Epstein, Joseph. "Heavy Sentences." THE NEW CRITERION (June 2011).

Fish, Stanley.  How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.  New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

Fish’s central key to good writing, his Open Sesame, is to master forms of sentences, which can be imitated and later used with one’s own content when one comes to write one’s own compositions. Form, form, form, he implores, it is everything. “You shall tie yourself to forms,” he writes, “and forms will set you free.”

By forms Stanley Fish means the syntactical models found in the sentences of good writers, or sometimes even in grabber lines from movies, or even interviews with movie stars: “If you want to see the girl next door,” he recounts Joan Crawford saying, “go next door.” He serves up John Updike’s sentence about Ted Williams’s last home run in Fenway Park—“It was in the books while it was still in the sky”—as a form that can be made use of in one’s own writing by wringing changes on the original. “It was in my stomach while it was still on the shelf” is Fish’s example of such a change.

Fish’s first bit of instruction is that one practice wringing changes on these forms, over and over again, as a beginning music student might practice scales. “It may sound paradoxical,” he writes, “but verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.” He adds: “For the purposes of becoming a facile (in the positive sense) writer of sentences, the sentences you practice with should have as little meaning as possible.” Is this true? Taking the Updike sentence for my model, allow me to kitchen-test the method: “My toches was still in Chicago while my mind was in Biarritz”; “My mind was still in Vegas while my toches was in the Bodleian.” I fear it doesn’t do much for me, but perhaps I am too far gone for such warming-up exercises.

The larger point for Fish is that one learns to write

not by learning the rules [of grammar, syntax, and the rest], but by learning the limited number of relationships your words, phrases, and clauses can enter into, and becoming alert to those times when the relationships are not established or are unclear: when a phrase just dangles in space, when a connective has nothing to connect to, when a prepositional phrase is in search of a verb to complement, when a pronoun cannot be paired with a noun. . . .

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053

Haslett, Adam. "How to Write a (Good) Sentence." SALON January 23, 2011.

Fish, Stanley.  How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.  New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

This question of how forms of writing produce forms of thought is one that the literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish has been wrestling with most of his career. He first came to prominence in the late 1970s with his theory of "interpretative communities." This held that all readings of literary texts are inescapably bound up with the cultural assumptions of readers, an uncontroversial proposition now but one that quickly earned him the sloppy epithet of "relativist." In the late 1980s and early 1990s he turned the Duke University English department into the headquarters of the then-burgeoning "theory" industry before, in 1999, surprising the academic world by moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he set himself the task of trying to renovate undergraduate education in basic skills like writing. Though he doesn't mention that experience in his new book, How To Write a Sentence and How To Read One, it's not far offstage. The problem with Strunk & White, in Fish's view, is that "they assume a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have attained," that is, the Cornell kids whose secondary education did at least a halfway decent job of teaching them the basics.

Fish's aim is to offer a guide to sentence craft and appreciation that is both deeper and more democratic. What, at base, is a sentence? he asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students "nothing about how to write." Instead, we should be examining the "logical relationships" within different sentence forms to see how they organize the world. His argument is that you can learn to write and later become a good writer by understanding and imitating these forms from many different styles. Thus, if you're drawn to Jonathan Swift's biting satire in the sentence, "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse," then, Fish advises, "Put together two mildly affirmative assertions, the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate." He offers, "Yesterday I saw a man electrocuted and it really was surprising how quiet he became." Lame, and hardly Swift, as Fish is the first to admit, but identifying the logical structure does specify how satire functions at the level of the sentence and, if you want to employ the form, that's a good thing to know. . . .

Visit: http://www.slate.com/id/2282086/.

Cfp: "Rhetoric and Writing across Language Boundaries," 22nd Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, Pennsylvania State University, July 10-12, 2011.

Developments in globalization, new media literacies, and postcolonial perspectives have called attention to the transnational flow of people and texts and to the hybridity of language itself. These developments have made scholars in rhetoric and composition aware of the monolingual assumptions informing their disciplinary discourses and pedagogical practices. With scholars considering such issues, there are calls now to understand the cross-language relations of writers and writing in an effort to reconfigure the discourses and practices of our discipline.

In light of these disciplinary trends, the 22nd Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition will focus on defining a multilingual rhetoric and writing practice. Featured speakers include leading scholars who address multilingualism in their research and scholarship. We invite you to share your reflections and research on this theme.

Visit the conference website here: http://www.outreach.psu.edu/programs/rhetoric/index.html.

"All Our Relations: Contested Space, Contested Knowledge," Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, April 6-9, 2011.

The phrase “all our relations” is a familiar one for many indigenous peoples in North America. It encapsulates an entire philosophy of humans in relation to other living things—plants, animals, rocks, earth—that emphasizes the intricately connected web of relationships that sustains our mutual ability to live out our shared existence on the earth together. In those teachings all living things matter, all are important, all must be treated as relatives. Even harmful, frightening or negative relatives are important and must be understood and honored if we are to survive together in the same spaces. “All our relations” is a phrase used both as invocation and conclusion—a heuristic that forces us to consider the balance between the weight of each human’s responsibility in maintaining the balance of the world and in understanding the smallness of each individual in relation to the larger web of meaning. I invoke “all our relations” here to allow CCCC’s scholars and teachers the chance to consider how such a concept of balance and webbed relationality might help us build a scholarly community in which knowledge and space are always contested. This is a space where it’s never taken for granted that we all value the same originary stories, but where the struggle between stories isn’t for dominance; rather, the struggle is to sustain our very rich, very productive differences in the face of social forces that call for dominance. This community, then, is one where the diversity of our disciplinary fields, and of the people who work here, is understood -as the heartbeat of a vital and vibrant future. More practically, in bringing this sense of “all our relations” to the CCCC, I want to encourage all members of the organization to acknowledge both the scholarly relationships that are frequently marginalized at the Convention and to make more substantial connections to the communities outside of higher education whose existence informs the work that we do. So, for the 2011 CCCC Convention, I’m asking you to share your space at our annual national gathering in the interest of producing knowledge that will help us contest, debate, revise & re-create who and what we are as both a disciplinary organization and as individual scholars, teachers, students, writers. Key to each of us being able to do this is the acknowledgement that we depend on each other—you and I, digital rhetorician and second-language writing instructor, istorian and 2-year college teacher, theorist and workplace studies scholar, ethodologist and tech writing teacher, administrator and graduate student. We, literally, make the disciplinary community habitable for one another even when—maybe, especially when—we don’t see the commonalities in our work, can’t discern the communal warp & weft of our dependence, have a hard time understanding the relevance of one to the other. This is a convention that focuses on those differences as the very strands of the web that makes us a community, a discipline. How then, to begin to interrogate and understand such a web? Consider some of these questions: • What spaces, knowledges, people and things is CCCC related to? How can those relatives be brought into the center of our conversations, in both our disciplinary and individual practices? • How do we define communities within our discipline and the institutions within which we build our professional homes? How do we make our work meaningful outside of those disciplines and institutions? • How can we build stronger communities within our classrooms? Within our graduate programs? Within our teacher preparation programs? • As a discipline, how do we (how might we) extend & complicate the stories we tell about ourselves? • How do we define “theory” & what it means to “theorize” in our discipline? What kinds of theories do we need to build in order to enrich our shared community? • What kinds of rhetorics do we enact as teachers and scholars? What kinds of methodologies and theories do we have to identify and study these rhetorics? • How are we being responsible to our relatives in the ways that we mentor one another, our graduate students, our undergraduates, our study participants, ourselves? • How might creative writing (all genres) and/or digital writing help us to explore ways we can attain a more vital and vibrant conversation about all kinds of writing? • How can languages other than English--including Indigenous languages and less commonly taught languages--become central to our rhetorical and pedagogical theories and practices? • Where is the space for an exploration of embodied rhetorics? • How can critical, gender, race, queer, disability, embodied, and cultural theories & rhetorics help us to re-make the culture of our discipline? • How do theories of civic engagement intersect with composition, rhetoric, writing, and the world we all live in? • How can our discipline transition from an understanding of rhetoric as a Greek and Roman tradition to rhetoric as a set of rules/practices locatable in all cultures, places, and times? As you read through this call, I hope you’ll think of ways to deliberately violate the categorical boundaries that the standard area clusters for submission usually force us to live within. What do I mean by that? For example, all too often when we talk about “teaching writing,” we’re really using a short-hand that means teaching first-year writing or teaching composition. But there are more kinds of writing getting taught than that and when we narrow our stories down, we run the risk of not listening to folks who are teaching digital writing or professional writing or life writing or writing in communities or second-language writing. These are, quite literally, our writing relations. And they have important things to bring to the table. As a way to encourage you to craft proposals that see connections instead of boundaries, I encourage you to eschew the usual cluster categories altogether and submit your proposal under #113—Contesting Boundaries! This new category is, in fact, the space where I hope all of the submissions arrive so that even the review process can become a moment of learning from each other! Why here? Why now? The city of Atlanta is itself a contested space. Built on land that was taken from the Cherokee and Creek nations, it plays a role in at least two iconic national narratives – that of manifest destiny and of a nation divided by slavery—out of which some of the most elemental contestations of knowledge in our national consciousness have arisen. As a geographical space celebrated as the epicenter of the “New South,” Atlanta stands at the crossroads of a contest of narratives of progress-despiteadversity like “the Trail of Tears,” “we shall overcome,” “the South shall rise again.” In fact, the city of Atlanta’s seal shows a phoenix rising from the ashes. And yet, all that has been destroyed in its history (i.e.: “overcome”) cannot simply be forgotten. In this racially diverse city of over 5 million, where thousands of immigrants (both forced and voluntary) have flocked for hundreds of years, where both poverty and plenty are visible on the face of the city, and where the non-white population is more than 60%, I invite you to consider how the complex, problematic history of the city of Atlanta might help us better understand our own community today. In the end, “all our relations” should remind us that only in our connections to others—even those profoundly and uncomfortably different than ourselves—can we find the key to our own survival. In asking you to take a more personal, more relational approach to our convention time together in Atlanta, I’m also asking you to take responsibility for your part in making the culture of our discipline, a place we’ve all chosen to live. For further information, visit: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv.

Cfp: "Academic Writing and Beyond in Multicultural Societies," Tel-Aviv, July 28-29, 2010.

Hosted by the Institute of Research, Curriculum and Program Development for Teacher Education. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, more and more educators have come to realize theimportance of academic writing programs both in and beyond academia. The view that thoseentering higher education are able to cope with their writing tasks without guidance has been widelychallenged. The need for quality writing ability after leaving higher education is clear. Beyond theacademy, with globalization in today’s worlds of business, research, and culture, writing skills are anecessity for all who wish to advance professionally. Especially in multicultural societies wherestudents come from many different cultural and linguistic traditions and are often expected to writein more than one language, supporting student writers at all levels of study and preparing them forwriting after their studies are pedagogical imperatives. Two years ago, the Israel Forum for Academic Writing held its first meeting at Tel Aviv University.Its purpose was to connect people engaged in the teaching and research of academic writing in Israel. Instructors in academic writing in Hebrew and English from colleges and universities throughout thecountry attended this meeting. Since then, our organization has grown – we now have over 150members on our mailing list. Visitors from abroad as well as local members have addressed issuessuch as responding to and assessing student writing, the use of technology in the teaching of writing,and how to gain administrative support for our programs. We have been fortunate in finding a homeand support for our organization through the MOFET Institute. In keeping with the intercultural and multi-linguistic nature of today’s societies, invited speakers atthe first international conference on academic writing in Israel will address current issues in firstlanguage, second (third, fourth, etc.) language and foreign language writing. We are also planning to present a panel of writers in English, Hebrew, Arabic, and perhaps other languages on the topic,“Universals and Specifics of Academic Writing across Languages”. Participants will address thequestion of what it means to write in their various languages. Parallel sessions will include individualpresentations, round table discussions, and workshops. The program is designed to engage all those interested in academic writing programs and the writersthey educate. Keynote and plenary sessions will be delivered in English. Papers and small grouppresentations may be given in Hebrew, English, or Arabic. Research-based contributions, as well aspractical approaches to the teaching and learning of academic and professional writing are welcome. Types of Presentations • Individual paper or presentation: 40 minutes including at least 10 minutes for discussion • Panel presentation: three 25-minute presentations with 15 minutes for discussion • Workshop: 90 minutes allowing at least 30 minutes for non-presenter participation • Round-table discussion: 90 minutes including non-presenter participation • Poster presentation Organizing Committee: Trudy Zuckermann — Achva Academic College of Education; Hebrew University of Jerusalem Bella Rubin — Tel Aviv University Hadara Perpignan — Bar Ilan University Sue Schneider — David Yellin College of Education; Open University of Israel Michael Dickel — Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Ohalo College Miri Yochanna — Seminar Hakibbutzim College of Education; CET (the Center for EducationalTechnology) Bev Stock — David Yellin College of Education Ziona Snir — Tel Aviv University; Seminar Hakibbutzim College of Education Cherryl Smith — California State University in Sacramento Further information is available from the conference chair, Dr. Trudy Zuckermann, mailto:trudy@vms.huji.ac.il

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES September 7, 2009.

I write a third column on the teaching of writing in colleges and universities because three important questions posed by a large number of posters remain unanswered: (1) Isn’t the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier? (2) Isn’t extensive reading the key to learning how to write? (3) What would a composition course based on the method I urge look like? Questions (1) and (2) can be answered briefly. Question (3) is, as they say, a work in progress. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/what-should-colleges-teach-part-3/.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach?" THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES August 27, 2009.

The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than advancing it. Have we lost our way or finally found it? Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization. It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices (two words excoriated in the ACTA report) cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.” The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun. That should be the real core of any curriculum. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/.

Cfp: "Writing Research Across Borders II," George Mason University, February 17-20, 2011.

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years. Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research. As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition’s previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims. Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects. The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to writing@education.ucsb.edu. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker’s individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter. For further information, contact: Professor Charles Bazerman Department of Education Gevirtz Graduate School of Education University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 phone: 805-893-7543 bazerman@education.ucsb.edu http://www.education.ucsb.edu/bazerman.

Cfp: "The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew," CCCC, Louisville, March 17-20, 2010.

Annual Convention, Conference on College Composition and Communication. Whether it’s taking the old and making it fresh and new or taking the current and giving it a different spin, to remix a thing is to try and make it better. In our 61st year, after decades of innovative teaching and cutting-edge scholarship, the CCCC remix provides us with a way to revisit, rethink, revise and renew our vision for the future of our field. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv.

Kugelmass, Joseph. "Stop Using Rhetoric to Teach Writing." INSIDE HIGHER ED December 23, 2008.

After almost five years teaching writing, English, ESL, and humanities courses to high school students and undergraduates, I have come to the conclusion that it is a serious mistake to ground undergraduate instruction in writing in the basics of Aristotelian rhetoric. I believe doing so is increasingly common, and that it is increasingly normal for universities to reframe composition jobs as being in “rhetoric and composition.” This is a discussion somewhat rooted in the practicalities of teaching first-year undergraduates to write, but it has much broader implications. It is part of a larger conversation about what, exactly, the humanities are supposed to mean at a historical moment when college-level reading and writing skills are quite valuable, yet also when the political and economic conditions put “anti-ideological” pressure on institutions of higher learning. In other words, universities increasingly see themselves as preparing students to write fluently on any topic, from any perspective. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/12/23/kugelmass.

Major, William. "Teaching Composition: a Reconsideration." INSIDE HIGHER ED July 22, 2008.

When I tell new acquaintances that I am an English professor, they generally react two ways. First, they express dismay that they now have to watch what they say (as if I were grading their performance). Second, and more to the point, many of them ask an inevitable question: “How well do your students write?” That people outside of academia recognize a crisis of communication within speaks to one central fact: The average college student is remarkably challenged by the age-old practice of putting ideas down on paper. Very few people would argue with the truism that success within the university and beyond is predicated upon students’ achieving a certain level of proficiency as writers. Thus, if the inability to communicate is begrudgingly taken as a given at the beginning of the freshman year, it becomes — in the general lament — a tragedy by graduation. Who, then, is to blame? English departments are a common target. I was stunned when, as a work/study graduate student in the department office, I answered the phone during lunch only to be berated by a physics professor who wanted to know what the hell we were doing over there. Things had apparently become so critical that even the good people in the sciences were beginning to notice. Leaving aside for a moment the unexamined presumption that only English departments should be responsible for writing — as if we alone knew how to impart the wisdom of subject-verb-object — I do in fact want to take his complaint seriously. What are we doing over here? I have no interest in the now clichéd grumblings over English departments and their esoteric if not onanistic engagement in high-octane literary theory. I will only say that there is merit to the criticism. On the whole, however, such censure really isn’t going anywhere; these exercises in cryptic marginalia are simply what we do, much in the same way that hyenas eat carrion. Both have their place, and whether one is more useful than the other is a matter for disputation. My questions are more practical, if not more overtly political: Why is the teaching of writing so readily given over to the novitiate? If writing is that important as a university and life skill, why do we assign its teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors? Where are the associate and full professors of English, for it is exceedingly difficult to find them in writing classrooms? . . . Get the answers here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/07/22/major.

Furedi, Frank. "Spell It Like It is." SPIKED ONLINE August 12, 2008.

Those of us who work in universities are used to reading essays by students who have liberated themselves from the oppressive regime of good grammar and spelling. Some of us still bother to correct misspelled words; others have become tired and indifferent to the problem of poor spelling. Now, an academic has come up with an interesting compromise. Ken Smith, a criminologist at Bucks New University, England, argues that we should chill out and accept the most common spelling mistakes as ‘variant spellings’. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5574/.