Interview

Multimodal Composition and the Rhetoric of Teaching: A Conversation with Cheryl Ball

Cheryl Ball is an Associate Professor of New Media Studies at Illinois State University where she teaches courses on multimodal composition as well as digital media, composition theory, and digital publishing. She gives talks and workshops on these topics around the country and has published and collaborated on a number of articles, edited collections, book chapters, and webtexts as well. She has also co-authored with Kristen Arola a textbook, Visualizing Composition. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the editor of the electronic journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. IW editor Wade Mahon spoke with Ball by phone on June 23, 2011. (1973), Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (1981), and Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing (2000), in addition to numerous articles, workshops and conference presentations. He is an advocate of freewriting and other strategies that empower students to develop their own voices in writing. He is currently working on a book on speech and writing.  On 20 October 2008, IW Editors Wade Mahon and Sarah Pogell spoke with Elbow by telephone.

Articles

-Local Archives, Local Practices: The Writing Research of Essie Chamberlain, 1920–1925. Lori Ostergaard 

This article analyzes the innovative and progressive high school composition research conducted by one of the National Council of Teachers of English’s earliest and most prolific members: Essie Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s work illustrates just one early twentieth-century teacher’s efforts to test a variety of composition methods and materials during a time when many composition histories claim research in the field had stalled. Classroom research may constitute the largest unexplored area of the composition archives, and Chamberlain’s work demonstrates the important contributions that high school research studies may make to our histories of composition as an emerging discipline.
 

-How Computer Editing Responds to Types of Writing Errors. David Major

Computer editing tools enjoy a variety of reputations for effectiveness, often leaving student writers, workplace writers, and teachers of writing unsure about how, when, or even whether to use spelling and grammar checkers. Choosing specific categories of writing errors to test and using large samples of sentences provides data allowing definitive analysis of the capabilities of computer editing, in this case, the proofing tools of Microsoft Word ’07. With this information, writers and teachers can plan their strategies for editing.

-Local and Global:  The Writing Class’s Vital Role in Composing Citizens. Donna Dunbar-Odom

The role of the introductory, first-year writing course is key in helping students begin to make sense of and take part in a world that demands that they see themselves as part of a global citizenry. But such work must be tempered with awareness that not all students are equally prepared to meet such change without trepidation and anxiety—especially working-class students, who are most vulnerable to those shifts. The writing course can offer glimpses of resistances to and difficulties in becoming citizens of the world. This essay describes a particular class with a particular sequence of writing assignments, but the particular assignments are less important than their thrust and purpose and the ways those assignments work to orchestrate students’ engagement with a larger worldview. The writing class is the linchpin to a vital humanities curriculum; the writing class is the place where students can see how the big questions in humanities courses connect in real ways to their own lives.

Review Essay

A Tipping Point in Plagiarism and Copyright Studies. Elaine Whitaker 

Blum, Susan D. My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2009. 229 pages. 

The Modern Language Association of America. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009. xxi + 292 pages.

MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3rd ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. xxiv + 336 pages.

Steve Westbrook, ed. Composition & Copyright: Perspectives on Teaching, Text-Making, and Fair Use. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. vi + 225 pages.

Reviews

Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction:  First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars. edited by Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris.
Reviewed by Bethany Blankenship

A Rhetoric of Style. by Barry Brummett.
Reviewed by D. Alexis Hart

Resources in Technical Communication:  Outcomes and Approaches. edited by Cynthia L. Selfe.
Reviewed by Evon Hawkins

Teaching the Neglected “R”:  Rethinking Writing Instruction in Secondary Classrooms. edited by Thomas Newkirk and Richard Kent.
Reviewed by Kevin Roozen

Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication. by Timothy D. Giles.
Reviewed by Jessica Rivait