The editor introduces the articles in this issue and previews upcoming special themed issues.

Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of students’ DSP essays, showing key differences between the writing of students who self-selected into a mainstream first-year writing course and that of students who self selected into a preparatory course. Using both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-based text analysis, the examination provides information that can, in addition to validating student decisions, equip students with a rhetorically reflexive awareness of genre and offer an alternative to externally imposed writing assessment.

This article situates the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing in current educational policy and in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. It argues the Framework positions the discipline to address gaps in American education by reinvigorating historical and traditional frames for writing instruction—ancient rhetoric and the liberal arts tradition. Although this realignment challenges technocratic assumptions about education, it raises pragmatic and ethical questions about assessing habits of mind that rhetoric and composition must consider.

This is a written version of the acceptance speech the Mike Rose gave at the CCCC Convention in St. Louis on March 22, 2012.

Three scholars review the following: College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco and We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education by Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh Rhetoric Matters: Why Denial May Not Work This Time Dominic DelliCarpini Jeremiad and Insularity Rita Malenczyk Asking the Right Questions Marlene R. Miner

The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance Ellen Cushman Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric Vorris L. Nunley Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions Christopher Schroeder Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, editors

Drawing on qualitative research conducted at the University of Michigan, this article examines the extent to which composition instructors theorize and teach reading-writing connections and argues that explicitly teaching reading-writing connections may increase student motivation to complete assigned reading. The article also discusses using model texts as an effective means of teaching those connections.

This article offers a case study of how three African American students enrolled in a first-year writing course employ Ebonics-based phonological and syntactical patterns across writing assignments, including those that also require students to compose multigenre essays.

Editor Kathleen Yancey introduces articles for this issue.

This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by manythousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. Weseek to understand more clearly through this conversation how culture and rhetorical tradition help shape the way we teach writing.

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.

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This is a written version of the address that Malea Powell gave at the CCCC Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, on Thursday, March 22, 2012.

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This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategicallyin an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization andto strengthen the voice of the president.

This article describes the rationale and efficacy of a graduate-level teaching module providing loosely structured practice with real archives. Introducing early career scholarsto archival methods changed their beliefs about knowledge, research, teaching, and their discipline(s). This case study suggests that archives can be productive training spacesfor all writing studies researchers.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

This article describes the nature of eye-tracking technology and its use in the study of discourse processes, particularly reading. It then suggests several areas of research incomposition studies, especially at the intersection of writing, reading, and digital media, that can benefit from the use of this technology.

What are the key ethical issues involved in conducting archival research? Based on examination of cases and interviews with leading archival researchers in composition,this article discusses several ethical questions and offers a heuristic to guide ethical decision making. Key to this process is recognizing the person-ness of archival materials.

This article provides an overview of the ways in which data and text mining have potentialas research methodologies in composition studies. It introduces data mining in thecontext of the field of composition studies and discusses ways in which this methodologycan complement and extend our existing research practices by blending the best of whattechnology and researchers have to offer. The authors examine a process model for datamining, discuss benefits and liabilities, and link to increased calls for accountability.

Over the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere.Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition.This essay surveys much of this recent literature, noting how rhet/comp has incorporated CDA methodology in a variety of studies of inequality, ethics, higher education,critical pedagogy, news media, and institutional practices. CDA uses rigorous, empirical methods that are sensitive to both context and theory, making it ideal for the demandsof a range of projects being developed in our field.

Institutional ethnography seeks to uncover how things happen—how institutional discourse compels and shapes practice(s) and how norms of practice speak to, for, and overindividuals. The Faculty and Staff Standpoints project is shaped by this methodology, as it explores writing center staff and faculty relationships to their work.

Rhetoric and composition historiography has recently undergone a rapid transformation as scholars have complicated and challenged earlier narratives by examining diverselocal histories and alternative rhetorical traditions. This revisionist scholarship has in turn created new research challenges, as scholars must now demonstrate connectionsbetween the local and larger scholarly conversations; assume a complex, multivocal past as the starting point for historical inquiry; and resist the temptation to reinscribeeasy binaries, taxonomies, and master narratives, even when countering them. This essay identifies and analyzes these challenges, posits responses to them, and suggestsexemplars for future practice.

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This article raises multiple issues associated with archival research methodologies and methods. Based on a survey of recent scholarship and interviews with experiencedarchival researchers, this overview of the current status of archival research both complicates traditional conceptions of archival investigation and encourages scholars toadopt the stance of archivist-researcher.

Presented as a series of graphs, bibliographic data gathered from College Composition and Communication provides perspective useful for inquiring into the changing shapeof the field as it continues to mature. In its focus on graphing, the article demonstrates an application of distant reading methods to present patterns not only reflective of themost commonly cited figures in CCC over the past twenty-five years, but also attendant to a steady increase in the breadth of infrequently cited figures.

Reviewed are: The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives, Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt, editors, The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide, 3rd edition, Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Winifred Bryan Horner, editors, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson, editors, The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process, Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, Becoming a Writing Researcher, Ann Blakeslee and Cathy Fleischer

This article summarizes various applications of oral history interviews at local sites to represent the writing of underrepresented groups. The coauthors (a rhetorician andan archivist) discuss the important disciplinary implications for tending to the local, especially at sites where formal archives are hard to come by, offering three principlesfor sustaining the local by combining research design with archival development.

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In order to show difference as a dynamic, relational, and emergent construct, this article introduces “markers of difference,” rhetorical cues that signal the presence of difference between one or more interlocutors, and suggests practical means by which teachers can engage this concept to improve their teaching practice.

In this Symposium focused on peer review, Irwin Weiser—drawing both on history and on his own experience as faculty member, WPA, department head, and dean—examines the set of practices we associate with the tenure and promotion process, finding that they differ across sites at the same time that they look very similar in their assumptions. Weiser’s review then culminates in a set of questions useful as a heuristic for the multiple stakeholders involved in the process. In the next and complementary article, Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher—drawing on their varied experiences as authors and publishers of a journal and several book series—provide a historical review and consideration of peer review in publishing. They find that scholarly peer review, from the question of signed reviews to the practices of digital publications, is in the midst of change, but that at the same time, a reviewing process of some sort is still the mainstay of publishing.

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.