Collaborative writing is a "messy" process which reveals much about the ways students struggle to write alone as well as with others. Two sections of an undergraduate college writing class were assigned a collaborative essay, to be written in small groups. In many groups, students could not negotiate or communicate with each other. The process…

An experimental study evaluated the writing growth of 97 college freshmen before and after instruction to determine whether direct instruction in F. Christensen's "Generative Rhetoric of a Sentence" (1967) made a significant impact on freshmen writers' use of right-branched free modification. The study used a quantitative,…

The most serious approaches to teaching basic writing in the last 20 years have been framed by the competing metaphors of growth and metaphors of initiation. The growth model pulled attention away from the forms of academic discourse and toward what students could and could not do as writers, and encouraged teachers to respect and work with the…

Composition instructors interested in fostering the development of their students' critical thinking skills can modify the thematic writing approach to that effect. Focusing an introductory composition course around one central theme, rather than on many, can offer students an explicit model of how knowledge, skills, and dispositions interact when…

Freshman composition teachers who are attuned to real-life writing situations can extend the scope of traditional research paper assignments and at the same time meet the writing needs of other disciplines. For example, history students could record data from old records, or fine arts students could describe their artistic observations. To lead…

There are two types of literacy: mechanical literacy and critical literacy. Those who teach mechanical literacy use language to oppress, while those who teach critical literacy use language to liberate. The mechanical view of literacy oppresses because it encourages passivity and acceptance of authority, places a disproportionate emphasis on…

The writing across the curriculum program at La Salle University, Pennsylvania, derives its basic philosophy from Charles Bazerman's "The Informed Writer" which stresses that students learn about academic writing and reading in terms of a community of discourse. Though Bazerman's text is not used in the freshman composition course,…

To determine how English department chairmen perceive the role of the freshman English director, a study surveyed English department chairmen from 250 randomly selected medium/small to large universities nationwide, representing every state (with a 54% response rate). The questionnaire solicited data about the tasks and responsibilities of…

A study was designed to ascertain the effect writing centers and peer tutoring have on the attitudes of student writers. Subjects, 121 students enrolled in either basic writing or English composition courses at Davis and Elkins College, had their attitudes toward writing measured. Over the semester the attitudes, of both those that did (43) and…

Composition specialists will find Plato's dialogues, and especially his conception of writing, useful for studying the nature of writing. Plato's strategy, in "Phaedrus" and other dialogues, was to use first person, to conceal himself by using an "I" that he created. In recent times this strategy, using the first person, has…

In this study comparing peer group conversation with conversation in other settings, five college freshmen were observed and taped in the 12th week of the semester during a group discussion about their own writing. Four types of conversational moves were tallied: structural comments, solicitations, responses, and reactions. Comparison of these…

This report brings together data from three cycles of replication and serves as a summary of the findings of the Learning Disabled College Writers Project at University of Minnesota-General College. From July 1985 through September 1988, teachers and researchers examined the impact of microcomputer word processing on the classroom performance of…

The idea-centered freshman composition program at Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, North Carolina, functions not only to meet the immediate needs of freshmen writers, but also to promote the aims of liberal education. The program has three interrelated goals: (1) to engage freshmen writers in "college thinking," defined as giving…

College freshmen enrolled in English composition classes were polled to determine their attitudes toward two different methods of bibliographic instruction: the lecture-discussion practicum and the workbook. Analysis indicated that most students perceived the lecture-discussion to be the more successful instructional technique for both general and…

Evaluates the efficacy of heuristics in the composition classroom, the importance of theory in teaching invention, the application of heuristics to stages of writing besides prewriting, and various heuristic systems. Describes the development of a theory of invention and pedagogy based on classroom experiment and the writings of other theorists.…