front cover of Academic and Professional Writing in an Age of Accountability
Academic and Professional Writing in an Age of Accountability
Edited by Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater, with an Afterword by Jessica Enoch and Scott Wible
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
What current theoretical frameworks inform academic and professional writing? What does research tell us about the effectiveness of academic and professional writing programs? What do we know about existing best practices? What are the current guidelines and procedures in evaluating a program’s effectiveness? What are the possibilities in regard to future research and changes to best practices in these programs in an age of accountability? Editors Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater bring together leading scholars in rhetoric and composition to consider the history, trends, and future of academic and professional writing in higher education through the lens of these five central questions.
 
The first two essays in the book provide a history of the academic and professional writing program at the University of Maryland. Subsequent essays explore successes and challenges in the establishment and development of writing programs at four other major institutions, identify the features of language that facilitate academic and professional communication, look at the ways digital practices in academic and professional writing have shaped how writers compose and respond to texts, and examine the role of assessment in curriculum and pedagogy. An afterword by distinguished rhetoric and composition scholars Jessica Enoch and Scott Wible offers perspectives on the future of academic and professional writing.
 
This collection takes stock of the historical, rhetorical, linguistic, digital, and evaluative aspects of the teaching of writing in higher education. Among the critical issues addressed are how university writing programs were first established and what early challenges they faced, where writing programs were housed and who administered them, how the language backgrounds of composition students inform the way writing is taught, the ways in which current writing technologies create new digital environments, and how student learning and programmatic outcomes should be assessed. 
 
[more]

front cover of Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 3rd Edition
Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 3rd Edition
Essential Tasks and Skills
John M. Swales & Christine B. Feak
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Like its predecessor, the third edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students explains understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres; includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising; shows how to write summaries and critiques; features Language Focus sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives; and helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities.

Among the many changes in the third edition:
*newer, longer, and more authentic texts and examples
*greater discipline variety in texts (added texts from hard sciences and engineering)
*more in-depth treatment of research articles
*greater emphasis on vocabulary issues
*revised flow-of-ideas section
*additional tasks that require students to do their own research
*more corpus-informed content
*binding that allows the book to lay flat when open.

The Commentary (teacher's notes and key) (978-0-472-03506-9) has been revised expanded. 

[more]

front cover of Acknowledging Writing Partners
Acknowledging Writing Partners
Laura Micciche
University Press of Colorado, 2017
Acknowledging Writing Partners treats the genre of written acknowledgements as a lens for viewing writing as a practice of indebted partnerships. Like new media scholars who have argued that studying ubiquitous technologies such as the pencil reveals the mundane and profound ways in which writing is always mediated by tools, Laura R. Micciche argues that writing activities are frequently mediated by human and non-human others, advancing a view of composing that accounts for partners who emerge in acknowledgements: feelings, animals, and random material phenomena. Acknowledgements are micro economies of debt and praise; they reveal writing's connectedness, often repressed by the argument or set of propositions that follow. Micciche suggests new methods for studying and theorizing writing that take into account the whole surround of writing. In doing so, Micciche asks what difference this economy makes to dominant conceptions of writers and writing as well as to pedagogical principles that inform writing instruction—and what difference it make to writers.
[more]

front cover of Adapting VALUEs
Adapting VALUEs
Tracing the Life of a Rubric through Institutional Ethnography
Jennifer Grouling
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Adapting VALUEs traces the use of the American Association of Colleges and Universities' VALUE rubric for written communication at two small universities. Through the lens of institutional ethnography, Jennifer Grouling examines how faculty and administrators adapted the rubric for their own purposes and writing programs. Throughout the book, Grouling explores the ways in which faculty members' interactions on committees, views of the classroom, disciplinary affiliation, and racial privilege impacted their views of this national rubric. Overall, Adapting VALUEs offers valuable insights into the power of the rubric as both a national and a local text that dictates pedagogical and administrative practice.
 
[more]

front cover of Air & Light & Time & Space
Air & Light & Time & Space
How Successful Academics Write
Helen Sword
Harvard University Press, 2017

From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment.

So how do these successful academics write, and where do they find the “air and light and time and space,” in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines, their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection?

Sword identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence; Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity and pleasure. Building on this “BASE,” she illuminates the emotional complexity of the writing process and exposes the lack of writing support typically available to early-career academics. She also lays to rest the myth that academics must produce safe, conventional prose or risk professional failure. The successful writers profiled here tell stories of intellectual passions indulged, disciplinary conventions subverted, and risk-taking rewarded. Grounded in empirical research and focused on sustainable change, Air & Light & Time & Space offers a customizable blueprint for refreshing personal habits and creating a collegial environment where all writers can flourish.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter