Author Archives: charityjoy

The End or Just the Beginning?? The reading assignments for the first half of this semester provided a snapshot of what is going on in composition studies today. We learned why composition is important and read many articles on different … Continue reading →

When I read about portfolio assessment in Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon, I was thoroughly convinced that it was a great way to go for assessment of student writing ability. The concept seemed straightforward and obviously beneficial. White’s “Using … Continue reading →

After graduating high school, I went to a small private school for a short time. Because I had high ACT scores, I was exempted from freshman composition. Next, I joined the military and CLEP’d freshman composition to fulfill the r … Continue reading →

Challenges and Best Practices in Delivering College Composition Kathleen Blake Yancey, the author of Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon, is an English professor and graduate program director in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. Yancey, the editor of … Continue reading →

Making Knowledge Collaboratively In “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” Kenneth A. Bruffee begins by discussing the history of the concept of collaborative learning. Even though the term “collaborative learning” was not coined until the 1980s, the concept had … Continue reading →

Playing with Texts In “High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing,” Elbow repeats some of the ideas he’s shared with us in other essays. He once again makes the distinction between high stakes writing for a … Continue reading →

Practice Makes Perfect…or at Least  Better In “Helping Students Do Well on Writing Assignments,” White encourages instructors to give students experience in writing on demand since short essay evaluations are not going away and “are much preferable to multiple-choice tests … Continue reading →

“Distributed Teaching, Distributed Learning: Integrating Technology and Criteria-driven Assessment into the Delivery of First Year Composition” by Rebecca Rickly discusses yet another approach to delivering and assessing freshman composition. Rickly begins by describing five challenges Texas Tech University was facing … Continue reading →