Electronic Writing Centers: Computing in the Field of Composition

by Peter F. Coogan

Overview

This book describes the emerging practice of e-mail tutoring; one-to-one correspondence between college students and writing tutors conducted over electronic mail. It reviews the history of Composition Studies, paying special attention to those ways in which writing centers and computers and composition have been previously hailed within a narrative of functional literacy and quick-fix solutions. The author suggests a new methodology for tutoring, and a new mandate for the writing center: a strong connection between the rhythms of extended, asynchronous writing and dialogic literacy. The electronic writing center can become a site for informed resistance to functional literacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567504293
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/24/1999
Series:	New Directions in Computers and Composition Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

DAVID COOGAN is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology, He teaches courses in writing, the rhetoric of technology,technical communications, and poetry. His work has appeared in the jourbanal, Computers and Composition and the anthology Wiring the Writing Center. His current research explores the intersection between rhetorical theory, technical communications, and technological change.

Table of Contents

Forward
Introduction
Tutors and Computers in Composition Studies
Email "Tutoring" and Dialogic Literacy, The Medium is Not the Message
The Idea of Electronic Writing Center. Computing the Field of Composition
Appendix
References
Author Index
Subject Index

Editorial Reviews

Coogan (English, Illinois Institute of Technology) theorizes the electronic writing center as a dialogic space where students and tutors learn to value those off-stage voices and contradictory impulses that inform their writing. By connecting e-mail tutoring with similar practices in the classroom, he challenges teachers to not only imagine new uses for computers in the writing center, but to implement a new practice of dialogic literacy in the discipline of composition. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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