This webtext, which was published in 2000 in the Academic.Writing Teaching Exchange, explores using problem solving computer games like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? to involve intermediate and advanced second language learners in reading, listening, researching, and decision making exercises – all of which can provide challenging, interesting, and meaningful contexts for improving second-language writing skills.

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This essay, originally published in 2000 in the Academic.Writing Teaching Exchange, addresses teacher's questions about computer-mediated instruction. The original article can be found at http://wac.colostate.edu/aw/teaching/haefner2000.htm. The article is reprinted in its entirety on this site.

This article provides a framework for adding writing to a course. It includes advice for the research paper, writing in the disciplines, and writing to learn, as well as general advice for responding to student writing. The article, originally published in the Academic.Writing Teaching Exchange, can be viewed by following the URL above.

A chapter from Jeff Galin and Joan Latchlaw's edited collection, The Dialogic Classroom: Teachers Integrating Computer Technology, Pedagogy, and Research (Urbana: NCTE, 1998). Students in most writing classes produce papers for which the primary audience is the teacher and the primary purpose is to pass the course. Yet our study of rhetoric tells us that citizens need to be prepared to write for a wide variety of audiences in a wide variety of contexts. Further, students writing researched papers often go no further than the books and journals in their own school library to gather source material. With the proliferation of the Internet, more and more students have access to what Howard Rheingold calls a "living database" of people grouped into virtual communities with similar interests. By first monitoring discussion groups on the network, analyzing the audience and discourse conventions used in these groups, then posting messages to the discussions, students can gain experience writing for real audiences spanning the globe. Using the network in this manner allows them to become better writers in a real-world communication context.

Summaries of the presentations made during the session, "What Makes WAC Work: Reflections on Writing Across the Curriculum," at the 2004 Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Antonio, Texas. Follow the link to view the summaries.

Joseph Williams offers a thoughtful treatment of problems, particularly in introductions. He opens his mongraph with the following:

For well more than a decade now, researchers have been reporting how in the act of drafting we recognize and solve rhetorical problems -- how we evaluate and synthesize sources, set local rhetorical goals, then seek to achieve them. But if the literature on solving such problems is thick, our understanding of how we articulate the substantive problem that occasions our efforts to solve them is quite thin. By "substantive problem" I do not mean the local and ongoing struggle toward the discovery and articulation of meaning, but the significant question whose answer justifies the effort, the problem in the world or mind whose solution repays our time spent writing and our readers' spent reading. We criticize the writing of our students and colleagues on many grounds, but none is more common -- or devastating -- than the observation that they have failed not just to solve a problem, but even to pose one that we think "interesting." And as teachers, we experience no failure more common than our inability to explain what we mean by "pose" or "interesting" or "problem" and what it is about a text that elicits such criticism.

Williams' monograph offers much to writers and teachers of writing. (Introduction by Mike Palmquist.)