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.

Although scholars have studied migrant children who translate for their families, less is known about how these experiences matter for life-long literacy experiences. This article argues that child language brokers develop advanced skills in literacy and rhetoric from which they draw throughout their lives, in multiple contexts.

This article analyzes how public policymakers responded to CCCC’s 1988 National Language Policy. While many treated CCCC as a leading critic of English-only policies, others interpreted the organization to be more of a hesitant critic, or even an outright ally of the English-only movement. Rather than cede rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies, policies, and movements, I argue for language policies that place less emphasis on English and more on language as a right and a translingual practice.

This article discusses strategies by which compositionists can use Kenji Yoshino’s theory on “covering” to identify rhetorical moves white compositionists make to “pass” as allies, so they can revise the moves effectively to support colleagues and students of color.

With June Jordan’s voice lodged inside my head, I traverse history and the here and now as queer immigrant scholar/teacher of color via a transnational critical optic, alert to the ravages of power. I write using experimental form to break the hold of dominant (white) rhetorical traditions that are failing us, intertwining my words with Jordan’s words amidst ongoing assaults on our lives/imaginations.

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.

In this article, I weave new materialist theories about assemblage, community, agency, and rhetorical responsibility to argue for pedagogies that foreground writing to assemble publics and offer direct rhetorical training in campaign organizing. In describing three student activist campaigns, I demonstrate how this pedagogy challenges students to create socio-material assemblages that entice bodies into collective action—a challenge that demands tactile agility, creative activism, and often metanoic revision.

This article theorizes how students know when to activate knowledge acquired in FYC courses. Addressing knowledge activation as motivated by pursuing activity-specific objectives, the author calls for situating students’ encounter with and acquisition of rhetorical knowledge and practices of writing as knowledge of how to perform activities other than writing.

Through an ecological and autoethnographic analysis of a repository of diachronically archived texts written over a period of six years in multiple cultural, geographical, and disciplinary contexts, the author unfolds his materialized experiences of coming to terms with, embracing, and composing with rhetorical differences as spatiotemporal relationality and affordances.

This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one hand, from the poststructural through the posthuman, our most vigorous theories challenge classical notions of selfhood and agency. On the other hand, from institutional assessment through writing about writing, composition’s most vigorous practices entail fairly traditional ideas about selfhood and agency. This piece crosses over the impasse by suggesting that “self” and “agency” are vital fantasies for composition, and that negotiating these fantasies is an ethical process. At its heart, I argue, composition is any ethical, collective working out of these fantastical concepts that helps adaptive individuals more freely emerge.

Building on studies of alternative rhetorics, this article envisions personal writing pedagogy as a relational endeavor that fosters rhetorical alliances among disparate communities. I detail a particular course design through which “personal reflection” becomes a means of enacting more radical forms of belonging.

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.

Epideictic rhetoric reifies and reshapes the shared values of a community, and in this article, I reread William E. Coles Jr.’sThe Plural Ias showing forth a classroom built upon epideictic rhetoric, his own epideictic pedagogy asking that teachers of writing engage student work not expecting to be persuaded but as observers of rhetorical display.

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.

This article proposes embodied and multimodal readings of student compositions from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as a way to illuminate processes of assimilation and resistance. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and the ways that the field of composition has taken up Vizenor’s work, I argue that the project remains incomplete if we confine our history of cultural rhetoric to resistant, individual, alphabetically literate voices as the sites of rhetorical sovereignty and rhetorics of survivance.

This essay advances same-sex romantic correspondence as a pre-Stonewall site of rhetoric’s queer extra curriculum. Grounded in archival research on African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, I argue their epistolary exchange was animated by queer erotics that enabled their participation in self-education for racial uplift.

Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have highly negative effects on AAL (African American Language) speakers. Thus, as an alternative to code-switching pedagogical practices, I introduce a comparative approach that may be applied across all minority language groups and that highlights African and African American contributions to standardized American written communication structures and demonstrates the value of AVT in academic settings. This comparative rhetorical approach may have a positive impact on student language attitudes toward AAL by illustrating that many academic writers from varied racial/ethnic backgrounds often use AVT in their writing for rhetorical purposes and to produce lively, image-filled, concrete, readable essays.

Books reviewed:Writing against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric by Haivan V. Hoang. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2015. 180 pp. Del Otro Lado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexican Border by Susan V. Meyers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2014. 195 pp. Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College by Todd Ruecker. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 219 pp.

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.

This study shows how the rhetorical form of the jeremiad emerges in academic writing produced by one evangelical Christian student. Recognizing the jeremiad in student writing can help compositionists and literature instructors better understand the rhetorical choices of such students and help them leverage the jeremiad’s resources for rhetorical ends.

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.

In this article, I argue that new media is defined and situated within two distinct scholarly conversations (composing in contemporary society and composing in academia) and has varied definitions supporting arguments made within these overarching conversations. Discussions of new media contribute to rhetoric and composition’s twenty-first-century composing frameworks.

This article uses rhetorical genre theory to discuss methods for writing studies research in light of increasing participation of Indigenous scholars and students in disciplines throughout the academy. Like genres, research methods are embedded in systems of interaction that create subject positions and social relations. Using rhetorical genre theory to understand methods as the cultural tools of research communities, we argue that methods can be enacted as flexible resources in the interest of advancing ethical knowledge. In the context of Indigenous epistemological activism, researchers can then take a contingent stance toward method, a stance we name “principled uncertainty.”

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that early approach to writing and writers.

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.

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.

0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

Drawing on forty-eight interviews with individuals who participated on the academic job market in rhetoric and composition between 2010 and 2015, this essay shows how conceptualizing the academic job search as an intimate endeavor can offer insights for understanding the rhetorical production of affective binds within institutional contexts.

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet’s JAC article (“Composition as a Management Science”), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field’s key terms in actuality undergo (and perform) a political-economic function. This exploration forms the basis for an analysis of how the knowledge domains of the field can be more clearly defined through an effort to reframe the field as “writing studies,” for the purpose of moving beyond the worn out commonplaces and labor exploitation associated with first-year composition.

Reviewed books: Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, editors Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. 256 pp. Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric: Defending Academic Discourse against Postmodern Pluralism Donald Lazere Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2015. 342 pp. Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times Amy J. Wan Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2014. 232 pp.

In this case study, an accomplished academic writer struggles to produce very brief game summaries for a local newspaper as part of the service requirements to his son’s community football team. An analysis of his experience demonstrates the universal challenge of transfer regardless of prior knowledge or meta-awareness of rhetorical strategies for writing in new or unfamiliar settings and argues for a more nuanced understanding of existing ability, disposition, context, and genre in the deployment of knowledge for writing.

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.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites. View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

Drawing from cultural studies and social justice education, this essay argues for the productive potential of racial inquiry in composition scholarship and pedagogy. Ethical imperatives facing rhetoric and composition are also pedagogical opportunities:to rethink multiculturalism, politicize student affect, and develop student-centered writing processes predicated upon deliberative critical inquiry.

Around 1986, inventional researchers began to presuppose an externalist philosophy of mind, thereby ushering in the postprocess era. Ecological composition and posthumanism,now understood as postprocess inventional models, present direct pedagogical applications, allowing different objects (e.g., databases, search engines) to qualify as writing and favoring rhetorical impact over “originality.”

Through an analysis of student writing and interviews, this article examines hyperbole as a neglected rhetorical device. The authors trouble notions of hyperbole as error and argue for a—reconceptualization of hyperbole as potentially highly communicative and able to convey emotional tone, passion, and significance while maintaining brevity.

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.

Examining the context and production of a community publication, I Witness: Perspectives on Policing in the Near Westside, this essay analyzes the ways in which local neighborhood authors situate themselves rhetorically when engaging with police issues within conditions of asymmetrical power. Furthermore, it describes the collective processes neighborhood residents used to empower their perspectives. The essay applies this case study to debates over open-hand and closed-fist rhetorics and the roles of scholars as sponsors to such rhetorical forms.

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

This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. We argue that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing–professional writing (WAW-PW) course can look like.

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.

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.

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

Through an examination of archival texts produced at sites of suppressed local rhetorics, this essay situates Oklahoma as a location of writing at the intersection of ecocomposition theory, critical regionalism, and composition pedagogy to establish the need for using local texts and transrhetorical analysis in writing classrooms.

What methods do graduate students take up for their dissertation projects? This article shares findings from distant reading of 2,711 abstracts, suggesting that humanist approaches predominate within the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, but not without some methodological pluralism. A large number of studies outside the consortium are also considered.

Dear Colleagues and Friends~~This month's issue includes various genres- articles, symposium contributions, review essay, exchange, and poster page-that tap both time and space. In these collective texts, we have historical perspectives helping us understand our own past and allowing us to update our present; linkages to other fields of endeavor so as to enhance our own; connections across spaces to other sites of writing around the world; and closer looks at our own sites-hence the title of this introduction. As represented here, our field includes a capacious view, and as we expand sites of inquiry and activity, we have a more robust and complex view. In this introduction, then, I'll summarize each of these contributions before taking up two other tasks: (1) outlining the treat in store for us, in the combined September and December special issue of College Composition and Communication, we will learn from colleagues about various and diverse Locations of Writing; and (2) sharing with readers our new policy on rememberingIn our first article, Expanding the Aims of Public Rhetoric and Writing Peda- gogy, Writing Letters to Editors, Brian Gogan takes up how the conventional assignment of the letter to the editor can be located in what he calls an ap- proach to public rhetoric and writing pedagogy that is conducted according to the tripartite aims of publicity, authenticity, and efficacy. Drawing on his work with students, Gogan expands on these single-concept aims to situate them in relationships: publicity-as-condition and publicity-as-action, authenticity- as-location and authenticity-as-legitimation, and efficacy-as-persuasion and efficacy-as-participation. Gogan also argues that we should separate and emphasize the participation the letter-to-the-editor genre entails from the persuasion that may be its aspiration: when the efficacy of the letter-to-the- editor assignment is expanded so that it is understood in terms of participation that may lead to persuasion, public rhetoric and writing pedagogy embraces the fullness of the ecological model [of writing] by seeing the wide range of effects-persuasive or not-there within.Continuing recent work recovering our collective writing pasts, our next article details the experiences of several 19th century women, some of them from the U.S., making their educational way at Cambridge University. In 'A Revelation and a Delight': Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing, L. Jill Lam- berton focuses on the writing these women engaged in, especially outside the classroom, in order both to succeed in the classroom and to affect wider spheres of influence. Defining this writing as a form of collaborative peer activity foster- ing agency, Lamberton identifies three benefits accruing to her 19th century subjects: (1) use of extracurricular writing that augmented and enriched cur- ricular learning; (2) use of writing to develop social networks and circulation; and (3) use of such writing to shift public opinion, looking outside the college or university for broader audiences to voice support and agitate for change.Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., and Tito G. Nurudeen Jr. return us to the present as they consider how our writing programs can be enhanced: by adapting a legal heuristic used to determine what in the law is called impact. In The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment, these col- leagues first distinguish between inequities produced by intent from those produced unintentionally-the latter called disparate impact-before outlin- ing a three-part question-driven process that can identify such instances and work toward ways of changing them:Step 1: Do the assessment policies or practices result in adverse impact on students of a particular race as compared with students of other races? …

This article outlines a three-part pedagogy capable of responding to the risks, rewards, and headaches associated with public rhetoric and writing. To demonstrate the purchase of this pedagogy, I revisit one of the oldest and most misunderstood public rhetoric and writing assignments: the letter-to-the-editor assignment.

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.