Students always benefit from more rhetorical analysis. This is a simple statement that our disciplinary identities, the connotations that automatically form in our brains as rhetoricians and writing teachers, perhaps might function to cloud. What I mean to say here is not that (or not only that) students benefit from more rhetorical analysis assignments being … Continue reading Re-Framing RetroActive Composition
Composition and education have long questioned a central premise of the academy and university life in higher education: What is a classroom? Recent research published in Psychological Science steers us toward a premise that is of paramount interest to our discipline. What would it mean for the natural world to serve the acting, thinking brains of our … Continue reading Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition
A bevy of scholarship within both the sciences and the humanities have surveyed the implications presented by recent research into the human's brain's astounding and only recently-realized levels of neuroplasticicy. The brain, the body of research suggests, is not a static entity that exists in fixed and stationary configuration, but rather is malleable, changeable, pliant … Continue reading Developing Habits, Developing Minds: What Can Neuroplasticity Do For Composition?
I do not wish to utter even a single cliché until the day on which I die. I wish that utterance to be "I did well," or "I was very happy," or perhaps even a cliché utilizing the phrases "well-spent" or "well-lived" or "I gave all." I think, right now, those are clichés I can live with, … Continue reading Poem Written On Simon & Shuster’s “Handbook For Writers.”
Lately I’ve been re-reading an old favorite I first read midway through college, right when I was just beginning to locate myself as a writer: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book raises a number of issues I won’t even begin to detail in this post, but I wanted to pay … Continue reading Writing, Composition and Deliberate Living
Jacob Richter 