Copyright (c) 2008 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow Recent documents in Peter Elbow en-us Fri, 02 May 2008 02:37:27 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/24 http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/24 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:36:50 PDT Regular grading is a problem for many reasons--but most of all because it so often harms the climate for teaching and learning. In this essay we describe and explain a contract grading system that we have found extremely beneficial to teaching and learning. It's a hybrid system. Students are guaranteed a B if they do all the things laid out in the contract. The teacher gives evaluative feedback as usual, but no teacher judgment can endanger the guaranteed grade. Grades higher than B, however, depend on teacher judgments of writing quality. The central leverage lies in designing a set of activities that--if engaged in over fourteen weeks--will get all students to improve enough to deserve a B. Peter Elbow http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/23 http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/23 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:18:55 PDT "Voice in writing" has fallen into a kind of limbo as a topic: it's vexed; it's discredited by most composition scholars; it's not much written about recently; and yet it remains widely used by readers, teachers, and writers. I examine good reasons for paying lots of attention to voice when we read and teach writing; and also good reasons for ignoring it. And finally insist that we can usefully do both. Peter Elbow http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/22 http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/22 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:07:54 PDT A short essay taken from remarks at the annual 2007 convention on getting the Exemplar Award. I look back over my career as an ongoing attempt to democratize writing--operating from the stance of a "vernacular intellectual" (a concept coined by Grant Farret). Peter Elbow http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/21 http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/21 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:00:00 PDT Mainstream teachers commonly invite mainstream students to freewrite and use very informal language for early and mid drafts of important academic essays--and hold off surface editing till the end. This amounts to inviting mainstream students to do lots of writing in their spoken vernacular--and to wait till the end to edit into a clearly different dialect: edited ("correct standard") written English. This essay argues the same approach for speakers of African American Language--and addresses objections. Peter Elbow http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/20 http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/20 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:58:04 PDT A defintion of the believing and doubting games; a thumbnail idealized history of believing and doubting; and three arguments why we need the believing game. Paper given 4/08 at annual CCCC. Peter Elbow