In my comp class right now, the students are composing using Sondra Perl's composing guidelines. I love them, but students have a love/relationship with them. That much writing is usually more than they want to do at one time...
I am researching this semester the teaching of professional writing, and my instructor is asking me to look outside the field of English studies for the sources. So I am traipsing through the world of journals I have never felt the need to look at before: Technical Communications, IEEE, Journal of Marketing in Education and more. And of couse, the ones I need are not available in full text in the databases. And many of them are not even available in our library here. Old Dominion has several of them in their print holdings, but that does not help me a great deal since I do not live in Virgina.
So for my annotated bibliography entry for today, I read eight pages where a couple of engineers argue that students should be exposed to visual rhetoric and document design. They used their observations as evidence. Fine. I am good with that. What they do not do is use much theory. They list one theorist, but do not summarize his argument. Instead, they show examples of how student work can be formatted to overcome common problems with illustrations commonly encountered with engineering students! So the middle of the article was essentially useless for any kind of broad sense...
Looking through some of the bibliographies posted by the other students, I am pleased to see articles that also seem applicable to my class idea. Of course, the avenue that I am ignoring at this point is the scholarship directly relating to honors students. I am not looking forward to digging that up. It is hard enough to find scholarship relating to the pedagogy of technical writing.
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