Opinion

It's time to shift the way contingent faculty members -- and their tenure-track colleagues -- think about their work and how to improve their treatment, writes Steve Street.

For those of you who will attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Chicago next month, I...

The poet W.D. Snodgrass has died. Here's a poem of his written in the spring but just as right for...

I have a question to ask you and your "wise and worldly readers." :) I'm a PhD candidate in an evergreen social science, and I just taught for the first time last semester. While I loved many things about teaching, the biggest surprise for me was how much I loved teaching writing. I loved marking student papers, trying to teach them about how to structure an argument, working with them on how to craft a better piece of writing and thinking. I know most writing is taught in English Comp classes, which I'm obviously not properly placed, disciplinarily, to teach. But, at different sorts of schools, what opportunities are there for social scientists to teach writing? I know the elite SLAC my wife attended had "writing-intensive" courses across the disciplines; how common are those? Is wanting to teach writing an asset in the job market? How might I position myself (beyond saying "I love teaching writing!" in a cover letter) to show this interest?

A new correspondent writes: I have a question to ask you and your "wise and worldly readers." :) I'm a...

It's here to stay, writes Andrei Codrescu, who offers his poetry course to illustrate.

Once, when I was in high school, I entered a public speaking contest. I think there were four entries, and...

(I thought about titling this "Lies, damn lies, and assumptions", or even "Making an ASS of U and ME". So...