How do faculty across the disciplines define the qualities of good writing? What assumptions underlie their writing assignments? How do students learn to write within their majors? Meet teacher expectations? Acquire proficiency in academic genres? Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki sought answers to these important questions in their landmark, four-year, crossdisciplinary study of faculty and students from a wide range of majors. Their results will change your approach to teaching writing. Thoroughly researched and incisively written, Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines shows faculty and student writers taking risks with form and ideas as they weigh the demands of writing in the academy with their own passions for learning and self-expression. Thaiss and Zawacki demonstrate that academic disciplines are dynamic spaces that accommodate a variety of alternative styles and visions, even as they respect careful, systematic research. --Publisher's description.

Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) is a growing field in which discipline-based academics, writing developers, and learning technologists collaborate to help students succeed as subject specialists. This book places WiD in its theoretical and cultural contexts and reports on initiatives taking place at a range of UK higher education institutions. Also includes surveys of current developments and scholarship in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere, making it of interest to both a UK and an international audience.

Concepts in Composition is designed to foster reflection on how theory impacts practice, allowing prospective teachers to assume the dual role of both teacher and student as they enter the discipline of Writing Studies and become familiar with some of its critical conversations. Now in its third edition, the volume offers up-to-date scholarship and a deeper focus on diversity, both in the classroom and in relation to Writing Studies and literacy more broadly. This text continues to offer a wealth of practical assignments, classroom activities, and readings in each chapter. It is the ideal resource for the undergraduate or graduate student looking to pursue a career in writing instruction.

Writing Assignments Across the University Curriculum as a whole asks and answers these questions: What kinds of documents do students write in a wide range of university degree programs in Canada? How do instructors structure those writing assignments? That is, who is the audience for the assignments? Do students get formative feedback as they develop their documents? Do the patterns we found in a small liberal arts college (Graves, Hyland, and Samuels 2010) occur in other kinds of universities? We took our cue from an article by Anson and Dannels (2009) who pointed us toward the idea that students experience a curriculum through their degree progress in an academic program. Consequently, we needed to map the writing assignments according to how different departments organized these degree programs. Results that were organized by curricular unit (departments, faculties or colleges, or programs/units) were more significant than general statistics because students would progress through these courses to a degree. Several chapters in the book describe how this kind of curricular mapping provided a spark for curricular reform in Engineering, Education, and an entire small university. The last two chapters report on the instructors perspective on their assignments: what they were intending to do, and why they both resisted and engaged in curricular discussions.

Kelly Ritter and Paul Kei Matsuda have created an essential introduction to the field of composition studies for graduate students and instructors new to the study of writing. The book offers a careful exploration of this diverse field, focusing specifically on scholarship of writing and composing. Within this territory, the authors draw the boundaries broadly, to include allied sites of research such as professional and technical writing, writing across the curriculum programs, writing centers, and writing program administration. Importantly, they represent composition as a dynamic, eclectic field, influenced by factors both within the academy and without. The editors and their sixteen seasoned contributors have created a comprehensive and thoughtful exploration of composition studies as it stands in the early twenty-first century. Given the rapid growth of this field and the evolution of it research and pedagogical agendas over even the last ten years, this multi-vocal introduction is long overdue.

From the outset, experimental writing has been viewed as a means to afford a more creative space for students to express individuality, underrepresented social realities, and criticisms of dominant socio-political discourses and their institutions. Yet, the recent trend toward multimedia texts has left many composition instructors with little basis from which to assess these new forms and to formulate pedagogies. In this original study, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan provides a critical history of experimental writing theory and its aesthetic foundations and demonstrates their application to current multimodal writing. Sullivan unpacks the work of major scholars in composition and rhetoric and their theories on aesthetics, particularly avant-gardism. She also relates the dialectics that shape these aesthetics and sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. Additionally, she shows how current debates over the value of multimedia texts echo earlier arguments that pitted experimental writing against traditional models. Sullivan further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn't changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

For undergraduates following any course of study, it is essential to develop the ability to write effectively. Yet the processes by which students become more capable and ready to meet the challenges of writing for employers, the wider public, and their own purposes remain largely invisible. Developing Writers in Higher Education shows how learning to write for various purposes in multiple disciplines leads college students to new levels of competence. This volume draws on an in-depth study of the writing and experiences of 169 University of Michigan undergraduates, using statistical analysis of 322 surveys, qualitative analysis of 131 interviews, use of corpus linguistics on 94 electronic portfolios and 2,406 pieces of student writing, and case studies of individual students to trace the multiple paths taken by student writers. Topics include student writers’ interaction with feedback; perceptions of genre; the role of disciplinary writing; generality and certainty in student writing; students’ concepts of voice and style; students’ understanding of multimodal and digital writing; high school’s influence on college writers; and writing development after college. The digital edition offers samples of student writing, electronic portfolios produced by student writers, transcripts of interviews with students, and explanations of some of the analysis conducted by the contributors. This is an important book for researchers and graduate students in multiple fields. Those in writing studies get an overview of other longitudinal studies as well as key questions currently circulating. For linguists, it demonstrates how corpus linguistics can inform writing studies. Scholars in higher education will gain a new perspective on college student development. The book also adds to current understandings of sociocultural theories of literacy and offers prospective teachers insights into how students learn to write. Finally, for high school teachers, this volume will answer questions about college writing. Companion Website Click here to access the Developing Writers project and its findings at the interactive companion website. Project Data Access the data from the project through this tutorial.

WRITING PROGRAMS WORLDWIDE offers an important global perspective to the growing research literature in the shaping of writing programs. The authors of its program profiles show how innovators at a diverse range of universities on six continents have dealt creatively over many years with day-to-day and long-range issues affecting how students across disciplines and languages grow as communicators and learners.

Resounding the Rhetorical offers an original critical and theoretical examination of composition as a quasi-object. As composition flourishes in multiple media (digital, sonic, visual, etc.), Byron Hawk seeks to connect new materialism with current composition scholarship and critical theory. Using sound and music as his examples, he demonstrates how a quasi-object can and does materialize for communicative and affective expression, and becomes a useful mechanism for the study and execution of composition as a discipline. Through careful readings of Serres, Latour, Deleuze, Heidegger, and others, Hawk reconstructs key concepts in the field including composition, process, research, collaboration, publics, and rhetoric. His work delivers a cutting-edge response to the state of the field, where it is headed, and the possibilities for postprocess and postwriting composition and rhetoric.

Reconnecting Reading and Writing explores the ways in which reading can and should have a strong role in the teaching of writing in college. Reconnecting Reading and Writing draws on broad perspectives from history and international work to show how and why reading should be reunited with writing in college and high school classrooms. It presents an overview of relevant research on reading and how it can best be used to support and enhance writing instruction.