English Language and Literature Commons^™

Toward A Multilingual Composition Scholarship : From English Only To A Translingual Norm., Bruce Horner, Samantha Necamp, Christiane Donahue

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Against the limitations English monolingualism imposes on composition scholarship, as evident in journal submission requirements, frequency of references to non-English medium writing, bibliographical resources, and our own past work, we argue for adopting a translingual approach to languages, disciplines, localities, and research traditions in our scholarship, and propose ways individuals, journals, conferences, and graduate programs might advance composition scholarship toward a translingual norm.

Living Well: The Value Of Teaching Place, Catherine M. English

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation is a teaching memoir that examines the implementation of a place conscious pedagogy as a means to teach sustainable living practices into a secondary English classroom in a rural Nebraska school. It is framed upon the premise of instilling five senses of place consciousness into students as defined by Haas and Nachtigal (1998) including living well in community or a sense of belonging; living well spiritually or a sense of connection; living well economically or a sense of worth; living well politically or a sense of civic involvement; and living well ecologically or a sense of place. I …

Dancing With Don: Or Waltzing With "Expressivism", Bronwyn Williams

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Student Writers As Problem Solvers In Literature Classrooms, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema, Dawn Reed, Katie Greene

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article reports on the role of student writers in the U.S. to enhance the study of literature in the classroom. High school teacher Dawn Reed shares how students' professional writing served as a starting point for deeper study and advocacy of American literature. It provides an overview of Katie Greene's assessment system that creates flexibility while providing a model of evaluation which can be adapted for other professional writing experiences.

Relocating Basic Writing., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

I frame the continuing value of basic writing as part of a long tradition in composition studies challenging dominant beliefs about literacy and language abilities, and I link basic writing to emerging--e.g."translingual"--approaches to language. I identify basic writing as vital to the field of composition in its rejection of simplistic notions of English, language, and literacy; its insistence on searching out the different in what might appear to be the same and the familiar; and its commitment to work with students consigned by dominant ideologies to the social periphery as in fact central, leading edge. These positions enable basic writing …

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Good Writing: The Problem Of Ethics, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article focuses on good writing in the English classroom. It mentions that the way to know if one has good writing is to see how the audience reacts to it. Writing professionals argue that good writers anticipate readers' reactions as they shape style, page design, and content and every aspect of their writing. It notes that one of the main goals in professional writing is to teach students to use of rhetoric tools to influence their audiences and to emphasize ethical decision-making.

Discourse And Conflict: The President Barack H. Obama Birth Certificate Controversy And The New Media, Timothy Lee Adams

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

A creative exploration of the consequences of public speech in the era of freely accessible, social media, as the author, a former elections official, records and explores the consequences of public dissent in the case of President Barack Obama’s eligibility controversy. This non-fiction narrative culminates with the author’s analysis and observations on both his personal experiences and the state of public speech and political power in contemporary America.

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …

"Struggling" Adolescent Writers Describe Their Writing Experience: A Descriptive Case Study, F. Jean Mcpherron

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Four adolescents identified as struggling writers in an English language arts classroom were interviewed about their perceptions of a writing task--how they judged their capability to succeed, how they ranked their passion, persistence, and confidence about writing, and how they responded to classroom activity. Student perceptions of self-efficacy and the related self-beliefs of motivation and interest as well as self-regulation were stated and implied as students described a planning worksheet, instructional scaffolding, peer interactions, and ownership of their writing. Wersch's view of mediated action and Engestrom's model of activity systems were the lens through which the students' descriptions were analyzed. …

Mapw Capstone Project, Carol A. Levine

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects

Fiction and non-fiction work, short stories and one novel chapter.  Order of Content:

Reflective Essay
"No More Jesus"
"Puzzle Pieces"
"Little Shoes"
"Squeaky"
Nell
"Baby Blue"
"Stunning"
"Culinary Art"
"The Garden"
"A Snow White Van"
"My Hero"
"Small Deer"

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Beyond Language: The Grammar Of Document Design, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article offers guidelines in teaching professional writing in an English classroom. It highlights the elements in deciding for a good document design which include layout, fonts and color. It outlines the CRAP acronym (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) formulated by Saul Greenberg which summarizes the essential techniques in grammar design.

Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.

Liminal Practice In A Maturing Writing Department, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph]

In Spring 2011 I was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant to "consult, collaborate, and inform" on the future of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, located in the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. The Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department (hereafter, RWC) was a pioneer in writing instruction in Canada, where it became the first unit to establish itself independently as a department with a full-‐time faculty committed to both teaching and scholarship in writing and rhetoric. It remains a rare phenomenon on the Canadian higher education scene, where studies …

Group Membership And Its Adverse Psychological Effects In The Ox-Bow Incident, Casey Plach, '15

Outstanding Gateway Papers

This paper examines and analyzes the causes and motivations of groups in the book The Ox-Bow Incident.

The Grimm Brothers As Editors, Blair Wright '15

Outstanding Gateway Papers

In almost all circumstances, copying the work of others has a strongly negative connotation. In fact, from a very early age, children begin to understand the consequences of mimicking others’ original ideas. It is not uncommon for a little girl to sneak across the street with a neighbor to pick flowers even though her parents had specifically instructed her to stay in their own yard. Upon confrontation, this little girl will likely defend herself by saying, “Well, Jessica was doing it too!” The little girl’s parents would then say, “Will you always just do what Jessica does? If Jessica jumped …

Studium And Punctum: The Duality Of Photography, Karen Thul '15

Outstanding Gateway Papers

What defines greatness? What element can change something from being mildly interesting to extraordinary? Details, emotion, back-story, and message can all add to the power of a photo, but these are all reasonable answers to define something unreasonable. Recognizing something powerful is instinctive, which makes it hard to define. Barthes gives some guidance to this process by separating the vaguely interesting from the piercingly wonderful. Through studium and punctum, images are separated into these categories, allowing the viewer to analyze images with acute precision. What makes this interesting? Why do I care? These questions are slowly answered by looking …

The Elephants Evaluate: Some Notes On The Problem Of Grades In Graduate Creative Writing Programs, Rachel Peckham

English Faculty Research

This article takes up the "special strangeness" of grading practices in the graduate creative writing workshop, based on the author's research, personal experience, and interviews with the faculty of her doctoral creative writing program. Using a structure of notes, the author attempts to make sense of the way grades are understood by both teacher and student at the post-secondary level. First, she considers why the formal evaluation of creative writing continues to be defined by a system of grades, despite the perceived failure of grades to represent the value of such work, and despite educators' historic and ongoing attempts at …

Language Difference In Writing : Toward A Translingual Approach., Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, John Trimbur

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.

Ua68/6/2/1 Potter College Of Arts & Letters English Student Organizations Western Writers, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records of the Western Writers and issues of Voices magazine.

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Professional Writing: What You Already Know, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article offers the authors' insights on professional writing that are taught in the English classroom, in which it is defined as writing within professional context with genres such as formal reports, directives, and proposals. They state that many teachers learn professional writing not only from advice, but also from experience and practice. They also mention that professional writing can be integrated in all fields of English language arts classrooms that can be taught to students.

Seeking New Worlds: The Study Of Writing Beyond Our Classrooms, Bronwyn T. Williams

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

As new ways of creating and interpreting texts complicate ideas of how and why writing happens, the field of rhetoric and composition needs to be more conscious of how our institutional responsibilities and scholarly attention to college writing have limited its vision of writing and literacy. It is time to move beyond consolidating our identity as a field focused on college writing, reach out to other literacy-related fields, and form a broader, more comprehensive, and more flexible identity as part of a larger field of literacy and rhetorical studies.

Talmidae Rhetoricae: Drashing Up Models And Methods For Jewish Rhetorical Studies, Janice W. Fernheimer

Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Annie Prey Jorgensen Papers: Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction And Women's Rhetoric On The Plains, Renee Mcgill

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the college and professional writing of Annie Prey Jorgensen, who attended the University of Nebraska during the 1890s as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Annie’s collection of papers, housed in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, offers composition and rhetoric significant insights about women college students’ rhetorical practices at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, Annie uses personal experience and narrative techniques to deploy a feminist rhetorical strategy that allows her to inscribe gendered experience into academic writing. Annie’s collection offers a cross-section of writing from three sites of inquiry—the papers …

Working Rhetoric And Composition., Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships between these two terms, it is important for scholars to trace how they are “worked”—that is, how they materially function—in a variety of specific circumstances.

Narrative Distance In The Works Of George Gordon, Lord Byron, And Jonathan Swift, Or "A Digression In Praise Of Digressions", Samantha M. Cash, E. Derek Taylor Ph.D.

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis reviews and discusses narrative distance in the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Jonathan Swift or “A Digression in Praise of Digressions.” Byron takes on multiple roles in his poetry. Swift provided Byron a model for how to negotiate the boundaries of fictional self-fashioning and biographical revelation. Bryon’s technique of presenting a version of himself while simultaneously maintaining narrative distance is a distinct characteristics of Swift’s work. The thesis adapts to an important fact in that Byron, although writing in the age of Romanticism, significantly and unflinchingly sought distance between himself and Romantic figures.

Pragmatism, Disciplinarity And Making The Work Of Writing Visible In The 21st Century, Michael W. Kelly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation outlines how Pragmatism, as a philosophy richly conceived, can act as a useful intervention on three levels ranging from the pedagogical issues surrounding teaching writing teacher to labor issues Composition. In contemporary writing center scholarship, conversations about the utility of theory are hotly debated. Throughout much of its disciplinary history, much writing center scholarship has taken a decidedly best practices approach to its research. This emphasis on applicability is challenged by the trend in some pockets of the field that have incorporated a theoretical bent into their work. The effect of this work has been met with skepticism. …

Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn From Engagement, Shirley K. Rose, Irwin Weiser

All USU Press Publications

An important new resource for WPA preparation courses. In Going Public, Rose and Weiser moderate a discussion of the role of the writing program vis-a-vis the engagement movement, the service learning movement, and the current interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetoric and composition. While there have been a number of publications describing service-learning and community leadership programs, most of these focus on curricular elements and address administrative issues primarily from a curricular perspective. The emphasis of Going Public is on the ways that engagement-focused programs change conceptions of WPA identity. Writing programs are typically situated at points …

The Tractarians' Sermons And Other Speeches, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the first chapter of A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It provides an overview of the Tractarians' homiletic theory, and examines the various genres of their oratory: sermons (both "plain" and "university"), lectures, and episcopal charges.

Introduction To A New History Of The Sermon : The Nineteenth Century, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the introduction to A New History of the Sermon:The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It discusses the concept and history of "rhetorical criticism," and seeks to lay a foundation for the rhetorical study of the Anglo-American pulpit.

The Breath We Walk On, Sean Matthew Tribe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

"The Breath We Walk On" is a collection of poems written during my time at UNLV, instructed by the poetic works of George Oppen, DH Lawrence, William Blake, Alice Notley, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and John Donne, as well as, The Greek Anthology, The Bible, and The Gnostic Gospels. The major ideas forming this collection detail issues of self in relation to the world. The poems that were most instructive from these books explore this idea in the best of their works. Other questions addressed are how can human beings live in a way that inflicts minimal harm to the …