Silko demonstrates that writing "American Indian" and being "American Indian" is a matter of process rather than ethnographic and historical fact. Members of American Indian communities are shaped by the telling of stories and shape others by telling stories. To write "American Indian" is to tell stories of belonging.…

Concentrates on studies done in Germany that examine a reader's response to literature and applies three basic concepts of reception theory to children's literature. (HOD)

Describes the author's method of teaching literary analysis to "not particularly well-read students." Presents students with a set of over-generalizations which they are free to denounce, vilify, or modify as their exposure to literature progresses. Includes a class handout that describes characteristics of various literary movements in this…

Explores China's literary tradition to refute popularly held beliefs regarding Chinese literary genres and to illustrate how teachers of Chinese students can take advantage of such fundamental Chinese beliefs as: (1) the personal is political; (2) the written word carries power; and (3) the product outweighs the process. (92 references) (CB)

Examines mathematical models of style analysis, focusing on the pattern in which literary characteristics occur. Describes an autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA) for predicting sentence length in different works by the same author and comparable works by different authors. This technique is valuable in characterizing stylistic…

Describes a discussion between Cleanth Brooks and Eudora Welty about the state of the story in today's fiction. Characterizes the narrative form as the spine of literature. Points out that, too often, contemporary writers neglect this form of writing and instead emphasize a type of prose poetry. Notes that authors today overemphasize the present…

Analyzes 50 scientific papers selected from the top 100 most-cited papers for the period from 1945 to 1988. Finds that most are in biochemistry and became citation superstars because of method or material discoveries usable in other people's research. Discusses the typical form and writing style in these papers. (SR)

Discoursal construction is illustrated with 1 case (a 26-year old's academic essay) and then discussed in terms of Goffman's framework of self-representation through any form of social action. It is suggested that Critical Language Awareness, unlike other teaching/writing approaches, focuses explicitly on the discoursal construction of writer…

Applies 51 stylometric computer tests of Shakespeare play authorship and 14 of play authorship, developed by the Shakespeare Clinic, to 37 "true Shakespeares," 27 plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and to several poems of unknown authorship. Finds that no claimant, and none of the apocryphal plays or poems, matched Shakespeare. (DSK)

In 1958 in their journal, "The Fifties," Robert Bly and William Duffy introduced North American readers and students to a number of European and South American poets who had developed an imagination variously described as "ecstatic,""surreal,""fantastic,""mythic," etc. That same year the American poet Donald Hall began to write poetry in a new…

The concept of genre should not be limited to literary genres, but should be expanded to include all types of texts, including those traditionally considered to be nonliterary. Essentially, many things about writing work the way they do because of genre, and a better understanding of genre can give us a better understanding of writing, reading and…

An approach to teaching stylistics, or writing style, to high school and college composition classes is described in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): Composition teachers generally recognize and appreciate grace in writing. But teaching or learning that grace is difficult at best. Perhaps style cannot easily be taught, but it can be…

Use of dialect literature increases student awareness of dialect features and reduces the occurrence of such features in student writing.

A content analysis was conducted of 17 technical writing textbooks published between 1911 and 1938 and of 3 texts published recently to determine if the early texts differ from the more recent ones in the way they define the purposes of technical writing and in their treatment of style and audience. Results showed that both sets of texts define…

A college composition course based on teaching the difference between male and female modes of rhetoric offers advantages over the traditional course in reference, persuasive, and expressive discourse: the appeal to student emotion provided by the terms "female" and "male," and the clarity of the terms in delineating the…