Digital Commons Network^™

Talk Before Writing: Oral Rehearsal As A Pre-Writing Strategy For High School Students With Difficulties In Retrieval, Valerie Sebern Aubry

Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the effects of oral rehearsal used as a pre-writing strategy by twenty-eight high school students (21 males, 7 females) with difficulties in retrieval. Study participants read texts, wrote summary-response essays, and revised their compositions in two conditions: with rehearsal and without rehearsal. A repeated measures (2 x 2) x (2) design with Passage and Order of Treatment as the between-subject variables, and Condition as the within-subject variable was used to assess differences in compositions.

Eight quantitative measures, with four considered primary, were used to evaluate differences in the quantity, complexity, content, and quality of compositions. Positive changes …

Bodily Discourses: When Students Write About Sexual Abuse, Physical Abuse, And Eating Disorders In The Composition Classroom, Michelle Marie Payne

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes student texts about bodily violence written for Freshman English and advanced writing courses at the University of New Hampshire between 1994 and 1996. All the volunteers were white women, most aged 18-21. The project addresses four central questions: Why are students writing about these experiences? How are they writing about them? What assumptions inform teachers' responses to such essays? What larger cultural contexts shape how such experiences are represented and understood by students and teachers?

The primary materials are twenty-five student essays; interviews with students, teachers, and campus personnel; and observations of classrooms and staff meetings. Information …

This Is Gonna Hurt Like Hell: A Pentecostal Student Enters The Academy, Stephen R. Barrett

Doctoral Dissertations

The little that has been written about expressions of religious experience in the field of Composition Studies focuses on the many ways religious belief places its adherents at a disadvantage in writing classrooms. We discuss in our journals and staffrooms only those religious conservatives who are most expressive of their beliefs. Many others sit in silence during discussions that may reveal anything of their beliefs, fearing to offend teachers and peers or to expose themselves to offenses from others. Unfortunately, these silent students contribute little or nothing to our understanding of the abilities of faith-centered students. Many are writing with …

Unruly Acts: An Inquiry Into The Art Of Letter Writing, Anne Righton Malone

Doctoral Dissertations

Although professors of ancient art of letter writing were among the most revered in medieval universities, instruction in this "gentle art" as Virginia Woolf once described it, is currently relegated to etiquette manuals and elementary school textbooks. And for most composition instructors and rhetoricians, that is where it should stay. Most twentieth century rhetoricians portray the medieval genre of letter writing as the product of a dark period in the history of rhetoric, passing it by in a quick move from the sermons of Saint Augustine to the classically grounded rhetoric of Peter Ramus.

During the nineteenth century, training in …

Composition As A Mode Of Being: Politics, Ethics, And History In The Writing Classrooms Of Postmodernity, Lance Michael Svehla

Doctoral Dissertations

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once commented that while he did not "deny the importance, on the level of theory, of the (postmodern) project," such a project did not help him when he was "trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue" (Loose Canons 37-38). The postmodern project lacked what Gates calls "practical performative force." The purpose of this dissertation is to establish postmodernity's practical performative force for the composition classroom. It addresses four central questions: What is postmodernity? What is its relationship to composition? Why should composition teachers and students care about this relationship? How …