Tag: composition

  • Writing Studies

    Writing studies seems so much more serious than anything going on in speech communication rhetoric to me these days. I think what’s most attractive is the focus on the idea of pedagogy. This requires the assumption that people can change if we give them opportunity to do so, and that opportunity exists in the carefully…

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  • The Reason that Debating is as Important to Education as Writing

    “We are all teachers of writing,” is not only a good principle of education, or a good mantra of focus for teachers overwhelmed my the irrelevant minutae of state requirements and Common Core, but it is also a political statement – it’s the phrase of victory of rhetoric and composition, who conquered the educational world…

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  • What’s in a Debate Name?

    Debate Coach makes me cringe for so many reasons. I’m not sure I can list them all here. The first concern with this term I share with William Hawley Davis, Professor of Speech at Case Western in 1916, who worried that teaching debate for competition made his role “adjunct to sport.” If there is a…

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  • The First Oral Assignments are Turned In and It Seems Like a Lot of Grading

    The biggest hazard from teaching online I think is that you get huge waves of grading that have very firm time requirements. If I assign students to prepare a speech 6 minutes long, I have to listen to 40 or so 6 minute speeches. There’s nothing I can do to reduce that amount of time…

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