College Composition and Communication
379 articlesFebruary 2018
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Abstract
Building on interest in writing’s situatedness and materiality, this article stretches conceptions of writing processes with accounts of writers’ unintentional, embodied, and emergent interactions within writing environments, as rendered through reflective multimodal methods combining talk, drawing, photographs, and video.
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Abstract
This article describes how a first-year learning community combining library, archival, and digital literacies facilitated students’ grasp of threshold concepts of academic research and writing. It argues that critical-rhetorical processes and pedagogies can help counteract neoliberal educational trends that interpellate students as consumers rather than learners.
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.
September 2017
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Pretty Bullets: Tracing Transmedia/Translingual Literacies of an Israeli Soldier across Regimes of Practice ↗
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Tracing the literacy practices of an Israeli soldier, this case study examines how his engagement in multilingual and multimodal (MML) composing affects his ways of thinking about and doing literacy. It specifically attends to how MML practices dispose writers to certain orientations to reading, writing, speaking, and design.
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Abstract
Examining the chanupa, or ceremonial pipe, from a Lakota perspective reveals it as responding to a particular ontology and extends indigenous rhetorics to consider the ontological dimensions of communication. Distinctions between indigenous rhetorics and new materialist rhetorics bring greater attention to how groups and individuals constellate themselves as beings.
June 2017
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Abstract
Books reviewed: Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics by Laurie E. Gries. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 324 pp. Dialectical Rhetoric by Bruce McComiskey. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 228 pp. Hospitality and Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession by Richard Haswell and Janis Haswell. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 232 pp.
December 2016
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Abstract
Borrowing from rhetorically based theories of usability, this article offers an invention tactic designed to help students understand how mundane features of everyday dwelling places have significant impacts on their educational experiences. Additionally, the offered tactic helps students understand how to craft rhetorical critiques in contexts inside and outside academia.
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Abstract
Translingual dispositions, characterized by a general openness to plurality and difference in the ways people use language, are central for all users of English in a globalized society, and the fostering of such proclivities is an imperative to the contemporary composition classroom. In this article, we analyze student writing that emerged from a global classroom partnership between a US university and a Hong Kong university designed to facilitate the fostering of translingual dispositions. We show that an examination of writing provides a window into the varied ways in which students negotiate their linguistic identities and construct their ideological commitments to language difference. Although composition can become a space that facilitates opportunities for students to “do” translingual dispositions, these dispositions are constitutive of a constellation of highly complex sociocultural issues and experiences and therefore cannot be expected to be articulated in a preconceived and uniform manner.
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Abstract
This article explores bodily movement practices as a foundational component of rhetorical awareness. Through ethnographic study of dance pedagogy, the author demonstrates how genre uptake is enabled by bodily experience; learned ways of moving produce inclinations toward certain rhetorical pathways over others.Enabling students to uptake new genres means teaching them to be aware of the intersection of bodily and intellectual resources.
September 2016
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Abstract
In an era of normative austerity in US higher education, composition is being transformed by budget cuts, retrenchment, and marketization. Nevertheless, the field’s scholarship continues to compartmentalize questions concerning the material terms of practice away from questions of curricular philosophy. Because composition has not developed a deliberate, sustained inquiry into how scholarship and teaching are being shaped by the perpetual crisis of austerity economics, we are compelled to adopt myopic and reactionary stances toward our work. As a means of subverting composition’s perpetual crisis, Scott advocates disciplinary work that not only imagines new, globally focused, and politically conscious curricula but also actively pursues the creation of the work and learning environments that are necessary for their successful realization.
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The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to Twenty-First-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition Labor ↗
Abstract
Since the adoption and subsequent fade of the Wyoming Resolution, we have seen the political economy of writing instruction change remarkably. Certainly, composition studies’ disciplinary viability seems more solid, but the proportion of contingent writing teachers has increased to almost 70 percent. The authors of this article attribute these trends to “neoliberal creep” and attempt to think through their effects on our work and our students.
June 2016
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Abstract
The authors report on a study of writing transfer using a relatively novel method. Specifically, they use screencast videos to study the work of a dozen undergraduates who had taken first-year writing and were now enrolled in an interdisciplinary biology class. The authors argue that students were able to adapt to the writing requirements in the biology class because they implicitly understood themselves to be engaged in Carter’s metagenre of “research from sources.” Because students in this study had been asked to engage in that metagenre at least since high school, they believed their writing habits were established well before first-year writing, and consequently they have trouble recognizing the influence of such a course on their subsequent work. The study also revealed that students coordinated multiple texts simultaneously in order to engage in processes akin to what Howard has called “patchwriting” but also similar to the habits of professional writers. Whereas professional writers have well established networks for seeking information, the students in this study worked in relative isolation, using a few sources found haphazardly through library or Google searches. The authors suggest that instructors spend more time helping students develop effective networks of information, including experts and organizations in addition to published sources.
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Abstract
This article argues that composition should be involved in the study and teaching of graduate level writing. It goes on to argue that independent consulting offers a viable way for compositionists to share expertise with graduate students and programs, as well as to expand opportunities for participation in the profession.
February 2016
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Do Academics Really Write This Way? A Corpus Investigation of Moves and Templates in “They Say / I Say” ↗
Abstract
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s writing textbook, “They Say / I Say,” has triggered important debates among writing professionals. Not included within these debates,however, is the empirical question of whether the textbook’s templates reflect patterns of language use in actual academic discourses. This article uses corpus-based discourse analysis to examine how two particular “moves” discussed in the textbook are realized in three large corpora of professional and student academic writing. The analysis reveals important differences between the textbook’s wordings and those preferred by student and professional writers. It also uncovers differences in use of “interpersonal”functions of language by experienced and less experienced writers. In offering this detailed analysis of academic prose, I aim to extend calls to recenter language in writing research and instruction. I conclude with implications for discussing academic argumentation with students.
December 2015
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Abstract
Motivated by a fear that she may have plagiarized, the author considers the possibility that plagiarism might be understood as a transgression against reading as well as against writing. Drawing on Philip Eubanks’s work in Metaphor and Writing, the article proposes that one reason for composition studies’ ambivalent relationship to reading is that we possess a reading prototype that equates all reading with literature. A significant effect of the prototype is a conceptualization of reading in terms of volume, which understandably transmutes reading desire into reading anxiety. This article suggests that paying attention to the ways in which we find the things we read can help to assuage this anxiety.
September 2015
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Cultural Schemas and Pedagogical Uses of Literacy Narratives: A Reflection on My Journey with Reading and Writing ↗
Abstract
A literacy narrative.
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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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Tracing Transfer across Media: Investigating Writers’ Perceptions of Cross-Contextual and Rhetorical Reshaping in Processes of Remediation ↗
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This qualitative study examines how writers perceive the mobilization and adaptation of their print-based writing knowledge and multiple literacies when remediating written essays into digital stories. It also outlines a pedagogical tool that can help writers reflect on what they might transfer as they compose across media.
February 2015
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Symposium: Critical Retrospections on the 1987 CCCC Position Statement “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Department Chairs” ↗
Abstract
This issue’s symposium consists of what I call “critical retrospections” on a CCCC position statement from 1987, “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Department Chairs.” The authors of the statement intended it to be useful to faculty and administrators called upon to justify or explain the work of composition studies as an academic and scholarly field. The statement calls attention to our field’s methodological “diversity” as well as to how our work “reach[es] outside the traditional methods of literary studies.” I invited several scholars and teachers from across the field to reflect on this statement, asking them if it still represents the range of interests and commitments within our discipline.
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Local Examples and Master Narratives: Stanley Fish and the Public Appeal of Current-Traditionalism ↗
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This article analyzes the rhetoric of public attitudes toward composition, as represented in Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” blog in the New York Times and in comments posted by his readers. Fish denounces the field of composition as highly politicized and anti-academic and advocates instead a belletristic, current-traditional approach. The dialogue between Fish and his audience exemplifies the web of definitions and logical fallacies by which current-traditionalism and belletristic English frame public attitudes. To the extent that composition’s “public turn” involves engaging public opinion, compositionists must anticipate this framing or else find their engagements ineffective, even self-defeating.
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Abstract
This essay details the pedagogical possibilities of incorporating archival research assignments in undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses. It uses Susan Wells’s concept of the “gifts” of the archives to explore a pedagogy for undergraduate research that emphasizes uncertainty and exploration—a pedagogy that has applications beyond undergraduate archival research projects.
December 2014
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Abstract
Preview this article: From the Editor: A Mixed Genre—Locations of Writing; (Another Beginning), Another Farewell, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/66/2/collegecompositionandcommunication26214-1.gif
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“The Worst Part of the Dead Past”: Language Attitudes, Policies, and Pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College, 1866–1902 ↗
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To underline the value of composition’s international and multilingual history, this article presents an account of language attitudes, policies, and pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College (Beirut) between 1866 and 1902, which also provides a historical dimension to contemporary conversations about international and translingual approaches to writing research and pedagogy.
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Abstract
Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe
September 2014
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Abstract
Reporting on a year-and-a-half-long study of Latina/Latino multilingual students transitioning from high school to a community college or university on the US-Mexico border, this article explores how writing instruction was shaped across the three institutional locations by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing pressures, resource disparities, and individual instructors. In concluding comments, the author suggests ways for composition teachers, researchers, and administrators to build connections between different locations of writing and facilitate student transitions between institutions.
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Review Essay: Locations and Writing: Place-Based Learning, Geographies of Writing, and How Place (Still) Matters in Writing Studies ↗
Abstract
Reviewed are: Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman The Locations of Composition Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser, editors What Is “College-Level Writing”? Vol. 2: Assignments, Readings, and Student Writing Samples Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau, editors Teaching Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach Rhonda C. Grego and Nancy S. Thompson Generaciones’ Narratives: The Pursuit and Practice of Traditional and Electronic Literacies on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands John Scenters-Zapico
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Daughters of the Seminaries: Re-landscaping History through the Composition Courses at the Cherokee National Female Seminary ↗
Abstract
Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.
June 2014
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino
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“A Revelation and a Delight”: Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing ↗
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This article surveys the extracurricular writing of the first women to attend Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge University. It argues that such student writing did more than promote intellectual formation or rehearse new knowledge; indeed, it changed institutional culture and the social horizons for middle-class women’s lives.
February 2014
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Abstract
Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman, eds. Race and Writing Assessment Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, eds. Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies Michael R. Neal Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds.
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Abstract
Only once in the Bible is Jesus represented as writing. This essay focuses on that brief, intriguing episode (John 7.53–8.11) to explore the rhetorical power of writing as apublic performance, the interplay of orality and literacy, the relationship of writing to reflection, and the rhetoric of silence.
December 2013
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Abstract
This article discusses what we mean by the term—internship, with special attention to requiritalicents for compensation; explains the issues that appertain to unpaid student internships; and urges broad engagitalicent and individual as well as collective action on this issue.
September 2013
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The Rise of the Online Writing Classroom: Reflecting on the Material Conditions of College Composition Teaching ↗
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This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.
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Preview this article: Just Like Steve: One Writing Teacher's Well-Lived Life, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/65/1/collegecompositionandcommunication24213-1.gif
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This article considers connections between the work of composition and rhetoric and the growing field of faculty development. It defines faculty development, explores reasons composition and rhetoric scholars might be drawn to and successful in faculty development positions, and examines existing and potential intellectual connections between these two fields of inquiry.
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Abstract
This article argues that tenure and promotion decisions should reflect the fundamental ways in which the academy and our positions within it have changed. Calling attention to the role senior scholars can play, the article considers the challenges offered by activity in four areas: digital and new-media scholarship, editorial and curatorial work, administration and leadership, and mentoring.
June 2013
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Abstract
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.
February 2013
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Abstract
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
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Abstract
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
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.
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Abstract
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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Muted Rhetors and the Mundane: The Case of Ruth Mary Weeks, Rewey Belle Inglis, and W. Wilbur Hatfield ↗
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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.
September 2012
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Grasping Rhetoric and Composition by Its Long Tail: What Graphs Can Tell Us about the Field’s Changing Shape ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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
February 2012
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Abstract
The Reviews (and reviewers) are: Methodologically Adrift Richard H. Haswell Everything That Rises … Jeanne Gunner Important Focus, Limited Perspective Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt An HBCU Perspective on Acaditalicically Adrift Teresa Redd
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“Ladies Who Don’t Know Us Correct Our Papers”: Postwar Lay Reader Programs and Twenty-First Century Contingent Labor in First-Year Writing ↗
Abstract
I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.
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Abstract
While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers’ compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic writing conventions in question. Suggestions for repurposing the intellectual work of the TA-training practicum follow.
December 2011
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers. Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, Stuart Selber, editor. From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup, Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, editors. Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, editors. Generaciones’ Narratives: The Pursuit and Practice of Traditional and Electronic Literacies on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, John Scenters-Zapico.
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Abstract
Against the limitations English monolingualism imposes on composition scholarship, as evident in journal submission requirements, frequency of references to non-English medium writing, bibliographical resources, and our own past work, we argue for adopting a translingual approach to languages, disciplines, localities, and research traditions in our scholarship, and propose ways individuals, journals, conferences, and graduate programs might advance composition scholarship toward a translingual norm.
September 2011
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Abstract
This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological and intellectual comfort zones. As a deeper benefit, the study of Native American rhetorical strategies renders the Western rhetorical tradition not only as a framework for inquiry but as an object of analysis and critique itself.