Revisions: A Zine on Writing at Queens College

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From the Editor

By Dara Sicherman

It is with great pleasure that I am able to participate in this inaugural issue of "Revisions: A Zine on Writing at Queens College" published by the Office of College Writing Programs. It is our hope that this semiannual zine will provide a forum for students and faculty alike to discuss issues, concerns, practices, understandings, pleasures, and struggles that are encountered by all writers--students, faculty, staff--at QC.

Our inaugural issue focuses on the topic of writing, and teaching and learning, in the multilingual environment at Queens College. Together, faculty, staff, and students offer an exchange of ideas that reflect the benefits and challenges of teaching writing and learning within such a diverse community of multiple languages and multiple literacies. In addition, Maddalena Romano and Rhona Cohen each review the two Queens College Writers at Work events that we sponsored this past semester and Sean Egan reviews Art Young's Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).

Our Fall 2004 issue will address the topic of plagiarism in the classroom and beyond. We hope to include thoughts pertaining to this multifaceted topic from faculty and students alike. As with the topic of multiple languages, we hope that the zine can become a catalyst of new thinking, encouraging new ways of imagining topics with which we might have assumed an easy familiarity, a fixed way of knowing. In addition, the next issue will offer some resources on how to avoid and how to identify plagiarism.

One of the things we really want to achieve with "Revisions: A Zine on Writing at Queens College" is a conversation that does not end within the pages of a zine. As a result, we have started a WEBLOG as a way of continuing our conversation. Please join the conversation at:

http://qcpages.qc.edu/Writing/weblogs.html

We hope that you will find this zine informative and hope that it will foster an ongoing conversation about writing at Queens College.

-- DS