I am pleased to announce that several new publications are available on the WAC Clearinghouse (http://wac.colostate.edu).

Across the Disciplines (http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/) announces its second volume. New work includes a new column on secondary education and writing centers/WAC by Pamela Childers and articles by Jonathan Hall, Robert Samuels, Jessica Yood, Linda Anstendig, Eugene Richie, Shannon Young, Pauline Mosley and Bette Kirschstein. New articles and materials will be added to the volume as the year progresses.

Janice Lauer's book, Invention in Rhetoric and Composition, is now available in PDF format for free download from the WAC Clearinghouse at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/lauer_invention/. Published jointly with Parlor Press, which offers the book in print-on-demand and various digital formats, Lauer's book is the first in the series, Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition, which is edited by Charles Bazerman. New volumes are forthcoming in the series and will be announced as they are made available.

The WAC Clearinghouse Teaching Exchange has made available Joseph Williams' monograph, Problems into PROBLEMS: The Rhetoric of Introductions. In this work, Williams offers a thoughtful treatment of problems, particularly in introductions. He opens his monograph with the following:

For well more than a decade now, researchers have been reporting how in the act of drafting we recognize and solve rhetorical problems -- how we evaluate and synthesize sources, set local rhetorical goals, then seek to achieve them. But if the literature on solving such problems is thick, our understanding of how we articulate the substantive problem that occasions our efforts to solve them is quite thin. By "substantive problem" I do not mean the local and ongoing struggle toward the discovery and articulation of meaning, but the significant question whose answer justifies the effort, the problem in the world or mind whose solution repays our time spent writing and our readers' spent reading. We criticize the writing of our students and colleagues on many grounds, but none is more common -- or devastating -- than the observation that they have failed not just to solve a problem, but even to pose one that we think "interesting." And as teachers, we experience no failure more common than our inability to explain what we mean by "pose" or "interesting" or "problem" and what it is about a text that elicits such criticism.

Williams' monograph offers much to writers and teachers of writing. It is available at http://wac.colostate.edu/exchange/williams.pdf

I hope you will check out all of this good work.