Freewriting, Literacy, and the Key of E-flat

I am on a quest to fully understand and explain literacy—how it works, why some people do or don’t attain it, why it matters, what motives exist for it, how […]

How Far Will the Rules Carry Us?

And swiftly, another school year draws to a close. When I am teaching mostly writing, I tend to lose track of where the time is going. I find myself working […]

The Subject is Discourse

I don’t know if anyone still talks about discourse theory in composition. But that is what I want to talk about. Discourse theory. I have been teaching a new writing […]

Parables for Our Time: Of Burke’s Parlor and the Braindead Megaphone

Students of rhetoric are familiar with a Kenneth Burke passage that describes a parlor in which people have gathered, where the give and take of conversation has been happening freely […]

The Fine Art of Minimal Marking

Last week, I participated in a meeting with other teachers who were in their first hours of teaching a writing class in their field. The challenge for them was that […]