The study of writers and writing in digital environments raises distinct and complex ethical issues for researchers. Rhetoric theory and casuistic ethics, working in tandem, provide a theoretical framework for addressing such issues. A casuistic heuristic grounded in rhetorical principles can help digital writing researchers critically interrogate their research designs, carefully examine their relationships with research participants, and make sound ethical judgments.

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as “vacuous” themes, this archival study examines women’s compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms.

Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence, edited by Megan Boler; “Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era,” by James A. Inman.

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In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important contributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can usefully fill.

This article is a rhetorical analysis of the anxious and outraged discourse employed in response to the “rising tide” of cheating and plagiarism. This discourse invites actions that are antithetical to the goals of education and the roles of educators, as exemplified by the proliferation of plagiarism-detection technologies.

Heather Lettner-Rust has written a commentary on David Coogan’s article “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric,” which appeared in the June 2006 issue of CCC. David Coogan responds to Heather Lettner-Rust’s commentary. The full text of the original article is available at http://inventio.us/ccc.

This article places responses received from an open-ended survey of graduate students and faculty in dialogue with published commentary on the scope of composition studies as a discipline to explore three interrelated disciplinary dilemmas: the “pedagogical imperative,” the “theory-practice split,” and the increasingly complicated relationship between “rhetoric” and “composition” as our field’s titular terms.

Delivering the Goods: How Writing Instruction Really Works by Howard Tinberg; A review of “Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts” by Joseph Harris and of “Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon,” edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey.

This essay reports on a study of first-year student writing. Based on a stratified national sample, the study attempts to replicate research conducted twenty-two years ago and to chart the changes that have taken place in student writing since then. The findings suggest that papers are longer, employ different genres, and contain new error patterns.

Review Essays: Defining Dialect David Johnson American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward Do You Speak American? Robert MacNeil and William Cran A Teachers’ Introduction to African American English: What a Writing Teacher Should Know Teresa M. Redd and Karen Schuster Webb.

The phrase “academic bullshit” presents compositionists with a special dilemma. Because compositionists study, teach, and produce academic writing, they are open to the accusation that they both tolerate and perpetuate academic bullshit. We argue that confronting this problem must begin with a careful definition of “bullshit” and “academic bullshit.” In contrast to Harry Frankfurt’s checklist method of definition, we examine “bullshit” as a graded category. We suggest that some varieties of academic bullshit may be both unavoidable and beneficial.

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.

The article explores writing-centered pedagogies that deepen student learning in literature survey courses. More broadly, the article also responds to Richard Fulkerson and Maureen Daly Goggin, who challenge professors of English studies to find disciplinary unity within the diverse epistemologies of rhetoric.

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Coming to See Myself as a Vernacular Intellectual: Remarks at the 2007 CCCC General Session on Receiving the Exemplar Award Peter Elbow My Five-Paragraph-Theme Theme Ed White The Fourth Generation Kristen Kennedy.

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Writing in personal genres, like autobiography, leads writers to public voices. Public voice is a discursive quality of a text that conveys the writer’s authority and position relative to others. To show how voice and authority depend on genre, I analyze the autobiographies of two writers who take opposing positions on the same topic. By producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions, student writers gain agency.

Review Essays: The Literacies of Hip-Hop Nancy Effinger Wilson Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture H. Samy Alim “Gettin’ Our Groove On”: Rhetoric, Language, and Literacy for the Hip Hop Generation Kermit E. Campbell Hiphop Literacies Elaine Richardson Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans Geneva Smitherman.

William Irmscher, past president of NCTE (1983) and past chair of CCCC (1979), passed away just before Christamas.

The Japanese martial art of aikido affords a framework for understanding argument as harmonization rather than confrontation. Two movements, circling away (tenkan) and entering in (irimi), suggest tactics for arguing with adversaries. The ethical imperative of aikido involves protecting one’s adversary from harm, using the least force necessary, and, when possible, transforming aggression into cooperation.

CCCC Executive Committee Meeting Nashville, Tennessee, November 21, 2006

This is a written version of the address Akua Duku Anokye gave at the CCCC meeting in New York on March 24, 2007.

This essay theorizes the ways in which comics, and Marvel Comics in particular, acted as sponsors of multimodal literacy for the author. In doing so, the essay demonstrates the possibilities that exist in examining comics more closely and in thinking about how literacy sponsorship happens in multimodal texts.

The next entry into our “Re-Visions” feature—a series that offers reconsiderations of particularly significant work in CCC—is a reappraisal of Joseph Janangelo’s “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts,” which originally appeared in February of 1998 (volume 49.1, 24– 44). In addition to commentaries by Anne Frances Wysocki, Collin Gifford Brooke, and Jeff Rice is a “comment on the comments” by Joseph Janangelo. The subject of these commentaries is readily available for reference at the CCC Online Archive (www.inventio.us/ccc). I welcome your feedback on this feature and suggestions for subjects of future “Re-Visions.”

Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning” First-Year Composition’ as “Introduction to Writing Studies’” in the June 2007 issue of CCC (volume 58.4, 552–84) has raised a good deal of debate, and I welcome more contributions from readers as we discuss the Downs-Wardle article in these pages. Joshua Kutney’s written response came in time for publication in this issue. In addition to the print copies of the journal, the original article is featured on the CCC Online Archive (www.inventio.us/ccc).

By reflecting on Japanese internment camps executed by the U.S. government in World War II, this article examines camp schools’ curricula and writing assignments and an English teacher’s response to student essays to show how racially profiled students and their Caucasian teacher negotiated the political meanings of civil rights and freedom.

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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.

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This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student work, “Accessing Disability” argues that critical thinking can be taught more effectively through multi-modal methods and a de-emphasis on the linear progress narrative.

While Richard Weaver, R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Robert Streeter have been most identified with rhetoric at the University of Chicago and its institutional return in the 1950s, the archival record demonstrates that Frederick Champion Ward, dean of the undergraduate “College” from 1947 to 1954, and Henry W. Sams, director of English in the College during Ward’s tenure, created the useful tensions for these positions to emerge.

Imprints from the February 1958 issue of CCC, “Speed of Cultural Change” by Marshall McLuhan.Imprints from the February 1958 issue of CCC, “Speed of Cultural Change” by Marshall McLuhan.

“Branding” a university in an effort to attract student applicants and alumni dollars is increasingly commonplace. The history of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic attests to the ways student writers represent an institution’s brand and provides a troubling picture of a world in which under-prepared students are branded out of existence.

This qualitative investigation explores the perceptions of four women compositionists regarding mothers, teaching, and scholarship in the field of composition. I examine narrative case studies about four women who have PhDs in composition from the same doctoral program.