Reforming College Composition: Writing the Wrongs

(Hardback)

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Description

As colleges and universities have responded to the demand of businesses and industries for graduates who can write effectively, Composition Studies has gained significance. However, while new theories and approaches to the teaching of writing have been proposed and implemented, many composition courses do not satisfactorily educate their students. This volume includes essays by writing specialists who are concerned with their own failure to improve their students' writing skills. These contributors examine why entering college students still write poorly and why our various attempts to improve such poor writing skills have largely failed. They compare the promise of previously touted new methods, paradigm shifts, and curricular innovations with the reality of little change or improvement; they describe what their students can and cannot do in the writing classroom, even after 12 years of primary and secondary education; and they address what they see as needed reforms in the whole idea of college composition, especially for the first-year college student.

Author Bio

RAY WALLACE is Department Head and Professor of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana./e He has published numerous articles and is the coeditor of 3 other books on the teaching of writing. ALAN JACKSON is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Georgia Perimeter College, where he teaches composition, literature, humanities, and introduction to technology./e He has published and presented widely on writing instruction, writing centers, linguistics, and Southern literature. SUSAN LEWIS WALLACE is Instructor of English and Reading at Northwestern State University of Louisiana./e She has published several articles on writing center tutoring, developmental reading, rhetoric, and literacy.