Invention & Craft MLA 2016 UPDATE. This item is unavailable.Invention & Craft MLA 2016 UPDATE

Invention and Craft: A Guide to College Writing offers a new approach to teaching and learning in the first-year writing classroom. Invention and Craft draws on the relationship between the writing process and the creative process model and teaches a problem-solving, insight-driven approach to writing clearly and effectively in all genres. Its emphasis on knowledge transfer instructs students to recognize the patterns that occur within and across genres and to apply what they know to each new writing assignment. Invention and Craft offers special promise for casting students in the role of meaning-makers by pinpointing strategies for transferring knowledge―the hallmark of successful expository prose.

Professor Ronda Leathers Dively received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English (with teacher certification) and her Master of Arts degree in English (literature) from Eastern Illinois University. After gaining a few years of teaching experience in the secondary English classroom, she pursued her Doctorate of Arts degree in English (Rhetoric and Composition) at Illinois State University, completing her degree in 1994 and accepting an assistant professorship in the English Department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale that same year. Currently an associate professor at SIUC, Dr. Dively serves as the Director of Writing Studies for the Department of English and teaches in the Rhetoric and Composition program. Her areas of teaching specialization include composition pedagogy, empirical research methods, intermediate and advanced composition, and classical rhetoric. She has also enjoyed teaching special topics courses that explore intersections between creativity theory and composition theory. Professor Dively’s scholarship investigates how intersections of creativity and composition theory may illuminate how individuals negotiate transitions between various academic composing contexts―from high school to college classrooms, from general education to discipline-specific writing courses, from status as undergraduate student to graduate student, from status as graduate student to professional. Such interests generated a book-length empirical study entitled Preludes to Insight: Creativity, Incubation and Expository Writing (Hampton Press, 2006), as well as various articles and conference presentations. She has also published in the areas of knowledge transfer and religious expression.