Week 2: Villanueva

Jared Wheelock

Professor Brian Graves

Lang 120

6 September 2018

Villanueva, Victor Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. National

Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

In this excerpt from ​Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color​, Director of

the Writing Program at Washington State University, Victor Villanueva tells his story
of his experience through college and the understanding of the importance of
rhetoric, with the purpose of educating other teachers on the importance of
rhetoric, and to open up their eyes to their fault of not teaching their students
elements of writing that are vital, not because they choose not to teach it, but
simply because they don’t know it’s something they need to include. He wants to
save the “victims of the language of failure.” It’s enlightening to think about writing
in this way, because it opens up your perspective to think about the elements of
writing that are important that you don’t realize are important, so it makes you
think about all the things you could be working on to be a better writer.

Week 3: Sommers

Jared Wheelock

Professor Brian Graves

Lang 120
8 October 2018
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult
Writers.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, 1980.

In this scholarly article from ​College Composition and Communication, ​Director of

Expository Writing at Harvard, Nancy Sommers presents personal definitions of
“revision” from both students and experienced writers to teachers who are unaware
of the way they’ve been teaching revision improperly, and open their eyes to the
other approaches more beneficial to their students. She understands revision to be
a constant factor to be considered during the writing process rather than it being a
final step at the end of a linear process. It’s important to know what role revision
plays when you write because if you recognize its constant role from beginning to
end you can produce the best piece of yours possible.

Week 4: Dirk

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces, vol.1 2010

In this chapter from ​Writing Spaces,​ a textbook for college students, Kerry Dirk
writes a casual letter to composition students on the true definition of genre and
how understanding it allows you to become a better writer. Presenting multiple
quotes from other professors and her own personal experience. She states that
being able to discern between multiple genres will give you a large repertoire and
improve you as a writer, and knowing what kind of response you’d like to elicit from
your reader will assist you in the writing process. This is actually extremely
interesting and helpful because if you study multiple genres and understand how
they work and what the specific genre provokes in an audience you will have a
large toolbox to pull from when you’re writing, tailoring your piece in the best
possible way for your audience.

Week 6: Thonney
Thonney, Theresa. "Teaching the Conventions of Academic Discourse." ​Teaching
English in the Two-Year College,​ vol. 38, no. 4, May 2011.

In this scholarly article from ​Teaching English in the Two-Year College​, Theresa
Thonney, an associate professor at Columbia Basin College, attempts to explain to
other professional academic writers how there are standards in academic writing
that can be identified and used to their advantage. Analyzing “twenty-four research
articles” to find standards and features that unite academic writing, she believes if
conventions such as introducing topics or organizing arguments can be found and
taught first-year students will have “a valuable tool for clarifying academic
mysteries to large numbers of students.“ What I take away from this is that there
are still to this day unexplored elements in the writing world that are still being
studied and theorized about. A lot of people have differing opinions on the same
subject and the hard thing to do is find out who exactly is right. It takes evidence,
research, and time to organize an argument to try to prove your point.

Week 7: Stern

Stern, Arthur A. “When Is a Paragraph?” ​College Composition and Communication​,

vol. 27, no. 3, 1976.

In this journal article from ​College Composition and Communication, ​Arthur Stern, a
professional writer and teacher seeks to increase our understanding of what a
paragraph and how we are teaching it in a misguided way. By displaying quotes
from other experts on the matter, he discusses how paragraphs are seen is singular
units and are taught in a formulaic way as opposed to discourse-centered and
working together as a whole. He says, “Paragraphing, Rodgers here suggests, is
governed by rhetorical choice rather than by logical or grammatical rule.” His
purpose is to educate other professional writers so that future students can learn
about writing in a discourse-centered way as opposed to what is being taught now,
because it limits writers on how a paragraph should be written. What I take away
from this is that so much of what I learned in school about writing was taught to
me to be inarguable fact but in all reality it’s up for debate and I can have my own
opinions on the matter.