Author Archives: charityjoy

I’m nearing the end of my book and I barely have enough material to finish out the last two book notes. So, I’m reading one chapter this week and finishing off the book next week. This week I read “Asynchronicity: … Continue reading →

In the first chapter of Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide, Edward M. White gives suggestions for writing assignments. One of the first points that White makes and also repeats through the chapter is that it is more constructive … Continue reading →

Dialects & Discourse This week’s Elbow reading was the most useful to me so far. “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong Language,’” Elbow describes his teaching techniques in relation to students without a firm background in … Continue reading →

In “Toward Delivering New Definitions of Writing” by Marvin Diogenes and Andrea A. Lunsford, the authors argue that the way we look at writing and text is outdated and needs to be revised. Diogenes and Lunsford point out that “western … Continue reading →

Coherently Cohesive…or Is It? Stephen P. Witte and Lester Faigley explore Halliday and Hasan’s study of cohesive writing in the article “Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality.” Witte ad Faigley spend a great portion of the article explaining the cohesion study. … Continue reading →

Bucking More Binaries In the first of this week’s assignments Elbow challenges his readers to un-dichotomize the acts of reading and writing. The first section of “The War Between Reading and Writing – and How to End It” describes the … Continue reading →

Composition studies holds a unique position in American higher education; it is one of the few courses required in some form or fashion for every college student. The assumption is that students will be required to write well at some … Continue reading →

Seriously Skeptical! In “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” Patrick Hartwell discusses whether teaching grammar is useful and/or necessary. He debates the question by illustrating five types of grammar. Grammar I is “the grammar in our heads” (Hartwell 211), … Continue reading →

Which Came First: the Social or the Private? In this week’s Elbow reading, “In Defense of Private Writing: Consequences for Theory and Research,” Elbow has a chicken-or-the-egg type discussion regarding whether writing is inherently personal or social. He begins the … Continue reading →

A lot of Discourse in ‘Dis Course! As I stated in my Elbow post, this week’s Cross Talk in Comp Theory reading selection jives well with Elbow’s analysis of multiple discourses. James L. Kinneavy literally illustrates the major theories of … Continue reading →