Utah State University Press on WAC

Series Editor: Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University

The Utah State University Press on WAC series offers open-access digital editions of leading books on WAC published by Utah State University Press. The books in this series are part of a larger collection of open-access books available through the USU Press Digital Commons. Some of these books are still available in print and can be purchased through the Press.

Note: The PDF files for this book series were created by scanning print documents. As a result, they lack structure (headings and so on) and ALT tags for images. Screen readers will not be able to determine heading levels and other information that would ease the reading process.

Books in the Series

Between Talk and Teaching: Reconsidering the Writing Conference

By Laurel Johnson Black

The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.... More

The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship

Edited by Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges.... More

Coming to Terms: A Theory of Writing Assessment

By Patricia Lynne

In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory? By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition.... More

Discord and Direction: The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator

Edited by Sharon James McGee and Carolyn Handa

Postmodernism's central moves include questioning hierarchy, valuing paratactic associations, and rejecting grand narratives, and the work of a Writing Program Administrator, most days, includes those moves as well. The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise—and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views of accountability and assessment.... More

A Field of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition Studies

Edited by Peggy O'Neill, Angela Crow, and Larry W. Burton

One of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.... More

Genre Across the Curriculum

Edited by Anne Herrington and Charles Moran

an first-year college writing courses operate without a powerful context: they are designed to teach academic writing, but what kind of academic writing? Which of the many particular discourses, and, within those discourses, which recurring social situations? Lacking a clear context to refer to, textbook authors inevitably privilege form. Genre across the Curriculum will function as a "good" textbook, one not for the student, but for the teacher, and one with an eye on the context of writing. Here you will find models of practice, descriptions written by teachers who have integrated the teaching of genre into their pedagogy in ways that both support and empower the student writer.... More

Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition

By Anis S. Bawarshi

In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. ... More

Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

Edited by Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, and Dickie Selfe

Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication offers a variety of activities, projects, and approaches to energize pedagogy in technical communication and to provide a constructive critique of current practice. A practical collection, the approaches recommended here are readily adaptable to a range of technological and institutional contexts, as well as being theoretically grounded and pedagogically sound. Throughout the collection, its editors and contributors demonstrate the importance of critically engaging students through creative and innovative pedagogies. ... More

Keywords in Creative Writing

By Wendy Bishop and David Starkey

Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience. Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. ... More

Machine Scoring of Student Essays: Truth and Consequences

Edited by Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Richard H. Haswell

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.... More

Noise from the Writing Center

By Elizabeth H. Boquet

In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center. Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. ... More

On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring

Edited by Candace Spigelman and Laurie Grobman

Classroom-based writing tutoring is a distinct form of writing support, a hybrid instructional method that engages multiple voices and texts within the college classroom. Tutors work on location in the thick of writing instruction and writing activity. On Location is the first volume to discuss this emerging practice in a methodical way. The essays in this collection integrate theory and practice to highlight the alliances and connections on-location tutoring offers while suggesting strategies for resolving its conflicts. Contributors examine classroom-based tutoring programs located in composition courses as well as in writing intensive courses across the disciplines. ... More

Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action

By Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler, Heidi Estrem, Susanmarie Harrington, Maureen McBride, Eric Stalions, and Scott Weeden

Educators appropriately strive to create "assessment cultures" (Huot 2002) in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators establish the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on writing assessment practice is just beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. This volume documents the second generation in an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows the range of DCM's flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.... More

Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies

Edited by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe

Once again, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe offer a volume that will set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies face as the next century opens couldn't be more dramatic or deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, and visual, has changed beyond recognition, challenging even our capacity to articulate them.... More

(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning

By Brian Huot

Brian Huot's aim for this book is both ambitious and provocative. He wants to reorient composition studies' view of writing assessment. To accomplish this, he not only has to inspire the field to perceive assessment—generally not the most appreciated area of study—as deeply significant to theory and pedagogy, he also has to counter some common misconceptions about the history of assessment in writing. ... More

Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives

Edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey and Irwin Weiser

Yancey and Weiser bring together thirty-one writing teachers from diverse levels of instruction, institutional settings, and regions to create a stimulating volume on the current practice in portfolio writing assessment. Contributors reflect on the explosion in portfolio practice over the last decade, why it happened, what comes next; discuss portfolios in hypertext, the web, and other electronic spaces; and consider emerging trends and issues that are involving portfolios in teacher assessment, faculty development, and graduate student experience.... More

What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing

By Bob Broad

The result of a long-term study of one university's introductory composition program, Broad's approach to mapping the values that inform writing evaluation is empirically grounded, painstakingly analyzed, yet flexible, human, and pedagogically wise. Not simple, but surely practical, his method yields a more satisfactory process of exploration and a more useful representation of the values by which compositionists actually evaluate their students. With this important study, Broad moves the field far beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing.... More

Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures

Edited by Carol Petersen Haviland and Joan A. Mullin

Carol Haviland, Joan Mullin, and their collaborators report on a three-year interdisciplinary interview project on the subject of plagiarism, authorship, and "property," and how these are conceived across different fields. The study investigated seven different academic fields to discover disciplinary conceptions of what types of scholarly production count as "owned." Less a research report than a conversation, the book offers a wide range of ideas, and the chapters here will provoke discussion on scholarly practice relating to intellectual property, plagiarism, and authorship—and to how these matters are conveyed to students.... More

Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations?: Learning to Teach Underprepared Writers across the Curriculum

By Stephen M. Fishman and Lucille McCarthy

Ever since Horace Mann promoted state supported schooling in the 1850s, the aims of U.S. public education have been the subject of heated national debate. Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations? joins this debate by exploring clashing educational aims in a discipline-based university classroom and the consequences of these clashes for "underprepared" writers. In this close-up look at a White middle-class teacher and his ethnically diverse students, Fishman and McCarthy examine not only the role of Standard English in college writing instruction but also the underlying and highly charged issues of multiculturalism, race cognizance, and social class.... More

Wiring the Writing Center

Edited by Eric H. Hobson

As computers have brought important developments to composition studies, writing centers have found themselves creating and improvising applications for their own work and often for the writing programs and institutions in which they live. Online tutorials, websites with an array of downloadable resources for students, scheduling and email possibilities--all of these are becoming common-place among writing centers across the country. However, in spite of impressive work by individual centers, exchange on these topics between and among writing centers has been sporadic.... More

About the Publishers

The Utah State University Press is a refereed scholarly publisher and division of Utah State University Libraries. It publishes its books through the University Presss of Colorado. Established in 1972, the Press's mandate is to acquire and publish books of superior quality that win the esteem of readers and that appropriately represent our university to the community of scholars. Vital also to our mission is publication for a broader community, including students, who use our books in their studies, and general readers, who find in them enjoyment as well as enlightenment. The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. The site receives support from Colorado State University, from its contributors, and from its large group of editors, reviewers, editorial board members, and editorial staff. For more information about the Clearinghouse, please see our site information page.

A Note of Thanks

The Clearinghouse is grateful to Utah State University Press and the University Press of Colorado for their willingness to make these books available on this site.