Academic Writing Across the Disciplines

This comment was submitted to International Affairs in late September 2018 and returned within 48 hours with a note that the journal does not publish rejoinders. That the article I comment on can be published at all is testimony to the sorry state of the field of International Relations, which since 9/11 has slowly descended to what I call in my Discipline of Western Supremacy (Pluto Press 2014) an ‘embedded discipline’ serving the requirements of war preparation and demonisation of the ‘enemy’. To allow peer review I had to refer to my own Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War in the third person and I also tried to be as ‘academic’ as possible and did not refer to the ‘mercenary quality’ of this research (as I do in the book), although ERC funding of work of this quality tells it all.

Academic Writing, Real World Topics fills a void in the writing-across-the-curriculum textbook market. It draws together articles and essays of actual academic prose as opposed to journalism; it arranges material topically as opposed to by discipline or academic division; and it approaches topics from multiple disciplinary and critical perspectives. With extensive introductions, rhetorical instruction, and suggested additional resources accompanying each chapter, Academic Writing, Real World Topics introduces students to the kinds of research and writing that they will be expected to undertake throughout their college careers and beyond. Readings are drawn from various disciplines across the major divisions of the university and focus on issues of real import to students today, including such topics as living in a digital culture, learning from games, learning in a digital age, living in a global culture, our post-human future, surviving economic crisis, and assessing armed global conflict. The book provides students with an introduction to the diversity, complexity and connectedness of writing in higher education today.

Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content.

COMMENTS

“Academic Writing, Real World Topics promises to be an ideal resource for college-level writing instruction. For students, the organization of the book will be helpful as it guides them through the process of writing and then provides real examples of writing in different disciplines. For instructors, the pairing of those examples with the writing process will simplify classroom instruction and allow for focus on particular issues relevant to the students. I am looking forward to using the book in my own writing seminars.” — Jacob Sauer, Vanderbilt University

“Rectenwald and Carl’s emphasis on discourses surrounding digital culture, transhumanism, and globalization will convince first-year writing students not only that they have something to say about these big issues, but also that their ideas matter and that there are many ways to participate in the conversation. Academic Writing, Real World Topics will model for students—as emerging scholars—the multiple approaches writers take to addressing and engaging with social, cultural, scientific, and technological change.” — Keaghan Turner, Coastal Carolina University

“With Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Rectenwald and Carl have prepared the definitive writing-across-the-curriculum textbook. This book engages students and teachers in lively and robust topics, but it also introduces them to the world of academic disciplines and their various concerns. The topics are compelling, and the concise introduction to academic writing is thorough and easily digested. This book will function not only for introductory writing sequences and WAC courses, but also for first-year seminars and other introductory surveys. There is simply no better book that I have seen for introducing students to both college-level writing and academic discourses more generally. I recommend it for instructors who wish to engage their students in productive scholarly writing and discussion, and also for those who strive for broader and deeper intellectual activity.” — Tamuira Reid, New York University

“What excites me about Academic Writing, Real World Topics is that this book is unapologetically smart, contemporary, and multi-disciplinary. It does a great job at presenting the anatomy of an argument as well as providing examples from a range of disciplines. Throughout, the book emphasizes the connection between logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The result is a systematic approach that makes students aware of how authors use language to create ideas. The emphasis on language in this text will ensure that students develop the reading and writing skills necessary to strive in college—something every text promises but rarely delivers. Finally, it is worth reiterating that the readings consist of contemporary essays in political science, sociology, education, information technology, and literary theory. This will engage students in the issues as well as prepare them as academic writers.” — Jacob Singer, Professor of Academic Writing

Comments from students using Real World Topics

“Academic Writing: Real World Topics is a book that boldly discusses the real-world problems that the new generation is now facing … The book helped me, as a student, to organize my thoughts on the emerging global culture through the lenses of renowned scholars. This collection helps students apply their growing writing skills to real topics that are applicable and important to school as well as to the rest of their lives.” — Georgia Grace Larsen, Sophomore in Media, Culture, and Communications, New York University

“Academic Writing, Real World Topics is an excellent resource for students in the twenty-first century. This book is engaging and easy-to-follow, as it is organized by thought-provoking and pertinent topics … As a student who used this book in a first-year writing seminar, I found it to be an excellent introduction to scholarly writing. Rectenwald and Carl break down various types of college-level writing into approachable steps, guide readers through each of those steps, and include a carefully-curated selection of essays that spark spirited discussions that extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom.” — Hon-Lum Cheung-Cheng, Sophomore in Politics at New York University

This study illuminates faculty beliefs about reading by closely examining their attitudes toward assigned readings and faculty professional reading practice. Drawing upon interview data from instructors teaching in a range of disciplines at a two-year college, we suggest that conversations about reading would benefit from greater awareness of the various contexts and purposes for reading. Rather than talk about reading as something students either “do” or “don’t do”, or do well or poorly, we draw attention to the ways that different purposes for reading shape reading behaviors for students and faculty alike. Studies of college reading often bemoan the sorry state of reading on college campuses: students are weak readers and resist assigned reading; instructors do not do enough to promote and monitor reading; more needs to be done to correct this situation. Certainly, there are reasons to be concerned about low levels of reading in higher education, and we share the view that both in...

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n3p173Desde a década de 1990, na Argentina, tem havido uma preocupação considerável sobre se as instituições de ensino superior devem assumir a responsabilidade de ensinar habilidades acadêmicas a sua população estudantil ou se ambos os graduandos e graduados devem lidar com o processo de enculturação sem assistência. Embora acadêmicos pareçam ter chegado a um acordo e uma série de ações destinadas a facilitar o acesso dos estudantes universitários em suas comunidades de discurso alvo tenham sido apresentadas, ainda há um debate acalorado sobre a forma como a questão deve ser abordada. Neste artigo vamos descrever as iniciativas levadas a cabo em duas faculdades de engenharia (a Facultad de Ciencias de la Alimentación e a Faculdad de Ingeniería pertencente à Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos) que abriram o caminho para a integração entre ensino e aprendizagem de habilidades de literacia acadêmica no currículo.

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on integrating corpora in a graduate-level technical editing course to teach students about writing variation. Students applied this knowledge to edit research-based texts for nonnative English speakers within the STEM disciplines. Though this case history focuses on corpora in a technical editing course, the approaches I describe transfer to any course with a writing component as well as across grade levels and student proficiencies. I conclude by addressing the barriers associated with integrating corpus-based learning into the classroom. Linguistic and rhetorical patterns reflect an academic discipline's subject area and its methods fo...

En este trabajo se presenta el diseño de un sistema didáctico para apoyar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la escritura del trabajo de título en la carrera de Ingeniería Civil Informática. Esta propuesta se fundamenta en una concepción sociocognitiva del proceso de escritura académica y disciplinar. Se recurre a la pedagogía del género como
sustento teórico para implementar una plataforma online, así como dispositivos pedagógicos basados en investigación lingüística. El macrogénero Trabajo Final de Grado (TFG) se caracteriza por su naturaleza articulatoria entre la formación universitaria y el desempeño laboral. Es un género escrito relevante en la trayectoria académica, ya que cristaliza un proceso de aprendizaje y de apropiación de habilidades profesionales de diferente naturaleza, las que son necesarias para la inserción en la comunidad de práctica concernida. Escribir, por tanto, el trabajo de título en Ingeniería Civil Informática requiere de la articulación de los contenidos, las formas de investigación y el estilo
discursivo disciplinar, todas necesidades relevantes, validadas por los expertos disciplinares. Para asegurar el último componente, se modela el conocimiento sobre el complejo proceso de producción discursiva-textual del trabajo de título por parte de especialistas en Ciencias del Lenguaje. Esta conjugación da como resultado un sistema de trabajo
colaborativo e interdisciplinario que permite fortalecer en el curriculum de ingeniería competencias fundamentales para un adecuado desempeño en entornos profesionales de creciente complejidad y dinamismo, lo que evidencia la necesidad de explotar el rol epistémico y retórico de la escritura en ingeniería.

Many students in Germany undertaking academic writing tasks consult one of the numerous German-language books on research writing. Curiously, these works tend to downplay or ignore creativity, compared to their American counterparts. A hermeneutic and rhetorical study that examines the structure, content, and style of 21 German books on research writing with the help of framing theory reveals that, firstly, the rationale given to readers for learning how to do a research project is usually that it enables them to complete difficult tasks and thus to graduate successfully – the potentially fascinating aspects, such as learning through writing, and the possibility of advancing the field are rarely mentioned. Secondly, when defining good academic research, US books stress exploration and invention based on wrestling with questions, while the German ones mostly emphasize rules, correctness within a fixed system, and the mastery of techniques. Finally, in the 21 works, academic work primarily comes across as a solitary, linear process neatly divided into separate phases, not as a holistic, discursive practice that takes place within the research community. The likely reasons for this phenomenon highlight several crucial challenges German writing teachers and consultants are facing: as the rhetoric/composition and writing consultancy scene in Germany is vibrant but somewhat marginalized at universities and relatively new, there is no tradition of mandatory composition courses influenced by writing studies with a creative component, and most guidebooks on research are not by writing experts but by professors in other fields. Moreover, there is still widespread belief that creativity cannot be taught, and that students’ fascination with their chosen field of study should be taken for granted, so that neither need to be mentioned in primers. Terminology might also play a role; the German term for ‘research (writing)’, ‘Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten’ or ‘academic practice’, already appears to emphasize correctness over discovery.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of applying the writing letter activity of writing to learn strategies on the English Language Academic Achievement and Attitude level of 11 th grade students. The research was carried out with 84 students (43 male, 41 female) at one of the state schools in Black Sea Region of Turkey. Mixed method was used in the research. A non-equivalent control group model which is one of the quasi-experimental methods was used in the quantitative part of the research. Simple Past Tense Achievement Test (SPTAT) developed by the researcher and Attitude to English Lesson Questionnaire (AELQ) developed by were used to obtain the quantitative data. Structured interview questions were asked to the six students chosen from the experimental groups using the maximum variety technique. At the end of the research, it is detected that using writing to learn strategies in English classes makes statistically significant difference for the benefit of experime...

Este artículo presenta un proyecto de escritura diseñado para promover el aprendizaje significativo de conocimientos científicos y la adquisición de la competencia discursiva propia de las ciencias. En este sentido, se exponen brevemente los supuestos teóricos que fundamentan esta propuesta didáctica, la cual se desarrolla a lo largo de seis sesiones, que tienen como propósito elaborar un número monográfico de una revista de divulgación científica integrada por una serie de artículos redactados por los estudiantes. Estos artículos surgen de un proceso reflexivo de composición textual en el que se hace hincapié en la planificación, la revisión y el análisis de los elementos retóricos y de contenido del texto.

This paper discusses an ongoing research-based collaboration between an academic literacies researcher and a lecturer in the field of Social Work aimed at exploring the nature of everyday writing in social work. The paper outlines the key principles of the methodology adopted—a text-oriented ethnography—and discusses the extent to which this methodology is facilitating a collaborative partnership towards meeting three interrelated goals: the empirical goal of building rich descriptions of writing in everyday social work practice; the ideological-epistemological goal of challenging a deficit discourse on writing (and writers); and the interventionist goal of working with institutions to harness writing in productive ways to learning and professional practice. Central to this methodological approach is an attempt to build a three-way conversation between the fields of 'new' literacy studies, in particular academic literacies; the discipline of social work education; and social...

This article takes the form of a critical conversation between three generations of critical theorists, examining the role of critical theory in the neoliberal academy: does this sort of intellectual project still have a place in an academic and educational system that tends to favour empirical research and policy-driven projects? Through a discussion of the relationship between critical theory and power, privilege, and positionality, the article addresses the ongoing urgency of such intellectual activities in the present context. The dialogue between the three participants acknowledges critical theory's historical, and continuing, fragility within the university, while elucidating the ways that it can provide a vehicle for challenging dominant forms of power. In doing so, this cross-generational exchange demonstrates that critical theory remains a vital space of rebellion, optimism, and social change.

Argument construction is an important aspect of academic writing. Although literature presents a number of theoretical and pedagogical models of argument, research is lacking into authentic argument construction in expert writing. Moreover, it is not clear how disciplinary variation affects the construction of argument. Therefore, this paper analyses argument in four disciplines – philosophy, literature, chemistry, and computational science. The results show a degree of variation among disciplines. Three models of argument have been found, called here premise-based argument (found in philosophy and literature), hypothesis-based argument (found in computational science and to a lesser degree in literature) and exposition-based argument (in chemistry). These models differ from the theoretical and/or pedagogical models proposed in the literature, suggesting that EAP students might be asked to produce arguments very different from arguments encountered in the reading in their discipline. Given the disciplinary variation observed, the paper supports applying English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) as well as English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) approach to teaching argument construction.

Las  demandas  de  la  sociedad  actual exigen  que  la  formación  de  profesionales considere habilidades y destrezas transversales que permitan al egresado desenvolverse con eficiencia y eficacia,  al  momento  de insertarse  en  el  campo  laboral. La  Facultad  de  Ciencias  Físicas  y Matemáticas de la Universidad de Chile entiende la relevancia de esta tarea y, por ende, ha desarrollado un trabajo sistemático de reflexión respecto de cómo trabajar dichas competencias. Un ejemplo de esto, es el trabajo realizado con la competencia genérica de la comunicación oral y escrita en español que la Facultad desarrolla.En este contexto, dos modelos que se articulan, el Modelo de Gestión Curricular y el Modelo de Asesoría Docente en escritura académica y profesional, permiten la colaboración entre expertos disciplinares  (académicos),  asesor curricular  y  asesor  de  alfabetización  avanzada.  Esta integración interdisciplinar  posibilita declarar  los  Resultados  de  Aprendizaje  que  orientan  la implementación de la competencia genérica dentro del aula, a fin de responder al requerimiento del perfil de egreso de las carreras y licenciaturas.

PALABRAS  CLAVES: Competencias  genéricas, Modelo  de  Gestión  Curricular,  Modelo  de asesoría docente en escritura académica y profesional, mapa de progreso, matriz de tributación

TEMA: Implementación de una comunidad de aprendizaje para el desarrollo de competencias
genéricas y específicas.

Repatriation of archival materials holds great potential for decolonizing archaeological archives. This paper argues that while repatriation of human remains and cultural objects is required by law under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), traditional manuscript archives can and should be subject to the same standards for repatriation. The entirety of the archaeological archive can therefore be repatriated to descendant communities. In fact, many museums and other institutions have adopted the practice of digital repatriation of both documents and artifacts. By repatriating a facsimile of an important cultural item, institutions may actually perpetuate the colonial perspective that the original item’s proper place is with the institution instead of with its community of origin. This paper addresses situations in which it is both appropriate and inappropriate to repatriate a digital copy instead of the original object.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of applying the writing letter activity of writing to learn strategies on the English Language Academic Achievement and Attitude level of 11 th grade students. The research was carried out with 84 students (43 male, 41 female) at one of the state schools in Black Sea Region of Turkey. Mixed method was used in the research. A non-equivalent control group model which is one of the quasi-experimental methods was used in the quantitative part of the research. Simple Past Tense Achievement Test (SPTAT) developed by the researcher and Attitude to English Lesson Questionnaire (AELQ) developed by Erdem (2007) were used to obtain the quantitative data. Structured interview questions were asked to the six students chosen from the experimental groups using the maximum variety technique. At the end of the research, it is detected that using writing to learn strategies in English classes makes statistically significant difference for the benefit of experiment groups on the level of academic success and attitude to lesson.

Abstract: This paper examines a collaborative partnership between discipline lecturers and an academic literacy practitioner in the context of undergraduate physics. Gee's sociocultural construct of Discourse is used as a framework for the design of an ...

This study examines student perceptions about (i) whether writing in undergraduate disciplines contributes to the development of student pre-professional identity (PPI) and (ii) how writing in such disciplines affects PPI relative to other classroom activities. The study was conducted at St. John’s University in New York, which has a very diverse student population, and involved four different undergraduate disciplines—First-Year History, Chemistry (STEM), Legal Studies, and Speech Pathology. Data was derived primarily from student survey responses. Our findings suggest that writing in undergraduate courses can affect student PPI. Further, the extent to which writing contributes to PPI relative to other course activities appears to be related to four things: whether the course was in the student’s major; how professionally authentic the students perceived the writing in the course to be relative to other course activities; the extent to which the instructor works through the discipl...

Although faculty across the curriculum are often faced with issues of racial identity in the teaching of writing, WAC has offered little support for addressing race in assignment design, classroom interactions, and assessment. Through examples from teaching workshops, I offer specific ways that we can engage discussions about teaching writing and race productively.

Considerable interest has been shown in studies in the disciplinary rhetoric of student academic writing in the last decade (e.g. Bunton, 2002; Kusel, 1992; Samraj, 2005; Thompson, 2001). However, the rhetorical aspects of student writing in Africa, and especially in Ghana, remain largely under-researched. Drawing on a modified version of Swales' (1990) move analysis, the present study investigates the generic structure of introductions in a total of 120 writing samples of Ghanaian undergraduates from two departments. Specifically, I consider the frequency of occurrence, textual space, and sequence of move. The study revealed three key findings. Regarding similarities, first, English and Sociology did indeed introduce their essays, allocating the greatest space to Move 2. Second, both English and Sociology students utilized a linear sequence of three moves. The key difference between the two disciplinary texts lay in the English students who preferred a two-move sequence, while ...

Drawing on three cases from a larger (N=169) longitudinal study of student writing development, this article shows how STEM students “rewrote” disciplines to suit their writerly purposes as they moved through their undergraduate years. Students made it clear that the institutional dimensions of disciplines, visible in administrative units or departments that control resources and records, remained visible in their mental landscapes, but they had a much more flexible view of the epistemological dimensions of disciplines. Rather than entering a field as novices aiming to emulate the writing of its experts, they drew on the intellectual resources of multiple disciplines in order to carry out their own projects. The goals and choices of these students suggest that the term new disciplinarity has implications for the ways WID is conceptualized. As theorized by Markovitch and Shinn (2011, 2012), new disciplinarity posits elasticity as a central feature of disciplines, calls the spaces bet...

In fall 2010, the University of Massachusetts Amherst instituted a new upperdivision General Education requirement, the Integrative Experience (IE), designed to help students integrate the various components of their undergraduate experience and reflect upon their learning and development as a result of those experiences, both key dimensions of High Impact Practices. In this article, we describe how writing played an important role in both 1) shaping formative assessment that informed program implementation and 2) facilitating integrative and reflective thinking through IE assignments. More generally, our assessment findings show the strong link of writing to distinguishing features of High Impact Practices and argue for broad, collaborative assessments that uncover such inter-connections. Our experience also underscores the wisdom of writing faculty being actively involved in general education program development and assessment, and taking the broad view of the role writing can pla...

Acknowledging that collaboration between faculty members and language teachers is challenged by resources constraints and their perceived distinctive roles in supporting knowledge and academic discourse development, this paper considers an adjunct instructional model that promotes the collaborative design of a genre-based bridging pedagogy in three disciplinary courses (Mechanical Engineering, Tourism Management and Sociology) at a Hong Kong tertiary institute. First, the paper examines the design and role of Engineering-specific assessment tasks in engaging students in simulated disciplinary problem-solving scenarios and selections of rhetorical and lexico-grammatical resources in their disciplinary knowledge creation processes. It also demonstrates the role of genre-based pedagogy in illustrating technicality in facilitating students' understanding disciplinary discourses in Tourism Management. Then, it highlights the functions of creating multimodal genre-based environments in facilitating students' sociological inquiry through scaffolded written tasks based on real-life social issues. Lastly, it explores how learners engage with polyvocal resources to clarify how they make sense of their disciplinary roles through their writing practices in the adjunct courses. The implications of these diverse trajectories are discussed in line with the need for curriculum-embeddedness of disciplinary conventions (Wingate, 2016) and discursive strategies for bridging English language learners' disciplinary discourse and knowledge creation across the curriculum.

Many universities across Central and South America in the last fifteen years have begun to pay more concerted attention to the writing of students and faculty. While this work grows from some earlier beginnings, it is only recently that a critical mass of faculty and researchers across universities and across countries have recognized their common cause and begun to share work and build networds for mutual support. (...) This thematica issue of Ilha do Desterro documents, exhibits, and carries forward the desire to understand and improve academic writing at the university level.
https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/issue/view/2282

Faculty resistance to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an issue that has been recognized by WAC program directors and practitioners for decades, yet it remains unresolved. Perhaps the problem is not resistance per se, but how we interpret and react to it. Faculty resistance is typically viewed as an impediment to the pedagogical change WAC programs hope to achieve. Moreover, the label of "resistance" is often used without further examination of the underlying causes. Based on research and experience as doctoral Writing Fellows in the Borough of Manhattan Community College WAC Program, we argue that so-called resistances are often justified concerns in regard to implementing WAC under given institutional, disciplinary, departmental, and personal constraints. We also suggest that if we listen and respond to these concerns, they become means to facilitate faculty engagement with WAC. By working through their concerns and adapting WAC to their context, faculty can take o...

The WAC director, composition director, director of Institutional Assessment (OIA), and WAC/OIA liaison describe the programmatic "needs" and "wants" they balanced in the plan they collaboratively designed to respond to a state mandate for "value-added" writing assessment. To satisfy this mandate, as they explain, they carried out an assessment of research-based essays from the first-year composition (FYC) course that mirrored the discipline-focused, course-embedded, and workshop-based assessment process George Mason has been implementing successfully in upper-division writing-intensive (WI) courses since 2002. Just as the writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) assessment data have been informing WAC efforts, the FYC process was designed to provide data to inform programmatic efforts in curriculum and faculty development. The authors begin with background on their model program of WID-based assessment and then discuss the steps they took to develop a value-ad...

A comparison of published statements about the source-use skills of sophomores in the 1990s and those revealed by the more recent Citation Project study of researched writing suggests that many of the assumptions driving pedagogy, policy, and curricula need to be revised and that faculty working across the disciplines should work with students on reading and source-use skills when they assign researched writing. The Citation Project studied research papers by 174 first-year students at 16 US colleges and universities, producing a data-based portrait of student reading and source-use skills. Those students work from one or two sentences in 94% of their citations, cite the first or second page of their sources 70% of the time, and cite only 24% of their sources more than twice. While 78% of the papers include at least one incidence of paraphrase, 52% include at least one incidence of patchwriting, with students moving back and forth between the two within the same paragraph. Like earl...

Drawing on Lindsey Allgood's scripts, journal entries, and images of a specific participatory performance piece she executed, we argue for seeing performance art as a form of embodied text. Such an assertion is particularly pertinent for postsecondary writing center praxis as it allows for the mindful intersections of the body and writing during the tutoring process, intersections harder to realize without a background in performance practices that rely on the body as primary tool of meaning making. Text: "participial stem of Latin texere to weave." --Etymology of Text, Oxford English Dictionary, n.1 stART Norman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NynqREh-VTM) Rifenburg and Allgood 2 The Opening Scene: Performance Art and a Lumberyard In a hundred-year-old abandoned lumberyard, discarded wood beams and metal strips and poles rest in piles, semi-damp from a recent rain. Earthy smells of dirt and dust waft from scattered patches of overgrown grass. One can imagine these ro...

The writing across the curriculum movement has rightfully gained recognition as a transformative force in how teachers conceive of, use, and assign writing in their classes throughout various disciplines. Drawing on data from the first three years of an ongoing study of faculty "WAC fellows" at a large, comprehensive state university, this article takes the view that, at its best, writing across the curriculum involves students deeply in writing as a social practice and that similarly applying WAC principles to student reading—and how teachers assign reading—is our best hope to address the problematic nature of how students do or do not read for school. As a writing center director and English professor, I hear my share of complaints about the state of student literacy. I know there is a very real possibility that at some point colleagues across campus, friends, neighbors, or anyone who knows that I teach writing may look me urgently in the eye and alert me to the sad stat...