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Full-Text Articles in Rhetoric and Composition
Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn From Engagement, Shirley K. Rose, Irwin Weiser
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 …
Mule Deer: A Handbook For Utah Hunters And Landowners, Dennis D. Austin
Mule Deer: A Handbook For Utah Hunters And Landowners, Dennis D. Austin
All USU Press Publications
Mule deer are a familiar sight to residents of Utah and the Intermountain West. Sportsmen hunt them, others seek a glimpse of them while hiking or camping, drivers dodge them, and homeowners sometimes delight, sometimes fret as deer visit backyards and gardens. Deer, many of which live in the towns, cities, and farms that sprawl over their historical habitat, sometimes seem ubiquitous. Useful information about them, either scientific or practical, is less widespread. In this handbook, Dennis Austin fills that need for information, offering a one-stop reference packed with up-to-date knowledge and practical advice on mule deer. Data on deer …
Facing The Center: Toward An Identity Poltiics Of One-To-One Mentoring, Harry C. Denny
Facing The Center: Toward An Identity Poltiics Of One-To-One Mentoring, Harry C. Denny
All USU Press Publications
In the diversity of their clients as well as their professional and student staff, writing centers present a complicated set of relationships that inevitably affect the instruction they offer. In Facing the Center, Harry Denny unpacks the identity matrices that enrich teachable moments, and he explores the pedagogical dynamics and implications of identity within the writing center. The face of the writing center, be it mainstream or marginal, majority or miority, orthodox or subversive, always has implications for teaching and learning. Facing the Center will extend current research in writing center theory to bring it in touch with theories now …
Dangerous Writing: Understanding And Political Economy Of Composition, Tony Scott
Dangerous Writing: Understanding And Political Economy Of Composition, Tony Scott
All USU Press Publications
Building on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, Dangerous Writing outlines a political economic theory of composition. In addition to work by others, Tony Scott also draws from two of his own studies--a classroom ethnography of an upper division writing class that was focused on labor and institutionality, and a qualitative study of the function of textbooks within a writing program. The book connects pedagogical practices in writing classes to their broader political economic contexts, and argues that the power of students' writing is prevented from reaching its potential by pressures within the academy …
Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping In Action, Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler
Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping In Action, Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler
All USU Press Publications
Educators appropriately strive to create "assessment cultures" (Huot 2002) in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators establish the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on writing assessment practice is just beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM …
Out Of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study In Composition And Rhetoric, Paul Butler
Out Of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study In Composition And Rhetoric, Paul Butler
All USU Press Publications
Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among compositionists, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler's goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy. In so doing, he offers an important revisionist history of the field by reading it specifically through the canon of style. In addition, Butler argues that it is through style that scholars in …
Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, Luming Mao, Morris Young
Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, Luming Mao, Morris Young
All USU Press Publications
Despite tremendous growth in attention to and scholarship about Asian Americans and their cultural work, little research has emerged that focuses directly on Asian American rhetoric. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric addresses this need by examining the systematic, effective use of symbolic resources by Asians and Asian Americans in social, cultural, and political contexts. Such rhetoric challenges, disrupts, and transforms the dominant European American rhetoric and it commands a sense of unity or collective identity. However, such rhetoric also embodies internal differences and even contradictions, as each specific communicative situation is informed and inflected by particularizing contexts, by different relations …
Placing The Academy: Essays On Landscape, Work, And Identity, Jennifer Sinor, Rona Kaufman
Placing The Academy: Essays On Landscape, Work, And Identity, Jennifer Sinor, Rona Kaufman
All USU Press Publications
Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.
Machine Scoring Of Student Essays: Truth And Consequences, Patricia Freitag Ericsson, Richard H. Haswell
Machine Scoring Of Student Essays: Truth And Consequences, Patricia Freitag Ericsson, Richard H. Haswell
All USU Press Publications
The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.
Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making Of Chinese American Rhetoric, Luming Mao
Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making Of Chinese American Rhetoric, Luming Mao
All USU Press Publications
LuMing Mao offers an important discussion of the rhetoric of Chinese American speakers, which has wide implications for the teaching of writing in English and for our understanding of cross-cultural influences in discourse. Recent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity—an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of "togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be …
Keywords In Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop, David Starkey
Keywords In Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop, David Starkey
All USU Press Publications
Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience. Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. This approach makes the book …
Identity Papers: Literacy And Power In Higher Education, Bronwyn T. Williams
Identity Papers: Literacy And Power In Higher Education, Bronwyn T. Williams
All USU Press Publications
How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may …
The Outcomes Book: Debate And Consensus After The Wpa Outcomes Statement, Susanmarie Harrington, Keith Rhodes, Ruth Fischer, Rita Malenczyk
The Outcomes Book: Debate And Consensus After The Wpa Outcomes Statement, Susanmarie Harrington, Keith Rhodes, Ruth Fischer, Rita Malenczyk
All USU Press Publications
The WPA Outcomes Statement represents a working consensus among composition scholars about what college students should learn and do in a composition program. But as a single-page document, the statement cannot convey the kind of reflective process that a writing program must undertake to address the learning outcomes described. The Outcomes Book relates the fuller process by exploring the matrix of concerns that surrounded the developing statement itself, and by presenting the experience of many who have since employed it in their own settings. For departments, programs, and individuals, this collection levers the Outcomes Statement in all its simplicity and …
Discord And Direction: The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator, Sharon James Mcgee, Carolyn Handa
Discord And Direction: The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator, Sharon James Mcgee, Carolyn Handa
All USU Press Publications
Postmodernism's central moves include questioning hierarchy, valuing paratactic associations, and rejecting grand narratives, and the work of a Writing Program Administrator, most days, includes those moves as well. The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise—and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views …
Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities For Writing Pedagogy, T. R. Johnson, Thomas Pace
Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities For Writing Pedagogy, T. R. Johnson, Thomas Pace
All USU Press Publications
For about two decades, say Johnson and Pace, the discussion of how to address prose style in teaching college writing has been stuck, with style standing in as a proxy for other stakes in the theory wars. The traditional argument is evidently still quite persuasive to some—that teaching style is mostly a matter of teaching generic conventions through repetition and practice. Such a position usually presumes the traditional view of composition as essentially a service course, one without content of its own. On the other side, the shortcomings of this argument have been much discussed—that it neglects invention, revision, context, …
Genre Across The Curriculum, Anne Herrington, Charles Moran
Genre Across The Curriculum, Anne Herrington, Charles Moran
All USU Press Publications
American first-year college writing courses operate without a powerful context: they are designed to teach academic writing, but what kind of academic writing? Which of the many particular discourses, and, within those discourses, which recurring social situations? Lacking a clear context to refer to, textbook authors inevitably privilege form. Genre across the Curriculum will function as a "good" textbook, one not for the student, but for the teacher, and one with an eye on the context of writing. Here you will find models of practice, descriptions written by teachers who have integrated the teaching of genre into their pedagogy in …
First Time Up: An Insider's Guide For New Composition Teachers, Brock Dethier
First Time Up: An Insider's Guide For New Composition Teachers, Brock Dethier
All USU Press Publications
First time up?—an insider's friendly question from 1960s counter-culture—perfectly captures the spirit of this book. A short, supportive, practical guide for the first-time college composition instructor, the book is upbeat, wise but friendly, casual but knowledgeable (like the voice that may have introduced you to certain other firsts). With an experiential focus rather than a theoretical one, First Time Up will be a strong addition to the newcomer's professional library, and a great candidate for the TA practicum reading list. Dethier, author of The Composition Instructor's Survival Guide and From Dylan to Donne, directly addresses the common headaches, nightmares, and …
On Location: Theory And Practice In Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, Candace Spigelman, Laurie Grobman
On Location: Theory And Practice In Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, Candace Spigelman, Laurie Grobman
All USU Press Publications
Classroom-based writing tutoring is a distinct form of writing support, a hybrid instructional method that engages multiple voices and texts within the college classroom. Tutors work on location in the thick of writing instruction and writing activity. On Location is the first volume to discuss this emerging practice in a methodical way. The essays in this collection integrate theory and practice to highlight the alliances and connections on-location tutoring offers while suggesting strategies for resolving its conflicts. Contributors examine classroom-based tutoring programs located in composition courses as well as in writing intensive courses across the disciplines. While earlier scholarship has …
Innovative Approaches To Teaching Technical Communication, Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, Richard Selfe
Innovative Approaches To Teaching Technical Communication, Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, Richard Selfe
All USU Press Publications
Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communica- tion offers a variety of activities, projects, and approaches to energize pedagogy in technical communication and to provide a constructive critique of current practice. A practical collection, the approaches recommended here are readily adaptable to a range of technological and institutional contexts, as well as being theoretically grounded and pedagogically sound. Throughout the collection, its editors and contributors demonstrate the importance of critically engaging students through creative and innovative pedagogies. Programs in technical writing, technical communication, and/or professional communication have recently grown in enrollment as the demand among employers for formally prepared technical writers …
Westwater Lost And Found, Mike Milligan
Westwater Lost And Found, Mike Milligan
All USU Press Publications
Upstream from Moab on the Colorado River, near the Colorado state line, there is a relatively short, deep canyon that has become one of the most popular river-running destinations in America. The canyon is known as Westwater. Its popularity is largely due to the thrill provided by possibly the most, certainly one of the most, dangerous and challenging stretches of white water on the Colorado-Skull Rapid. Near the head of the canyon are the remnants of the tiny town of Westwater, which has had an interesting and eventful history of its own, partly because of the river and canyon, partly …
Process This: Undergraduate Writing In Composition Studies, Nancy C. Dejoy
Process This: Undergraduate Writing In Composition Studies, Nancy C. Dejoy
All USU Press Publications
In Process This, Nancy DeJoy argues that even recent revisions to composition studies, cultural studies, service learning, and social process movements--continue to repress the subjects and methodologies that should be central, especially at the level of classroom practice. Designed to move student discourses beyond the classroom, these approaches nonetheless continue to position composition students (and teachers) as mere consumers of the discipline. This means that the subjects, methodologies, and theory/practice relationships that define the field are often absent in composition classrooms. Arguing that the world inside and outside of the academy cannot be any different if the profession stays the …
Coming To Terms: A Theory Of Writing Assessment, Patricia Lynne
Coming To Terms: A Theory Of Writing Assessment, Patricia Lynne
All USU Press Publications
In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory? By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition. She laments, as do many in composition, that the objectively oriented …
The Private, The Public, And The Published: Reconciling Private Lives And Public Rhetoric, Barbara Couture, Thomas Kent
The Private, The Public, And The Published: Reconciling Private Lives And Public Rhetoric, Barbara Couture, Thomas Kent
All USU Press Publications
At the 2003 "Rock the Vote" debate, one of the questions posed by a student to the eight Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination was "have you ever used marijuana?" Amazingly, all but one of the candidates voluntarily answered the question. Add to this example the multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, scanning and "wanding" at the airport) or private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, confessional talk shows, voyeuristic "reality" TV). That matters so private could be treated as legitimate-in some cases even vital-for …
Faithful Transgressions, Laura L. Bush
Faithful Transgressions, Laura L. Bush
All USU Press Publications
The central issue Bush finds in these works is how their authors have dealt with the authority of Mormon Church leaders. As she puts it in her preface, "I use the phrase 'faithful transgression' to describe moments in the texts when each writer, explicitly or implicitly, commits herself in writing to trust her own ideas and authority over official religious authority while also conceiving of and depicting herself to be a 'faithful' member of the Church." Bush recognizes her book as her own act of faithful transgression. Writing it involved wrestling, she states, "with my own deeply ingrained religious beliefs …
What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics In Teaching And Assessing Writing, Bob Broad
What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics In Teaching And Assessing Writing, Bob Broad
All USU Press Publications
The result of a long-term study of one university's introductory composition program, Broad's approach to mapping the values that inform writing evaluation is empirically grounded, painstakingly analyzed, yet flexible, human, and pedagogically wise. Not simple, but surely practical, his method yields a more satisfactory process of exploration and a more useful representation of the values by which compositionists actually evaluate their students. With this important study, Broad moves the field far beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing. What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then …
Genre And The Invention Of The Writer: Reconsidering The Place Of Invention In Composition, Anis S. Bawarshi
Genre And The Invention Of The Writer: Reconsidering The Place Of Invention In Composition, Anis S. Bawarshi
All USU Press Publications
In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the …
Landscape Of Desire: Identity And Nature In Utah's Canyon Country, Greg Gordon
Landscape Of Desire: Identity And Nature In Utah's Canyon Country, Greg Gordon
All USU Press Publications
Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.
The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, Michael A. Pemberton, Joyce Kinkead
The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, Michael A. Pemberton, Joyce Kinkead
All USU Press Publications
In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops …
A Field Of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs And The Future Of Composition Studies, Peggy O'Neill, Angela Crow, Larry W. Burton
A Field Of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs And The Future Of Composition Studies, Peggy O'Neill, Angela Crow, Larry W. Burton
All USU Press Publications
One of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.
(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment For Teaching And Learning, Brian Huot
(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment For Teaching And Learning, Brian Huot
All USU Press Publications
Brian Huot's aim for this book is both ambitious and provocative. He wants to reorient composition studies' view of writing assessment. To accomplish this, he not only has to inspire the field to perceive assessment—generally not the most appreciated area of study—as deeply significant to theory and pedagogy, he also has to counter some common misconceptions about the history of assessment in writing. In(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment, Huot advocates a new understanding, a more optimistic and productive one than we have seen in composition for a very long time. Assessment, as Huot points out, defines what is valued by a teacher …