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Note: These papers are mostly from
my own files. I have tried to insure that they are as close to the final
published versions as possible, but editorial variations may have crept in.
"Official" scholarly references ideally should cite the original
texts.
The exceptions are the articles originally published in electronic peer-reviewed journals. In these cases I have simply set pointers to the journals' own archives, which represent the most "authoritative" versions available.
Teaching as Performance in the Electronic Classroom. A paper on the ways in which new
modes of electronic teaching can shift our understanding of teaching from
"performance" to "thing."
Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy
An exploration of the impact that "true" nonlinear hypertext might
have on our ways of reading, writing and thinking, and of the implications of
these changes for teachers.
E-Publishing and Hypertext Publishing.
A
guest-editor's introduction to the first all-hypertext issue of EJournal.
Discusses the changing roles of author, editor, publisher and text in the
age of hypertext. This issue also features hypertext articles by Richard Andersen,
John December and Charles Ess.
Stevan
Harnad's Subversive Proposal: Kick Starting Electronic Scholarship
Summarizes and critiques the current debate over the future of electronic
journals, focussing principally on the conversation that Stevan Harnad began
with his famous "subversive proposal."
Information
Technology and the Breakdown of "Places" of Knowledge
Discusses how electronic text is eroding the distinctions between disciplines.
Uses Ong, Bolter, Myrowitz and Goffman as theoretical lenses and the rhetorical
concept of "places" (loci communes) as a guiding metaphor.
Oral
Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge: Speculations on the
History of Ownership Discusses the possible fate of
concepts such as copyright and individual ownership of knowledge in an age
of electronic text. Uses communication history and the "theory of transformative
technology" as articulated by Ong, McLuhan and Bolter as a main theoretical
lens.
Reading
as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge, Persuasion, and the Teaching of Research-Based
Writing. This book draws from classical and modern Western
rhetorics, reader-response and discourse-processing theories to argue that
rhetorical theory should include a theory of reading to describe how meaning
is made during the act of reading.
Articles
on Rhetoric and Composition Studies
The Research Paper, and Why We Should Still Care. Draft under review. This article applies rhetorical genre theory, activity theory and situated learning theory to argue that the "research paper," long neglected and/or denigrated in writing studies, has a vital role to play in helping studentx enter the academic discourse community, and that there are good reasons why composition courses should continue to teach it. It also makes a case for following Nelson and others in calling the genre "writing from sources" to emphasize its status as an activity rather than a set of formal conventions.
Transfer, Transformation, and Rhetorical Knowledge: Insights from Transfer Theory. Forthcoming in the Journal of Business and Technical Writing, expected publication date October 2011. This article traces the uncomfortable relationship that Writing Studies has had with the concept of learning transfer, including in some cases nearly outright rejection of the possibility that school knowledge can transfer to the workplace. However, transfer theory itself can be much more complex, and take a much more social view of knowledge, than it is sometimes credited with. Many aspects of transfer theory, while not well explored by Writing Studies, can suggest a number of ways that we can help our students learn to transform their expertise to fit new rhetorical situations.
Getting
Here: Welcoming Students to the Research University.
A chapter forthcoming in George Melnyk and Christine Sutherland (eds.), The University and the Teacher, likely
for publication in 2011. This is not an academic book as such but rather a
collection of reflections, insights and reminiscences about teaching experience
at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My chapter argues for teaching not
just the techniques but also the culture of research in order to help students
enter the discourse community of the research university. It also provides
some ideas on how to do so.
Using
an Academic Content Seminar to Engage Students with the Culture of Academic
Research. A paper in the Journal of the First Year
Experience and Students in Transition 18(1) 2006: 23-54.
The paper reports a qualitatitative study of students in the Faculty of Communication
and Culture's First Year Seminars. It concludes that a seminar offering
the opportunity to work on an extended research project is an important way
of helping students absorb university culture. It also concludes that
much more research is needed on academic content seminars as opposed to extended
orientation seminars.
Reinventing
WAC (Again): The First Year Seminar and Academic Literacy.
(2005) College Composition and Communication, 57, 253-276. Argues
that First Year Seminars can be a good bridge to Writing Across the Curriculum,
and uses interviews with students to show how a FYS can teach the writing
of the research paper as a genre.
Dangerous
Partnerships: How Cometence Testing Can Sabotage WAC.
(2005) The WAC Journal, 16, 78-88. Argues that institution-wide
writing competence tests may seem like a good way to advance the aims of Writing
Across the Curriculum -- but warns that they can also establish a remedial
frame of mind that is deadly to the WAC mission.
Same
Roots, Different Soil: Rhetoric in a Communications Studies Program.
A chapter in Roger Graves and Heather Graves' Writing
Centres, Writing Seminars, Writing Culture: Writing Instruction in Anglo-Canadian
Universities. This chapter describes the unusual position
of the University of Calgary's writing program in a Communications Studies
program rather than in an English department. It discusses the troubled
relationship between rhetoric, media studies, and English studies in Canada
and the United States, and how this relationship has affected the University
of Calgary's program. (Now a bit obsolete since the death of the U of C’s
writing program.)
The
Researcher as Missionary: Problems with Rhetoric and Reform in the Disciplines.
Judy Segal, Anthony Paré, Doug Brent, and Douglas Vipond. Discusses
the practical and ethical dilemmas faced by rhetoricians who seek to inform
the members of other discourse communities about the practices of those communities.
Is Anyone Listening? Writers Being (Mis)Read in the Academy. (Co-written with Mary-Louise Craven, Margaret Procter and Jane Ledwell-Brown.) This paper explores narratives of failure in responding to student writing: responses that send the wrong messages, that fail to accommodate the students' senses of themselves and how they fit into the academy, and that simply fail to help students learn. The paper addresses the social and institutional forces that help produce such failures and suggests ways of addressing them.
Rogerian
Rhetoric: An Ethical Alternative to Traditional Argumentation
A chapter from Argument Revisited, Argument Redefined: Negotiating Meaning
in the Composition Classroom, ed Barbara Emmel, Paula Resch, and Deborah
Tenny (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996). This chapter discusses Rogerian rhetoric
and how it can be used in the classroom as an alternative or supplement to
the teaching of more traditional forms of argument. It focusses on Rogerian
rhetoric more as a means of ethical enrichment than of persuasion in the traditional
sense.
Writing
Genres, Writing Classes, Writing Textbooks Uses genre
theory (Bazerman, Miller) to analyse the genre of the textbook, particularly
the composition textbook. I argue that composition textbooks represent a response
to a socially constructed pedagogical situation that is largely devoid of
social meaning, and present an alternative pedagogy in (adapted from Reither,
Vipond and Hunt) in which knowledge is socially constructed by a class acting
as a research community.
Why
Does Rhetoric Need a Theory of Reading? Argues that,
while three thousand years of rhetorical theory has provided solid theories
of how persuasive discourse is composed, rhetoric needs to turn its attention
to how persuasive discourse is processed by readers/hearers. Uses reader-response
theories such as those of Rosenblatt and Iser and rhetorical theories such
as those of Booth and Burke.
Young,
Becker and Pike's "Rogerian" Rhetoric: A Twenty-Year Reassessment
Assesses Young, Becker and Pike's 1970 textbook Rhetoric: Discovery and
Change. This book introduced the world of composition studies to a new,
supposedly more co-operative rhetoric based on Carl Rogers' therapeutic techniques.
The paper argues that, while Young, Becker and Pike's approach to rhetoric
is dated and does not take into account modern phenomenological notions of
language, Rogerian rhetoric nonetheless offers a valid alternative to traditional
argument.
Computer-Assisted
Commenting and Theories of Written Response. The
"computer assisted" part is completely obsolete now but I still
stand behind the theories of written response. I also think the general
lesson on automating education stands as well today as it did in 1991.
Indirect
Structure and Reader Response. An oldie (1985)
but an often-reprinted goodie. Argues that "indirect structure,"
which is commonly cited in business communication texts as a way to buffer
bad news, does not take account of the ways people really read and generally
does more harm than good.
Short
Papers, Texts of Oral Presentations, Works in Progress
Academic
Literacy Seminars. A presentation to the 2004 Conference
on the First-Year Experience. This paper describes the University of
Calgary's academically based first-year seminars, and argues that first-year
seminars based on academic content are hugely under-reported and under-researched
in the FYE literature. The paper also reports some very preliminary
results of interviews that explore students' experience of research.
Writing
Across the Disciplines: Politics and Pedagogy.
An address to the University of Regina's Faculty of Arts on Writing Across
the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (2003).
Creating
an Academic Community of Discourse in the Classroom.
A set of materials presented at the Laurentian University Writing Across the
Curriculum Workshop. It consists mainly of course materials which formed the
nucleus for discussion of how a classroom can be turned from a presentational
device into an active research community.
Ideas
from the Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop A brief
list of tips and techniques from a workshop at the University of Calgary.
The
Politics of Writing in the Disciplines. An unpublished
revision of a presentation to the Confernece on College Composition and Communication.
This paper follows up on the article "Problems
with the Missionary Position," also on this page.
(with
Diana Brent) "Technologies
of Resistance/Resisting Technology: Braille, Computers, and Literacy for the
Visually Impaired." A paper presented to
the Inkshed Working Conference #17, Bowen Island, May 2000.
Rogerian
Rhetoric A short entry on Rogerian Rhetoric, from Theorizing
Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary
Composition Studies, ed. Mary Kennedy.
In the Mirror
of Genre: Students Write this World. A short hypertext
based on a talk given at the Inkshed XVI conference, reporting the results
of research-in-progress about how students read and write WWW genres.
Web
Courseware Authoring Packages: Some Troubled Thoughts.
A brief article in Inkshed.
Keeping
the "Literacy" in "Information Literacy."
A brief article on the convergence between Information Literacy and Writing
Across the Curriculum.