Category: Comp Pedagogy

Empirical research into legal comm’n & professional status of LRW faculty

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson2 Comments

I was delighted to finagle an invitation to speak on a panel at the Legal Writing Institute in Portland on July 12, during the meeting of the LWI Professional Status Committee. The committee met in a plenary session with a larger audience and conducted its business, and then we panelists were asked to comment in short form (two minutes each) on an angle or issue relating to the professional status of legal research and writing faculty. (For readers outside the legal academy, teachers of communication in that field face status challenges similar to those faced by teachers of writing in the broader academy Read More …

Readings for 8011 for November 29

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson1 Comment

This week we’ll have a visit from Drs. Tom Reynolds and Patrick Bruch to talk about research in pedagogy. We had several readings to prepare for this discussion. Here they are: Herndl, C. G. (2004). Teaching discourse and reproducing culture: a critique of research and pedagogy in professional and non-academic writing. In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central Works in Technical Communication (illustrated edition., pp. 220-231). Oxford University Press, USA. Young, I. (1990). Introduction. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press. Connors, R. J., & Lunsford, A. A. (1993). Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Read More …

The Phenomenology of Error

Posted onAuthorBrian Larson4 Comments

I received a link from friend and colleague Trent Kays to this article: Williams, J. M. (1981). The phenomenology of error. College Composition and Communication, 32(2), 152-168. (I UPDATED this post 11/22 with notes from Prof. Sihler below.) It’s a good read, and points up a key problem: Self-appointed arbiters of writing style, unofficial state grammarians, and teachers of writing often feel compelled to point out errors in the writings of others. Unfortunately, an “error” may not really be one, because most readers would not react to it that way. And the grammar police themselves commit similar or identical errors Read More …

5531 Readings for October 6

Posted onAuthorBrian LarsonLeave a comment

I thought I’d post a couple quick notes about the readings for 5531 this week. This is briefer than posts for 8011, because they are not required for 5531… This week, we handled the following: Gage Gage, J. T. (1991). On “Rhetoric” and “Composition”. In E. Lindemannn & G. Tate (Eds.), An Introduction to Composition Studies (pp. 15-32). New York: Oxford University Press. This study tackled the meanings of “rhetoric,” “composition,” and “rhetoric and composition.”  He comes to a conclusion that seems altogether commonplace: Rhetoric is “reasoning down from wholes to functional parts” (30) Composition entails the process of “reasoning Read More …

Reflections on training I’ve had in writing

Posted onAuthorBrian LarsonLeave a comment

So, in my 5531 Composition Pedagogy class, I was given the following prompt: “[P]lease write a short version of your experiences with writing instruction in your schooling. In narrating your experiences, consider how your experiences were a product, to some degree, of what we have been reading about in Berlin [1987].” I’ve viewed this question broadly. I’ll ID anecdotes from applicable contexts: My earliest memory of being trained how to write was a sixth-grade teacher (Mr. Pethoud), who insisted that students know how to spell words well beyond the sixth-grade level and also insisted on good penmanship. The former was Read More …