The Writing Center looks forward to engaging faculty in conversations about how to improve student writing in their specific fields. We would like to see faculty use the Writing Center (and the director) to rethink and revise the teaching of writing in the classroom. Obviously, we are not authorities in all academic forms, methods, and materials, but we strongly believe that we can help teachers to assign writing in a way that will help students to their full potential. One of our goals is to encourage teachers to assign and teach writing creatively, so that they neither repeat the same lessons that students have heard before, nor promote writing that is tedious to read and respond to.
Below, we have tried to put together a brief list of sites as an introduction to the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Most people are not familiar with "composition" as a discipline; we tend to think of "composition" only as a classroom for Freshman or some activity college students do involving blue books and a red ink. Since 1963, however, conferences, journals, and Ph.D. programs have appeared around the theory and practice of teaching composition classes. Such research draws not only on "rhetoric" as the title suggests, but also on linguistics, ethnography, cognitive science, education theory, media theory, social psychology, and any other relevant source in order to answer the question: what is writing and how does one learn to do it? Much of the research below informs our sense of what the Saint Joseph's Writing Center should strive to be.
The links are organized in three categories. First are links to position statements of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and to annotated bibliographies published by the University of California, Davis's web-site. We include these because they are brief statements of the concerns that most composition instructors address: assessment, writing as a means of learning, collaborative writing, conflicts between "home" and "academic" discourses, dialect issues, and so forth. CCCC is the largest community of composition scholars in the U.S. We do not always agree with everything in the position papers, but they will provide a concerned reader with a good sense of the kinds of questions that compositionists ask.
Next are links to on-line journals of composition. If you teach writing and are already familiar with composition research, these sites will help you to keep up-to-date on publications.
Last are links to sites that have handouts on writing. Handouts don't solve much on their own, but, hopefully, providing them here will save you the time and effort of having to write your own. Some of this "freed" time may be directed more toward discussing writing in class or individually with students.
Note: Links to pages that are on other sites open in a new window. This allows you to explore the links of that site without losing your place here. When you are done, simply close the new window by clicking on the upper left-hand corner of the document.
CCCC Position Statements
Students' Right to Their Own Language
Statement of Principles and Standards for the Post-Secondary Teaching of Writing
Writing Assessment: A position Statement
Annotated Bibliographies
Collaborative Writing in University Teaching
Commenting on Students' Papers
Journals
College Composition and Communication
Journal of Advanced Composition
Handouts
Compiled by the University of Austin, Texas
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