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)

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…

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…

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…