history

I am pleased to introduce this 30th anniversary issue of The Writing Instructor, for which I’ve had the privilege to serve as Editor. As one of the Founding Editors of the journal, I value the role the journal played in my own development as a teacher and scholar of rhetoric and composition, and it’s been an honor to work again with these authors who contributed to the first five years of the journal’s publication.

Shirley Rose asked me if I wanted to write an epilogue to “Re-viewing Peer Review” to reflect on the experience of revisiting a piece I wrote nearly three decades ago. Her request reminded me that I have done a lot of these retrospective pieces, and I wondered if it is unusual to have done so many. College Composition and Communication published “Composing as a Woman” in 1988 and then “Composing ‘Composing as a Woman’” two years later.

The Digital Media and Composition Institute at The Ohio State University, founded by Cynthia L. Selfe and Scott L. DeWitt in 2006, is a two-week summer institute co-hosted by OSU’s English Department and Digital Media Project.

Increasingly, online publications are vying for prominence and acceptance in the academy. Questions about their validity and quality are raised alongside debates about the effects that these publications will have on academic scholarship. Despite all the hype around e-journals, few have carefully analyzed what differences actually exist between online journals and print journals.

A Commentary on "Chapter 1: Ancient Greek Writing Instruction" in A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America

My fondest wish is that I am now standing before you reading this statement about what I learned while researching the chapter on writing instruction in ancient Greece. One year ago, however, when our panel chair and editor James J. Murphy proposed this panel, I knew then that I could only attend if the program came very early in the conference. I should have realized, however, that with James J.

Peroration by David Blakesley . . .

2001 witnessed the second edition of this already classic work. In celebration of this new edition and TWI's digital debut, we present here a symposium—begun before a packed house at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Denver in March 2001—on what the writers of each chapter of this new edition learned as they updated chapters from the first edition. In some cases, new authors have joined the effort.

In 1982, I wrote an article for the second issue of The Writing Instructor, "Approaches to Comprehensive Writing: Integrating Writing into the College Curriculum," reviewing the early stages of the modern Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) / Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movement.

In the latter months of 2010, one of my colleagues from the long ago Rhetoric, Linguistics and Literature program at Southern Cal e-mailed to me the news that the county in which I live has the highest high school drop-out rate of black boys in the entire United States, news that my colleague, in fact, is responsible for corralling and analyzing.

Re-reading and reflecting on an essay published 27 years ago was a startling experience. With nothing but hindsight, I experienced surprise and a concern that my tone sounded too assured (those essays that I quoted didn’t sound nearly as weak as I made them out to be). A lot has changed since “Students as Readers of Their Classmates’ Writing: Some Implications for Peer Critiquing” was published in 1984. What about gender? race? class? ethnicity? transnationalism?

"Process and Intention: A Bridge from Theory to Classroom” is rooted in a time when intuitive, experience-based awareness that we should "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" (Murray 3) was bolstered by systematic research into the complexity of writing. Lots of years have passed since those days, so as a reminder, let me mention five 1970s researchers whose work seemed to me then (and still does, for that matter) to suggest a complex idea of writing as a dynamic interaction of brain, hand, and eye.