Nancy Sommers’ “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” raises a lot of interesting questions for me when she compares the revision process to composing music. She argues against the linear models of writing that place revision at the end of the process. She claims that this is not how writing happens, and to […]

“[I]f we want to truly understand embodied writing, perhaps what we need to most closely study are not ideal, complete texts, but the messy and recursive process of composing as we break our ideas apart through language. We need to see a polysemous writing process as that which allows for meaning to be made” – […]

I recently had the pleasure of looking through Don Lepan, Laura Buzzard, and Maureen Okun’s book How to be Good with Words, which provides a resource for careful examination of aspects of the English language that may stir confusion and controversy in higher education, under such topics as gender, race, class, disability, etc. For example, the chapter on race contains […]

In chapter 7 of Naming What We Know, Doug Down and Liane Robertson show how threshold concepts can be applied to first year writing courses. I am appreciative of how they demonstrate the interplay between learning outcomes and threshold concepts, showing several examples of learning outcomes in conversation with threshold concepts that meet first year writing […]

In Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean provides much practical information for rubric design. I was a bit surprised by his own approach to creating rubrics, which happened after the students have turned in their paper. Admitting it seems counter-intuitive, here is his process: Read over small sample to get a sense of the range and what […]

I have several regrets from college. Yes, all of those typical regrets that might come to mind, but let’s forget about those for now. I want to focus on one regret that has resurfaced ever since I began working with international students in higher education. My college, small, liberal arts, predominantly white English L1 speaking, […]

Ann George presents an overview of some of the main aims and challenges of critical pedagogy in “Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy” (A Guide To Composition Studies, 2014, pp. 77 – 93). After raising several questions regarding democratizing the classroom, student activism, and the contradictory aims and practice of critical pedagogy in the writing classroom, she […]

The reading I have been doing in new materialism has really messed me up. Nearly everything I read related to composition or second language writing seems too limited in the scope of what is working within a pedagogical situation, too human-centric, or too tied to dualistic thought. While I’m fairly non-committal in my theoretical underpinnings, […]

At the college where I teach, the TOEFL looms large for international students hoping to study there. The purpose of the TOEFL is to give a standard measure of academic English proficiency for college or university study, and the ESL students in the academic English program need to demonstrate an acceptable TOEFL score to be […]