College Composition and Communication
62 articlesSeptember 2025
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Abstract
From an unsettled, ambivalent middle between discourses of generative AI integration and refusal, we offer a critical-ethical stance for AI-engaged writing assignments. We apply a critical thinking framework to these assignments, assert critical AI literacy as a kind of critical thinking, and discuss how critical thinking and critical AI literacy can facilitate ethical discernment about generative AI use. This unsettled, critical-ethical stance positions scholars in our field to support context-sensitive pedagogical responses to generative AI across first-year writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing centers, and beyond.
June 2022
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Abstract
In this praxis-focused article, I reflect on incorporating what disability justice activists call “collective access” into the composition classroom through a semester-long, class-wide “Accessibility Best Practices” assignment. I show how asking students to recursively address access together helped them approach writing itself as a collaborative and revisionary process.
June 2021
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Abstract
This article provides precedent for publication expectations at a wide range of institutions and explores how more structure may mitigate the occupational stress that arises from role ambiguity. Clearer tenure guidelines and nuanced performance appraisals offer several benefits: reducing affective/emotional labor, improving work conditions, and providing consistent arguments to retain valuable faculty.
December 2020
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Embracing the “Always-Already”: Toward Queer Assemblages for Writing Across the Curriculum Administration ↗
Abstract
Framed in three guiding claims about relationships between Writing Across the Curriculum and queer theories, this article offers Jasbir Puar’s theory of “queer assemblage” as a model for rearticulating WAC administration.
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Revising a Scientific Writing Curriculum: Wayfinding Successful Collaborations with Interdisciplinary Expertise ↗
Abstract
Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because 1) their academic expertise is often not writing and 2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of existing instructional materials. While many writing studies scholars have the expertise to assist their STEM colleagues with such tasks, how to do so—and, more fundamentally, how to begin such efforts—is not commonly focused on in the literature stemming from these collaborations. Our article addresses this gap by detailing an interdisciplinary Writing in the Disciplines (WID) collaboration at a large, public R1 university between STEM and writing experts to redesign the university’s introductory biology writing curriculum. The collaborative curriculum design process detailed here is presented through the lens of wayfinding, which concerns orientation, trailblazing, and moving through uncertain landscapes according to cues. Within this account, a critical focus on language—what we talk about when we talk about writing—emerges, driving both the collaboration itself and resultant curricular revisions. Our work reveals how collaborators can wayfind through interdisciplinary partnerships and writing curriculum development by transforming differences in discipline-specific expertise into a new path forward.
September 2020
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Abstract
We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.
September 2019
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A Study of the Practices and Responsibilities of Scholarly Peer Review in Rhetoric and Composition ↗
Abstract
This article presents findings of an interview study with twenty rhetoric and composition scholars. Findings focus on the responsibilities of reviewers, editors, and writers in scholarly peer review. The authors make several recommendations for improving peer review practices and call for a field-wide discussion of and research about the topic.
February 2019
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Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice ↗
Abstract
Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.
June 2018
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“Language Difference Can Be an Asset”: Exploring the Experiences of Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers of Writing ↗
Abstract
The increasing diversity of US higher education has brought greater language diversity to institutions nationwide. While writing studies researchers have increasingly paid attention to the linguistic diversity of student writers, little attention has been paid to the growing numbers of writing teachers who speak English as a second language. This article reports on a study in which we surveyed seventy-eight nonnative English-speaking instructors and conducted follow-up interviews with eleven of them. Following a presentation of the survey data and profiles of selected interviewees, we recommend ways of working with instructors and students in order to decrease language prejudices and better facilitate the professional development of nonnative English-speaking teachers in writing programs.
February 2018
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With “Increased Dignity and Importance”: Re-Historicizing Charles Roberts and the Illinois Decision of 1955 ↗
Abstract
I revisit the so-called Illinois Decision of 1955, which eliminated basic writing from the University of Illinois Rhetoric Program and caused a chain of similar programmatic actions on other campuses nationwide. I contend that reviewing and archiving the Illinois Decision as a locally specific act with multiple actors besides WPA Charles Roberts historicizes a familiar narrative present today—namely, how WPAs address anxieties about writing in high school versus college, and how composition students and programs are beholden to ongoing institutional and extra-institutional imperatives regarding literacy and efficiency.
December 2017
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Collaborative Ecologies of Emergent Assessment: Challenges and Benefits Linked to a Writing-Based Institutional Partnership ↗
Abstract
This essay reports on a writing-based formative assessment of a university-wide initiative to enhance students’ global learning. Our mixed (and unanticipated) results show the need for enhanced expertise in writing assessment as well as for sustained partnerships among diverse institutional stakeholders so that public programming—from events linked to classroom-level learning to broader cross unit mandates like accreditation—can yield more rigorous, responsive, and mixed method assessments.
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Abstract
This article shares findings from a qualitative study on the experiences of students with disabilities in college-level writing and writing-intensive classrooms. I argue that normative conceptions of time and production can negatively constrain student performance, and I offer the concept of crip time (borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists) as an alternative pedagogical framework.
June 2016
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Abstract
This article explores the relationship between first-person pronoun use and “personal” writing. First, a quantitative examination of 160 papers written for a college literature class reveals how frequently students actually self-reference. Then, three categories of first-person references are developed: General Claims, Process Claims, and Personal Claims. These categories illuminate important differences in first-person pronoun use, including the degree to which each type is genuinely personal and their wide-ranging rhetorical possibilities.
December 2015
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Abstract
Examination of the perspectives and experiences of faculty, graduate student instructors, and undergraduates participating in a WAC/WID program shows how discipline-focused WAC/WID principles are often resisted, interrogated, and subverted by all three groups of stakeholders. New disciplinarity, especially its concepts of borderlands and elasticity, offers a promising focus for WAC/WID.
September 2015
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Abstract
There has been a remarkable surge of interest in creativity in a wide variety of disciplines in recent years. Taken in aggregate, this body of work now theorizes creativity as a—foundational aspect of human cognition and intelligence. If we theorize creativity as a highly sophisticated and valuable form of cognition, it must also then be regarded as a necessary—and indispensable part of the curriculum in the writing classroom.
June 2015
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Abstract
We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.
February 2015
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold, eds. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography Eli Goldblatt PHD (Po H# on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life Elaine Richardson Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp
June 2014
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Abstract
Sisters and Brothers of the Struggle: Teachers of Writing in Their Worlds Charles Bazerman Internationalization, English L2 Writers, and the Writing Classroom: Implications for Teaching and Learning Terry Myers Zawacki and Anna Sophia Habib
September 2013
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Abstract
Based on interviews with fifty-seven scholars in rhetoric and composition, this article addresses multiple topics in relation to the job search process. I emphasize the need for a more critical examination of job market procedures field-wide, taking into consideration the ways in which hiring committees might be unknowingly enacting exclusionary practices.
February 2013
December 2012
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Abstract
Early status reports on WAC call for engagement with the disciplines, robust research about writing, and a transformation from missionary work to a more wide-ranging model. A Taxonomy of WAC describes common characteristics of WAC programs as well as organizing those characteristics into a progression from initiation to change agency.
June 2012
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Abstract
This article reviews the deeply conflicted literature on learning transfer, especially as it applies to rhetorical knowledge and skill. It then describes a study in which six students are followed through their first co-op work term to learn about which resources they draw on as they enter a new environment of professional writing. It suggests that although students engage in little one-to-one transfer of learning, they draw on a wide range of internalized rhetorical strategies learned from across their academic experience.
February 2011
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Abstract
Calling for an explicit commitment to graduate-level writing instruction in English studies, the authors describe a critical writing workshop that serves this purpose. The aim of the course is to create a formal curricular space through which students can brainstorm, create, and sustain a wide variety of critical writing projects.
September 2010
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Abstract
This article argues that tracing multimodal-multilingual literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces is key to moving composition into the twenty-first century. Key tothis remixing of the field is a situated framework that locates multimodal-multilingual activities in wider genre, cultural, national, and global ecologies.
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Abstract
“Accountability” is widely used in discussions about what should be happening in school, but it is not an appropriate guiding concept for assessments designed to improveteaching and learning. This article examines discussions about assessment for internal and external purposes; it then outlines an alternative frame for assessment that has “responsibility” as its core.
February 2010
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Abstract
Review of seven books on writing across the curriculum.
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The State of WAC/WID in 2010: Methods and Results of the U.S. Survey of the International WAC/WID Mapping Project ↗
Abstract
As writing across the curriculum (WAC) has matured and diversified as a concept and as an organizational structure in U.S. higher education, there has arisen a need for accurate, up-to-date information on the presence and characteristics of WAC and writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) programs. Following on the only previous nationwide survey of WAC/WID in 1987, new data from the U.S./Canada survey of the International WAC/WID Mapping Project indicate that the presence of such programs has grown in U.S. institutions by roughly one-third. Moreover, clear patterns emerge regarding the formal components of these programs, their intra-institutional relationships, funding sources, reporting lines, and characteristics of leadership (e.g., faculty rank and length of service). Further, a comparison of data from all reporting institutions with those from well-established programs indicates some patterns of sustainability.
December 2009
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Abstract
In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.
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Abstract
In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.
February 2008
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Abstract
In this essay, I present three case studies of immigrant, first-year students, as they negotiate their identities as second language writers in mainstream composition classrooms. I argue that such terms as “ESL” and “Generation 1.5” are often problematic for students and mask a wide range of student experiences and expectations.
December 2007
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Portfolio Partnerships between Faculty and WAC: Lessons from Disciplinary Practice, Reflection, and Transformation ↗
Abstract
In portfolio assessment, WAC helps other disciplines increase programmatic integrity and accountability. This analysis of a portfolio partnership also shows composition faculty how a dynamic culture of assessment helps us protect what we do well, improve what we need to do better, and solve problems as writing instruction keeps pace with programmatic change.
February 2007
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Abstract
One way of helping faculty understand the integral role of writing in their various disciplines is to present disciplines as ways of doing, which links ways of knowing and writing in the disciplines. Ways of doing identified by faculty are used to describe broader generic and disciplinary structures, metagenres, and metadisciplines.
December 2005
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Abstract
Despite the widespread acceptance of many kinds of nonliterary texts for first-year writing courses, primary scientific communication (PSC) remains largely absent. Objections to including PSC, especially that it is not rhetorically appropriate or sufficiently rich, do not hold. We argue for including PSC and give some practical suggestions for developing courses and designing assignments using PSC
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Abstract
Academically oriented first-year seminars can be good venues for teaching many of the concepts important to WAC programs, including extended engagement with a research topic and situated writing. A qualitative study of a first-year seminar program at the University of Calgary highlights faculty members’ and students’ responses.
June 2004
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Abstract
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family … shall … be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim. …” So begins the Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law on the 20th of May by President Abraham Lincoln. The work of this extraordinary piece of writing is well known: more than 270 million acres of public land were parceled out to private citizens before the act’s repeal in 1976. Famously, the Homestead Act encouraged widespread Euramerican settlement of the western states and territories, but in so doing, it accelerated the infamous expropriation of land from native peoples and intensified federal initiatives that hastened their relocation, confinement, and genocide.
June 2003
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Abstract
This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design.
February 2003
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Abstract
After reviewing my career as a teacher of composition and literature and as a writing program administrator of writing across the curriculum, I discuss the potential of poetry across the curriculum as an important tool for writing “against” the curriculum of academic discourse. When they write poetry, students often express meaningful thoughts and emotions not readily available to them in disciplinary languages and contexts.
October 1996
October 1994
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Abstract
Preview this article: Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/45/3/collegecompositionandcommunication8778-1.gif
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Abstract
Preface - Elaine Maimon Writing Across the Curriculum - Susan H McLeod An Introduction Getting Started - Barbara E Walvoord Faculty Workshops - Joyce Neff Magnotto and Barbara R Stout Starting A WAC Program - Karen Wiley Sandler Strategies for Administrators Writing Across the Curriculum and/in the Freshman English Program - Linda H Peterson Writing-Intensive Courses - Christine Farris and Raymond Smith A Tool for Curricular Change WAC and General Education Courses - Christopher Thaiss Writing Components, Writing Adjuncts, Writing Links - Joan Graham The Writing Consultant - Peshe C Kuriloff Collaboration and Team Teaching The Writing Center and Tutoring in WAC Programs - Muriel Harris Changing Students' Attitudes - Tori Haring-Smith Writing Fellows Programs Conclusion - Margot Soven Sustaining Writing Across the Curriculum Programs
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Abstract
university campuses gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a conference we organized to discuss the pedagogy and politics of in the disciplines. Some teams were comprised of writing program lecturers at University of California campuses; teams from other universities consisted of tenure-track faculty in composition and other fields who were developing and teaching in WAC programs at their campuses. Discussion centered around the politics of WAC, institutional constraints, collegial networking, faculty development, and teaching models and objectives. Though participants welcomed such discussion, when group members began to name what they did and to define their goals, a level of conflict emerged that surprised us. Some participants spoke long and heatedly about the primacy of writing to learn, while others argued with equal heat for the power of discourse conventions in specific fields. A gap soon opened between the two groups that seemed almost unbridgeable. Upon reflection, we realized that the conference was playing out in microcosm one of the major conflicts in our field-a conflict variously expressed as voice versus discourse, learning versus performance, process versus form. In this article we explore the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this conflict for writing across the curriculum. We argue that the conflict itself is based on a false dichotomy and that work in the social construction of knowledge-particularly the concept of rhetoric of
May 1994
February 1993
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Abstract
Preview this article: Where Do We Go Next in Writing across the Curriculum?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/44/1/collegecompositioncommunication8845-1.gif
December 1990
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Abstract
This book describes in detail successful writing-across-the-curriculum programs at fourteen colleges and universities in the United States. Each chapter is written by a team of participating instructors, many representing disciplines other than English.
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Abstract
The English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea A. Lunsford S. Michael Halloran and John Hollow Developing Successful College Writing Programs, Edward M. White Louise Wetherbee Phelps Advanced Placement English.: Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy, Gary A. Olson, Elizabeth Metzger, and Evelyn Ashton-Jones David W. Chapman Creating Writers: Linking Assessment and Writing Instruction, Vicki Spandel and Richard J. Stiggins Karen L. Greenberg A Program Development Handbook for the Holistic Assessment of Writing, Norbert Elliot, Maximino Plata,and Paul Zelhart Edward M. White Programs That Work: Models and Methods for Writing Across the Curriculum, Toby Fulwiler and Art Young Disciplinary Perspectives on Thinking and Writing, Barbara S. Morris Joseph F. Trimmer Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Bruce Lincoln Joseph Harris