English Composition

of the social conventions governing effective writing in English. What follows is a description of various strategies that could be used by L2 writing teachers to help students develop awareness and mastery of the social conventions referred to previously. The morphosyntactic level As was pointed out earlier, in order to be effective writers, students need to learn that even on the morphosyntactic level, conventions of acceptability will differ depending on the social framework. This awareness is especially needed for writers from countries in which an institutionalized variety of English exists since the conventions of English that they mastered in their own country may differ from those of other countries. According to Lowenberg (1990), four

are bi- or multilingual and speak a home language other than English. Although skill in using English in academic writing is often a key criterion for gaining entry to collegiate academic studies and exiting a college degree program, these students' presence in academia has raised political and ethical dilemmas for universities regarding college writing requirements. For example, can or should students from bilingual backgrounds be held to the same writing standards as monolingual speakers of standard English, and if not, how do we establish different but equivalent and appropriate standards? What forms of writing instruction are appropriate for bilingual students? How well do nonnative language writers need to be able to function in written

Manly Writing Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition Miriam Brody Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville PART 1 INTRODUCTION Having identified a discourse, I ask in my conclusion what may replace it. I cannot do justice here to the rich literature generated by feminist challenges to male-privileged language or to the various emancipatory curricula proposed by critics of culturally hegemonic teaching practice. Nevertheless, I hope that my account of a discursive economy in rhetoric and composition broadens our understanding of these deeply entrenched, damaging metaphors and suggests how we might move through the looking glass of this representation to a more liberating description of good writing. I do not suggest

Writing to Create Ourselves New Approaches for Teachers, Students, and Writers By T. D. Allen Foreword by John F. Povey University of Oklahoma Press : Norman The reasons for brief Transitions between Scenes are: 1. The Scene (with its Encounter and, therefore, conflict) holds a reader's interest far better than any other unit of writing. Transitions are fairly dull. If movies can train our brains to leap through time and space, the stories we read need not slow down much for our necessary adjustments. 2. A reader gets comfortable with a time and place (setting) and feels at home there while a Scene takes place. He does not enjoy getting himself oriented in a new time and place, so the good writer (always considerate of his reader's feelings)

Introduction: What is an Ecology of Composition? The real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity, a lesson that can perhaps be transferred to other fields of knowledge, consists in emphasizing the wealth of reality, which overflows any single language, any single logical structure. Each language can express only part of reality. Music, for example, has not been exhausted by any of its realizations, by any style of composition, from Bach to Sch殢erg. —Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature Introduction • In 1929, Charles Reznikoff, the objectivist poet, published Family Chronicle, which included a story of his mother's life, his father's life, and his own life in

INTRODUCTION A COMPOSITIONIST READS BAKHTIN Mikhail Bakhtin was born in Orel, near Moscow, in 1895. Schooled in classics at Petrograd (Petersburg) University, his work was influenced by Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Buber, Kierkegaard, and Cassirer, among others. Yet the theoretical concepts for which he is most known are perhaps equally a result of the political, religious, and intellectual turbulence of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Russia. Like many intellectuals after the Bolshevik Revolution, Bakhtin moved from province to province, sometimes of his own volition, other times in exile. Although Bakhtin's work did not reach publication until late in his life, he was a prolific writer and member of a group that has come to be called the "Bakhtin

is a discourse, that whatever it searches for, it finally and inevitably entails an act of writing. We encounter writing in the languages with which we conduct our search and in the discourses we compose to convey our findings to others. In composition studies, researchers encounter writing immediately as well as inevitably. Writing is not only the medium we use to make discoveries and impart findings to others but the very ''it" we search for. In this respect, writing is what differentiates composition studies from other fields of inquiry and unites its practitioners as a research community. Within this research community, however, there is little consensus that we are engaged in a common enterprise. Although writing "names" our subject, providing

Introduction What we had not anticipated was that "voice" was more than academic shorthand for a person's point of view. We became aware that it is a metaphor that can apply to many aspects of women's experience and development. In describing their lives, women commonly talked about voice and silence: "speaking up," "speaking out," "being silenced,'' "not being heard," and so on in an endless variety of connotations all having to do with a sense of mind, self-worth, and feelings of isolation from or connection to others. We found that women repeatedly used the metaphor of voice to depict their intellectual and ethical development; and that the development of a sense of voice, mind, and self, were intricately intertwined. (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger,

Chapter 1 Introduction I don't feel it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? —Michel Foucault University open admissions policies in the late 1960s fundamentally changed American higher education and composition studies. Since then, the discipline has witnessed a paradigm shift from the current-traditional way of teaching to the process theories and pedagogies (Hairston 1982). This moving away from a basically teacher-centered pedagogy toward more student-centered teaching has brought teacher authority to the limelight of the composition

range and the depth of this shift. First institutions—political, economic, and academic—are threatened by new ideas; then these new ideas become institutions. version of a worksheet. Time would be better spent honing meaning, grappling with data, forging form, rearranging, rereading, and reformulating. Students must become proficient in the written word—in English.

The Writing Cure Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education Mark Bracher Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville For a Psychoanalytic Approach to Writing Purposes The basic argument of this book is that psychoanalysis and writing have much to offer each other, and that anyone interested in either of these fields or in the educational, personal, or social benefits that either practice can provide will benefit from exploring the intersection between the two. The primary audience of this book thus includes writing teachers, psychoanalytic practitioners (critics, teachers, and clinicians), social-activist cultural workers, and educators in general. To writing teachers my argument is that a psychoanalytic perspective

Foreword Patricia Bizzell Constructing Knowledges provides us with a thorough and timely analysis of attacks on theory in composition studies, both past and present. As Dobrin points out, theoretical implications have traditionally been denied to the teaching of writing, reflective of the sense within the parent field of English studies that this work is necessarily simplistic in method and impoverished in content. Moreover, writing teachers have traditionally responded to this denigration by defiantly embracing it—ever a tactic of the oppressed—and announcing their pride in their preoccupation with pedagogy. Now, to this traditional dissociation of theory and practice in composition studies is added the deconstruction of theory making

OVERVIEW despite the efforts of teachers in recent years to mimic the social and, particularly, the collaborative nature of writing tasks within organizations. This failure of technical writing textbooks, he claims, occurs "because their authors adopt the objectivist perspective of most business and governmental organizations, a view in which writing is not the social act that composition theory maintains it is." After discussing the theoretical and pedagogical literature regarding technical writing collaboration in the workplace and in the classroom, Gale analyzes an array of textbooks and concludes that they do not prepare students for careers "specifically because they do not adequately address the many constraints and conflicts … which

or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address the State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246 Production by Christine Lynch Marketing by Bernadette LaManna Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Left margins : cultural studies and composition pedagogy / edited by Karen Fitts and Alan W. France. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-2537-1.—ISBN 0-7914-2538-X (pbk.) 1. English language—Composition and exercises—Study and teaching. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 3. Political correctness. 4. Language and culture. 5. Critical pedagogy. I. Fitts, Karen, 1949- . II. France, Alan