I teach a general-education course at the University of Massachusetts entitled Spiritual Autobiography in which students read and write autobiography. The course is centered around the interrelationships between the act of reading autobiography and that of writing it: through reading autobiography students can discover how different writers express their own experiences, and as a result write in new ways, and through the act of writing their own life experiences students gain a new understanding of their own lives as well as coming to be better readers of autobiography. We focus on the experience of the artist reading her own autobiography...

What is history writing? The answer to that question is complex. And equally complex is the question of how to help students become better writers of history. In this chapter, the two of us—a composition specialist and history professor—look from our respective vantage points at these questions. As we undertook this project, our aim was to further our collective thinking about what it means to teach and to learn the genres of a particular discipline, and in particular, what it means to try to design and execute effective writing assignments in undergraduate history classes to promote a deeper...

These responses come from honors students who took Plagues: Past, Present, Future? a science course taught at the City College of New York in fall 2002. I begin with them because they confirm a theme central to genre theory: that individuals acquire genres by accenting alien forms with their own “views,” “opinions,” or purposes. To borrow from M. M. Bakhtin (1986), writers may most fully acquire “ownership” of communal forms when they assimilate them to their own social language.

From Bakhtin’s perspective, acquiring genres sparks a struggle between collective forms and personal understandings. To study genres, we can describe their...

I ran into David Hibbett at a convocation reception a year after we had collaborated on writing workshops for his Biology of Symbiosis class. Over cheese and crackers, surrounded by a throng of noisy faculty catching up on one another’s summers, David, a mycologist in the Clark University biology department, revealed that he was in the throes of writing a News and Views column for Nature, a commentary based on a primary research article in the same journal. The column is smaller in scope than the “mini-reviews” David had asked his symbiosis students to write, pieces that survey and comment...

These quotations are typical of remarks made by a group of twenty first-year students whom we interviewed (as part of a case study) three months after their entry into the humanities at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In some ways, the students’ experiences echo those reported in studies about the transition from school to university in many parts of the world. The students find the new discourse constraining and demanding in its many rules, its formality, its requirement to engage in close analysis and to consider the views of others in producing an argument. And yet the quotations also...

My first teaching assignment at my current college was the infamous freshman research paper class. To my then pleasant surprise, my students expressed a familiarity and ease with “the research paper.” They explained how they wrote such papers for almost all of their classes. Some of their courses even required two research papers per semester along with essays, short-answer tests, departmental midterm/final exams, and homework assignments. When I asked to see samples of these research papers, I understood more clearly how they were able to accomplish so much “formal” writing in one semester for one class. After reading about three...

In the last fifteen years, questions about the role of genre in the development of writing have increasingly informed both theory and practice in the composition classroom. David Jolliffe (1996) has observed, for example, that the most frequent genre that we ask students to compose is the “genre” of the school essay, noting that too often that genre doesn’t connect to the genres of life or workplace. Anne Beaufort (1999) put a face on such a claim in her landmark study, Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work, which demonstrates how the genres of school...

Increasingly, teachers in courses across a range of disciplines are creating assignments that involve the intersection of oral and written genres. In the past, when pedagogical literature on writing paid attention to oral communication, it did so from the perspective of the support that speaking can lend to a writer’s developing text (through one-on-one tutorials, small-group peer conferencing, or reading aloud; see Brooke 1991, 1994; Gere 1990; Murray 1982; Walters 1992; Zoellner 1969). However, until very recently there has been little written on the teaching and learning of multimodal genres that involve both writing and speaking.

In this chapter, we...

The genres in which writers communicate evolve, and this evolution is now strikingly evident on the World Wide Web, where millions of people create documents for an ever-burgeoning number of sites. As teachers, the two of us have discovered that working with Web genres in the writing classroom is no easy task, largely because of the differing perceptions and experiences individuals bring to Web compositions. In this chapter we examine how the eclectic and changing nature of genres on the Web brought about a reconceptualizing and reorienting of our own expectations about teaching and learning writing, focusing on ways in...

Writers are living, in the fullest sense of the ancient Chinese proverb, in interesting times. Not since the fifteenth century, when Gutenberg perfected a workable system of movable type, has there been such a change in how information and ideas are exchanged. In the late fifteenth century, Gutenberg’s technological innovations resulted in the widespread availability of printed work in vernacular languages, a factor that scholars such as Eisenstein (1979) argue contributed to the Protestant Reformation, the expansion of the Italian Renaissance, and the rise of the scientific method, among other movements. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the...

In our first chapter, as you may remember, we laid out what we saw as the territory: the evolution and present state of genre theory as it is applied to the teaching of writing. We located ourselves in what Aviva Freedman and others call the “North American” school of genre theorists. We wrote that first chapter as part of the book’s prospectus, well before we had read the chapters that now form the body of the book. Our basic understanding of the field, and our position in that field, have not changed since that time. But our understandings of both...