In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray's "A Writer Teaches Writing," fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray's legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting…

While comics have received widespread acceptance as a literary genre, instructors and scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have been slower to adopt comics, largely because of a lingering difficulty understanding how the characteristics of the form relate to our work in the classroom. Using as guides the "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year…

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions--we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively,…

Argues that, during writing instruction, students must be given the opportunity to go public with their composing processes. Discusses the theoretical structure of Robert Zoellner's pedagogy, and recommends its use for teaching the writing process. (PRA)

Asserts that there is a need for writing teachers to reevaluate the metaphors they use to think about composition. Retraces the steps taken by Robert Zoellner in 1969 to reconsider the instrumental metaphors used by composition theories in the 1990s. Offers a criticism of the writing process model proposed by Linda Flower and John Hayes. (PRA)

This book explores the implications and consequences, both theoretically and practically, of four propositions: (1) discourse is produced in context; (2) discourse is primarily a reaction to a precedent action; (3) social interactions in which language is used to construct reality are performed in a variety of roles; and (4) the features of…

Traces the influence of late-capitalist political ideology on the rhetoric which formed the process/product distinction; notes their sharing of an ideology of "possessive individualism." Reveals "social individualism" as an emerging ideology which may adjudicate the disparity between the ideals of process pedagogy and its…

Emphasizes that composition teachers can create exercises fitted to the current psychological or process perspective on learning (freewriting, drafting, revision) by adding to classical or product perspective (copying, summarizing, paraphrasing, translating, amplifying) the elements of rhetorical purpose and sense of context and community. (RS)

This book is intended to serve as a comprehensive guide for those English teachers and tutors, peer or professional, who face the challenge of one-on-one writing instruction. Written in a conversational style, the guide addresses the questions of "what" and "how" to tutor, and includes numerous illustrative excerpts from the…

Suggests focusing historical narratives explaining composition's emergence and search for an identity by concentrating on the changing face of rhetoric within institutional settings. Investigates the cultural history of the term "process." Explores what the unacknowledged cultural values "process" bring to reading and writing and the…

Writing teachers and theorists face political and pedagogical dangers because of their increasing tendency to align themselves against each other on the side of either rhetoric or composition. As the differences between the two schools widens, writing teachers stand to lose political ground in English departments and their students stand to lose…