composition

High School and Higher Ed. Writing Instructors Come Together This Monday, I attended a great event, Across the Divide, a writing forum that connected high school writing instructors from multiple disciplines with college writing instructors (mostly FYW). The forum took place in the form of a 2-hour roundtable talk that was based around organic discussion. It was held in a beautiful conference room at Biotechnology High School in Freehold, NJ, where several of the high school teachers were currently teaching.  The conversations were insightful, constructive, and fun. You can watch the conversation and check out the  live-tweet feed  to see for yourself! Just a quick aside: I found out about this event from my twitter pal, @ ReadyWriting . I was immediately interested because I don't think there are nearly enough opportunities for high school and college educators to collaborate. Plus, I am an alumna of the school district that was hosting the event and still live...

Cover Letters and the Consequences of Lacking Rhetorical Awareness As I wrote about in my last post, I've been working part-time at an IT company as a technical writer for the summer. One of the tasks that have been entrusted to me as part of the technical writing team is to filter through applications for a full-time entry-level technical writer. I thought that choosing between the qualified candidates would be a difficult task. Instead, finding a qualified individual has been the harder job. It's shocking how many people claim "excellence in written communication," yet fail miserably at effectively communicating. There are several composing models that I could use to think about these issues. I could consider Flower and Hayes' thoughts on defining a rhetorical problem-- better writers see more layers. I could consider Lloyd Bitzer's theories on about exigences, audiences, and constraints. These applications are ineffective because they seem to only consider ...