Donald Morison Murray was an American journalist and English professor. He wrote for many journals, authored several books on the art of writing and teaching, and served as writing coach for several national newspapers. After writing multiple editorials about changes in American military policy for the Boston Herald, he won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. For 20 years, he wrote the Boston Globe's "Over 60" column, eventually renamed "Now And Then". He taught at the University of New Hampshire for 26 years.
Ecocomposition is a way of looking at literacy using concepts from ecology. It is a postprocess theory of writing instruction that tries to account for factors beyond hierarchically defined goals within social settings; however, it doesn't dismiss these goals. Rather, it incorporates them within an ecological view that extends the range of factors affecting the writing process beyond the social to include aspects such as "place" and "nature." Its main motto, then, is "Writing Takes Place".
Second language writing is the study of writing performed by non-native speakers/writers of a language as a second or foreign language.
A writing process describes a sequence of physical and mental actions that people take as they produce any kind of text. These actions nearly universally involve tools for physical or digital inscription: e.g., chisels, pencils, brushes, chalk, dies, keyboards, touchscreens, etc.; these tools all have particular affordances that shape writers' processes. Writing processes are highly individuated and task-specific; they often involve other kinds of activities that are not usually thought of as writing per se.
Cognitive rhetoric refers to an approach to rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy as well as a method for language and literary studies drawing from, or contributing to, cognitive science.
Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States. The flagship national organization for this field is the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
James A. Berlin was an American scholar, professor, writer, and theorist in the field of composition studies, known for his scholarship on the history of rhetoric and composition theory.
First-year composition is an introductory core curriculum writing course in US colleges and universities. This course focuses on improving students' abilities to write in a university setting and introduces students to writing practices in the disciplines and professions. These courses are traditionally required of incoming students, thus the previous name, "Freshman Composition." Scholars working within the field of composition studies often have teaching first-year composition (FYC) courses as the practical focus of their scholarly work.
Commonly called new media theory or media-centered theory of composition, stems from the rise of computers as word processing tools. Media theorists now also examine the rhetorical strengths and weakness of different media, and the implications these have for literacy, author, and reader.
The process theory of composition is a field of composition studies that focuses on writing as a process rather than a product. Based on Janet Emig's breakdown of the writing process, the process is centered on the idea that students determine the content of the course by exploring the craft of writing using their own interests, language, techniques, voice, and freedom, and where students learn what people respond to and what they don't. Classroom activities often include peer work where students themselves are teaching, reviewing, brainstorming, and editing.
Processability theory is a theory of second language acquisition developed by Manfred Pienemann. The theory has been used as a framework by scientists from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
Concision is a writing principle of eliminating redundancy. For example, a sentence of "It is a fact that most arguments must try to convince readers, that is the audience, that the arguments are true." may be expressed more concisely as "Most arguments must demonstrate their truth to readers." – the observations that the statement is a fact and that readers are its audience are redundant, and it is unnecessary to repeat the word "arguments" in the sentence.
Efforts to teach writing in primary and secondary schools in the United States at a national scale and using methods other than direct teacher-student tutorial were first implemented in the 19th century.
Revision is a process in writing of rearranging, adding, or removing paragraphs, sentences, or words. Writers may revise their writing after a draft is complete or during the composing process. Revision involves many of the strategies known generally as editing but also can entail larger conceptual shifts of purpose and audience as well as content. Many writers go through multiple rounds of revisions before they reach a final draft: "Few writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try. Quite often you will discover, on examining the completed work, that there are serious flaws in the arrangement of the material, calling for transpositions... do not be afraid to experiment with your text."
A dialogue journal is an ongoing written interaction between two people to exchange experiences, ideas, knowledge or reflections. It is used most often in education as a means of sustained written interaction between students and teachers at all education levels. It can be used to promote second language learning and learning in all areas.
Theories of rhetoric and composition pedagogy encompass a wide range of interdisciplinary fields centered on the instruction of writing. Noteworthy to the discipline is the influence of classical Ancient Greece and its treatment of rhetoric as a persuasive tool. Derived from the Greek work for public speaking, rhetoric's original concern dealt primarily with the spoken word. In the treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies five Canons of the field of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. While rhetoric traditionally concerned matters related to verbal orations or speeches, both rhetoric and composition are related to the expression of ideas, often in an attempt to influence one's audience. In addition, composition is also concerned with the principles of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery traditionally associated with rhetoric; even memory can become an element of composition when one is writing a speech or a scholarly paper to be delivered orally. Thus, rhetoric and composition—colloquially termed "rhet/comp" or "comp/rhet"—became a field of its own and remains a burgeoning discipline in universities today.
Andrea A. Lunsford is an American writer and scholar who specializes in the field of composition and rhetoric studies. She is the director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English Emerita at Stanford University. She is also a faculty member at the Bread Loaf School of English. Lunsford received her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Florida and completed her Ph.D. in English at the Ohio State University in 1977. Lunsford has served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), as Chair of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Division on Writing, and as a member of the MLA Executive Council.
Paul Kei Matsuda is a Japanese-born American applied linguist. He is currently a professor of English and the director of second language writing at Arizona State University He has published several articles and edited books on the areas of second language writing, composition studies, and cognitive and linguistic theories of composition.
The Sydney School is a genre-based writing pedagogy that analyses literacy levels of students. The Sydney School's pedagogy broadened the traditional observation-based writing in primary schools to encompass a spectrum of different genres of text types that are appropriate to various discourses and include fiction and non-fiction. The method and practice of teaching established by the Sydney School encourages corrective and supportive feedback in the education of writing practices for students, particularly regarding second language students. The Sydney School works to reflectively institutionalise a pedagogy that is established to be conducive to students of lower socio-economic backgrounds, indigenous students and migrants lacking a strong English literacy basis. The functional linguists who designed the genre-based pedagogy of the Sydney School did so from a semantic perspective to teach through patterns of meaning and emphasised the importance of the acquisition of a holistic literacy in various text types or genres. ‘Sydney School’ is not however an entirely accurate moniker as the pedagogy has evolved beyond metropolitan Sydney universities to being adopted nationally and, by 2000, was exported to centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, and parts of Britain.
Victor Villanueva is a Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican academic and scholar in rhetoric and composition studies, serving the role of Regents Professor Emeritus at Washington State University. Villanueva was awarded NCTE’s David Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English for his groundbreaking book Bootstraps, From an American Academic of Color. In 2009, Villanueva was the recipient of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Exemplar's Award. Villanueva has written and edited a number of significant works on the topic of race, rhetoric, basic writing, and the social and political contexts of literacy education.
