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THE History of Modern Composition Studies

  • Conference on College Composition and Communication

    Conference on College Composition and Communication
    The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), was formed by the National Council of Teachers of English which marked the inception of modern composition studies!
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    New Criticism/Formalism

    Formalism claims to take an objective approach to the study of texts and text meaning. This approach viewed the text as autonomous.
  • /Research on Written Composition/

    /Research on Written Composition/
    Published in 1963 /Research in Written Composition/ was written by Richard Reed Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell A. Schoer. This book introduces empirical research into the field of composition theory. It called for research into the act of writing.
  • Dartmouth Conference

    The 1966 Dartmouth Conference re-evaluated formalist approaches to writing and pedagogy.
  • Stanley Fish

    Fish's research focused scholarly attention onto the cognitive processes of the writer and reader. This shift in focus departs from the New Critics by claiming that meaning emerged from the reader's experience with a text.
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    Cognitive processes

  • /Errors and Expectations/

    Mina Shaughnessy's text argues for the allowance of student's right to use their own languages.
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    Social and Historical Approaches

  • Carnegie-Mellon University

    Flower and Hayes state that, "the process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing." Texts, writers, and readers all inform each other.