Additional Reading

 In addition to the items listed in my paper's works cited page, I found these articles and the book particularly useful and interesting.  Each one of them comes with practical applications so hopefully some of them will fit your needs. I will update this list time to time so be sure to check back again.



Connors Robert J.” The Erasure of the Sentence”CCC  vol. 52 No. September 2000. 95-128.

He claims that contemporary composition dismisses the sentence based pedagogies of the 60s and 70s.  In the summary of this article he states:  "The usefulness of these sentence-based rhetoric was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, anti-behaviorist, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 dooms to them to a marginality under which they still exist today. “  He claims the imitation of excellent writers actually improve students’ writing.

Donovan, Timothy R. and Ben W. McClelland. ed. Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition.  Illinois: NCTE, 1980. Print.

The book is a practical but not how-to-teach book. The collection of articles analyzes composition theories from many fields of language studies such as rhetoric.

France, Alan W. Dialects of self:  “Structure and Agency as the Subject of English.”
       College English Vol. 63  No. 2. November 2000  pp145-165. Print.

He argues contemporary composition theory appears to focus on self as an independent agency not connected to cultural context.  He delineates his points through his own classroom assignments.

“In Composition, methodological individualism means that our pedagogy idealizes the seemingly untutored “”authentic” expression of personal experience, a “writing without teachers” to use Peter Elbow’s koine, which, proper as it is as a final objective is clearly not a good foundation for developing a common rhetorical pedagogy for English literature and language skills” (147).

Porter, Kevin J. "A Pedagogy of Charity:  Donald Davidson and the Student-Negotiated Composition Classroom.”  CCC .The Journal of the Conference on College Composition and Communication National Council of Teachers of English Vol. 52 No. 4 June 2001.  P547-611 Print.

The author labels traditional method of composition teaching a pedagogy of severity that centers around the discussion of faults and problems –  it is easier - and calls for a pedagogy of charity.  He argues that the charitable attitude motivates students to produce better revisions.