This reflective essay investigates why writer's block affects novice and expert writers on a continuum from students in first-year writing seminars to teachers of writing, paying particular attention to the shared experiences of this pair of practitioners. I begin by focusing on my own experiences as a blocked writer making a disciplinary…

Knoblauch and Brannon might suggest I pry loose the grip that ancient rhetorical tradition has on my modern classroom, but I'm not convinced I can so easily abandon the ancient rhetoricians. Learning to embrace the different, more creative, and less frequently acknowledged elements of this tradition may be the way for me to go instead. The ancient…

This article addresses the benefits and challenges involved with assigning small-scale research projects in one research methods class as means of introducing new(er) researchers to the work and rewards of empirical writing research. The following discussion does not claim to offer examples of cutting-edge methodological work. That is not our goal…

Though many teachers have adopted collaborative models for teaching writing and literature, much of classroom discussion, in small or large groups, is driven by the assumption that arguing ideas is a competitive exercise. Generally, essays written in this context are "counter-positional" and "agonistic," supporting points by…

The author created and has been teaching a first-year seminar (FYS) called "Food for Thought: Rhetoric of the Edible" for the past three years. Sustainability and ethics in the production and consumption of food have been tangential topics that have arisen in the course. While her academic background is composition and rhetoric, food has become a…

Recent scholarship shows that teachers across English studies continue to struggle with discussions of race in their classrooms. In this article, I offer the intent/effect tactic as a tool teachers can use to analyze and respond to racially problematic assertions. By asking students to consider not only intent but also effect, we can help them…

If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it…

I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."

This essay has been one of the hardest professionally to write as it documents some very personal and professional soul-searching that involved myself, many of my colleagues, and the students in our department over the span of four years. When I first presented our initial reform attempts at the 2010 CEA in San Antonio, much of this paper was…

Presents the growing emphasis on professionalism in English as a reflection of negative entropy, a temporary victory over the system's disintegration. Suggests that the new work in rhetoric, with its emphasis on service to people and the meaningful study of literature may provide fresh energy to the English profession. (MM)