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I may be late in responding to Rhonda's posting about the "Canadian trend"
but wanted to say (as many others across Canada can say, better than me)
that there have been universities here that have had "draft driven workshop
comp courses" for a very long time -- at McGill almost twenty years now.
Some of my colleagues here at McGill, working with Pat Dias and a team of
graduate students and teachers interested in process methods, developed a
course of this kind that began in 1980 and grew steadily in popularity and
range from then on; it is now a whole "suite" of courses tailored to
various disciplinary contexts. Anthony (Pare), Jane Ledwell-Brown, and Pat
himself can tell you a lot more.

Perhaps, as Inkshedders have often discussed, the placement in the
institution is a key factor -- at McGill, because of a historical fluke,
all the writing (now communications) courses are taught out of Education,
not English.

Ann Beer

At 12:44 PM 03/03/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Catharine
>I agree that what you label the Canadian trend in rhetoric makes no sense.
 My training comes from the staters, Univ So Cal's Rhetoric, Linguistics
and Lit Program specifically, so I bring a background and a bias with me.
I find myself on alien turf around here.  I think much of the
clinging-to-handbook-grammar-correction rhetoric I find around me, many
colleagues are from Queens or York backgrounds,  comes from exposure to
nothing else.  Even the lit education seems to have come in large-lecture
delivery.  I suspect this is a do what you are most comfortable with
because anything else is threatening precedent.
>The more draft-driven workshop comp courses we can put in place now, the
more chance of any change.
>Rhonda Schuller
>University College of the Fraser Valley
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