This article shares our experience designing and deploying writing assessment in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, the first-ever first-year writing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We argue that writing assessment can be effectively adapted to the MOOC environment and that doing so reaffirms the importance of mixed-methods approaches to writing assessment and drives writing assessment toward a more individualized,learner-driven, and learner-autonomous paradigm.

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.”

Explore the appendixes to Comer and White’s article.

The concept of metanoia illuminates the spaces that exist around and beyond opportune moments. As such, metanoia offers ways to reframe the affective elements of teaching and learning, writing and revising. This essay examines emotion, agency, and transformation in the concept of metanoia as a way to expand “opportunity” in writing processes. View a short video by Myers and some of her students on the CCC Videos page.

This article demonstrates that the terms of the debate over whether college is “worth it” undermine composition’s mainstay arguments for relevance. In light of students’ market-driven motivations, the article posits a citizen-worker perspective in composition that refuses the compartmentalization of economic, cultural, and civic functions of college.

Reviewed are: Stylish Academic Writing Helen Sword The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Steven Pinker

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This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. Ipresent a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and pedagogical attention.

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.

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.

This is a written version of the address that Adam Banks gave at the CCCC Convention in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, March 19, 2015.

This essay explores the pedagogical project of integrating digital archival research into the undergraduate classroom. We contend that rather than simply asking students to

A literacy narrative.

A literacy narrative.

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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.

A literacy narrative.

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Reviewed are: Literacy as Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms A. Suresh Canagarajah, editor Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations A. Suresh Canagarajah Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies Scott Wible Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African AmericanLiteracy Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy

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.

In this article, I turn to a grounded theory study that examines the experiences of students participating in an individual project-based FYW course, exploring up close the exploits,—practices, and products of one student “writing to assemble.” I question pedagogy stayed to theory that would treat writing as primarily a technology of representation, and in its place—introduce the concept of “writing as assemblage.” Positing a theory of the writing space that underscores writing’s more generative qualities, I call for a new definition of proficiency—for all manner of first-year writing courses.

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.

Reviewed: Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, 6th ed.

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Responses from Mary P. Sheridan, Scott Wible, Asao B. Inoue, Madelyn Flammia, Natasha N. Jones, Yvonne CLeary, and Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Anne Wysocki.

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.

Using Mariolina Salvatori’s difficulty paper assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students’

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 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.

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.

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This essay examines James Britton’s role in the development of composition studies as an academic discipline and considers the relevance of his work in the field today. It contends that his influence arose, paradoxically, through his construction of an antidisciplinary theory of the role of language in teaching and learning. Finally, in response to calls for composition studies to move away from its longstanding focus on instruction, it argues instead for an increased emphasis on pedagogical inquiry.

This is a written version of the address that Howard Tinberg gave at the CCCC Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Thursday, March 20, 2014.

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