand disciplinary discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition studies, this study theorizes a construct forged from collective insights on transfer of learning in the fields of educational psychology, education, and human resource development—namely, adaptive transfer. We define adaptive transfer as the conscious or intuitive process of applying or reshaping learned writing knowledge in new and potentially unfamiliar writing situations. Because adaptive transfer acknowledges both the reuse and the reshaping of prior writing knowledge to fit new contexts, this framework could have important implications for L2 and L1 writing pedagogies and research in the areas of contrastive rhetoric, English for academic purposes, and writing across the curriculum. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

To succeed as workers in the 21st century—a world of increasing knowledge and decreasing certainty—today's composition students (tomorrow's creative problem-solvers, risk-taking team-players, and flexible life-long learners) must develop the self-confidence (so elusive) and the self-understanding (so essential) that flourish when writing teachers reach the hearts and minds—the lives—of student writers. But because composition studies are messy much in the way that life is messy, a literature review fails to yield a unified teaching model, a coherent pedagogical theory, a structured methodology, a unique research paradigm that might support an argument for adopting the studied active learning techniques that have been used, successfully, in almost a decade of composition classes taught at a typical Midwestern American university, to transform lives. In a paper (more narration than argumentation, more description than prescription) that actively models the use of story and metaphor in learning, the author describes the intimate writing environments (integrating active learning, storytelling, and metaphor—making) in which both teacher and student (who matter equally in an environment where, finally, everything matters-all of the untidy thick description of living!) can learn, with confidence and understanding, to assert their humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the population of students who attend college campuses become more culturally diverse, the demands that literacy place upon these students becomes more intense. As compositionists struggle to allow access to populations of students who have traditionally been marginalized by the academy because of their linguistic abilities, the notion that a formal style of writing which strictly adheres to a monolithic set of rules and conventions, traditionally known as 'academic discourse,' has become problematic. The debate that surrounds this issue has focused considerable attention on the purposes of freshman composition. The curriculum that has guided freshman composition has now become commodified to the point that the sole purpose of freshman composition is to enable students to succeed in the 'content' courses in other disciplines in order to find success in the workforce. This paper examines styles of writing which have been referred to as 'mixed,' 'hybrid,' or 'alternative' because they encourage flexibility in how writing instruction is taught in freshman composition. I argue that literacy experiences in the academy must provide conditions for students and teachers to mediate and negotiate difference in the writing attempts of freshman composition students. By acknowledging difference and understanding the need for negotiation in acquiring writing abilities that will address not only the value of effective writing in the marketplace, but also in fulfilling civic responsibilities in pursuit of democracy, I argue that courses in freshman composition adopt a border pedagogy that will appreciate diversity and allow for conditions that will encourage students to develop voices that will be critical, oppositional, interrogative and analytical as they discover their own membership in an academic community that encourages them to be producers of knowledge rather than receivers of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology literacy, an area still developing (Leu, D. J., Jr., in press) is a critical component for the success of our on line writing project. Although our project, the Digital Divide Project, focuses on written literacy, the project has had longevity due in part to the understanding and application of technology literacy by high school students, teachers, faculty, and graduate students. Without students' understanding of basic technology literacy skills, the application to increase literacy cannot occur. Simply, students who do not know how to use the technology will not be able to achieve increased literacy skills. In effect, new literacies have emerged from the technology use of our project related to basic computer skills, networking, on-line communication, and knowledge of working in that environment. Once students acquire these technology literacy skills, they are able to conference electronically. Research has shown the importance of writing conferences in the composing process (Faigley & Witte, 1981). Through our two years of examining the correspondences between revisor and writer, we have seen the positive effects of these writing conferences. Although research indicates that students tend to make surface changes more often than meaning changes, our research has shown that students have revised in meaningful ways. In this project, students have learned how to improve their writing through conferencing, in addition to obtaining the technology literacy skills necessary to accomplish this task on computers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces a distinction between computer-mediated writing environments that are"tools" for correcting student prose and those that are "media" for communication. This distinction has its roots in the influence of behavioral science on teaching machines and computer-aided writing instruction during the 1960s and 1970s. By looking at the development of the time-shared, interactive, computer-controlled, information television (TICCIT) and early human–computer interaction (HCI) research, this essay demonstrates that hardware and software systems had the potential to work as both tools and media. The influence of this double logic is not only historical but also has implications for post-secondary writing instruction in the age of Microsoft Word, ETS's "e-rater," and the "reading/assessment" software tools being developed by Knowledge Analysis Technologies (KAT). This essay challenges composition researchers and computational linguists to develop pedagogies and software systems that acknowledge writing environments as situated within the logic of both tools for correction and "media" for communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the term post-process can be useful as a heuristic for expanding the scope of the field of second language writing, the uncritical adoption of this and other keywords can have serious consequences because they often oversimplify the historical complexity of the intellectual developments they describe. In order to provide a critical understanding of the term post-process in its own historical context, this article examines the history of process and post-process in composition studies, focusing on the ways in which terms such as current-traditional rhetoric, process, and post-process have contributed to the discursive construction of reality. Based on this analysis, I argue that the use of the term post-process in the context of L2 writing needs to be guided by a critical awareness of the discursive construction process. I further argue that the notion of post-process needs to be understood not as the rejection of process but as the recognition of the multiplicity of L2 writing theories and pedagogies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The term discourse analysis has been used interchangeably in two separate contexts — spoken discourse (i.e., multiple-source dialogic) and written discourse (i.e., single-source monologic). Such a distinction, however, oversimplifies the situation; while there are obvious overlaps between the two, to some extent each has evolved in its own direction. Written discourse analysis, the subject of our discussion, is obviously closely connected with work in literacy, but it implicates a great heterogeneity of topics and approaches, including at least some from psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Discourse analysis, in the sense in which we are using it, emerged in the early 1970s. A modern history of written discourse analysis is perhaps best covered within a 40–50-year time span. In the course of that time, a number of new and emerging disciplines and research fields have contributed to systematic analyses of the linguistic features and patterns occurring in written texts. At the same time, other continuing disciplines have provided contributions that have been important and are ongoing. It should be fairly evident that any attempt to cover such a broad spectrum of views and disciplines would not be appropriate in a single article. We therefore intend to limit the scope of this paper to analyses of written discourse that explore the actual structuring of the text via some consistent framework. Our goal is to highlight and describe historically the various efforts to find the structures and linguistic patterns in texts that contribute to how they are understood, interpreted, and used. It seems to us that, in order to comprehend what has happened in the context of L2 writing research, it is necessary to understand the extensive work that has been done in discourse analysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

By shifting hybrid pedagogies to constructionism, multimodal and makerspace composition teachers can transform both student- and faculty-inquiry within the classroom. A constructionist stance guides students through a path of knowledge informed by their own socio-culturally situated practices and experiences. In a multimodal and makerspace undergraduate course, this results in students applying maker competencies—defined through a university taskforce of faculty across disciplines—to form maker literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fan studies emphasis on participatory culture, much of the current work on vids (and in fan studies broadly) treats fans more as readers than as producers. To help us examine the relationships between fannish reading practices and fannish creative processes, we turn to composition studies and Marilyn Cooper's concept of an ecology of writing. We argue for an ecological model of vidding, an approach that enables us to explore the collaborative nature of vidding without erasing individual authorship; to investigate the relationships not only between vids and media texts but also between vidders and their audiences; and to treat fan conversations both as responses to mass media and as sites for the generation and circulation of interpretive conventions that guide both the creation and reception of vids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]