Because source use is a key academic literacy skill tied to students’ socialization into the university, scholars have called for more research on how novice second language (L2) writers’ use of sources changes over time as they engage with disciplinary discourse. The present study, therefore, tracked the semester-long development of thirty undergraduate L2 students’ source use in a research writing seminar course. Each student wrote two research papers for the course, providing sixty papers for both quantitative and qualitative text analysis. The researcher conducted data analysis in terms of citation density, source type, citation type, and source use purpose. Findings showed that students’ engagement with scholarly articles led to formulation of new citation patterns: incorporation of research summaries and frequent use of nonintegral citations. In addition, citation density increased overall, with scholarly sources newly used in theoretical orientations to John M. Swales’s CARS model. Nonetheless, students’ papers demonstrated a lack of proficiency in the sophisticated aspects of source use. The discussion concludes with suggestions for source use instruction in line with students’ understanding of disciplinary discourse.

Bilateral mentorships in rhetoric and composition can persist beyond formalized, institutional arrangements in ways that continue to (re)shape lives in the profession. Mediated discourse theory provides a lens through which to describe practices of enduring mentorships in terms of ways they might advance cross-gender and cross-generational understanding.

This essay examines the discourse around the trigger warning through the analytic paradigm of racial literacy and the rhetorical frames of colorblind racism to illuminate how the trigger warning as currently conceptualized, even when framed as a means of equitable engagement, is mediated by and upholds the racial status quo.

We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.

In this article, we argue that HBCU composition faculty members impact the composition field through our innovative and unorthodox tactics that we label cross-boundary discourse, discursive homeplacing, and safe harboring. Our goal is to show that HBCUs are unique sites of inquiry and poised to be at the forefront of conversations about race and writing because of our institutional contexts and the student populations with whom we work each day.

Proponents of reframing argue that prophetic pragmatism entails redirecting contemporary education reforms. While this judgment may defend our professional standing, it overlooks the consequences of redirecting reform's appeals to global competition, which preclude public participation in defining the goals and measures of literacy education. This article forwards an alternate pragmatism for attending to the public consequences of reform discourse.

This project explores the dynamic impact of student employment on classroom discourse and on students “long-term academic and professional success. Using student surveys, institutional data, and scholarly research, I demonstrate that students” everyday workplace experiences play an integral (and potentially integrated) role in their liberal arts education and in their ability to negotiate future workplace literacies.

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.

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.

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.

On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition’s History and Pedagogy Shane Borrowman, editor Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Scholars Amy C. Kimme Hea, editor Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study Ben McCorkle Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network Jeff Rice Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World Susan H. Delagrange

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 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.

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.

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.

In this essay, I offer William James’s notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think about the relationship between academic discourse and religious discourse. And the second adjustment relates to the stances we adopt when responding to religious students’ texts. Along with outlining these adjustments, I illustrate the ways James’s framework productively informed my response to a faith-based narrative that an evangelical student wrote in one of my first-year writing courses.

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom Kristie S. Fleckenstein Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability Peter N. Goggin, ed. Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Mark Garrett Longaker The Responsibilities of Rhetoric Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, eds. Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh, eds.

For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within College Compositionand Communication, the relationship now merits attention. The two fields’ common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other, forstudents, and for policymakers. As digital tools and media expand the nature and circulation of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composingtexts not created in response to rhetorical situations or for scholars.

In this article, we argue that prior learning assessment (PLA) essays manifest a series of issues central to composition research and practice: they foreground the “contact zone” between the unauthorized writer, institutional power, and the articulation of knowledge claims; they reinforce the central role of a multifaceted approach to writing expertise in negotiating that zone; and they call attention to new and alternative spaces in which learning is gained and call for new forms in which it may be articulated. Ultimately, we claim that PLA as an emergent discourse compels compositionists to re-imagine not only the students we all teach, but also ways we might better—more explicitly, more reflectively, and more tactically—teach such students about writing as a mechanism for claiming and legitimating learning.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

Responding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of plagiarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism; second, it examines transnational political contexts for writing pedagogy; and third, it offers a Daoist understanding of language.

While internationalization has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different in their approaches or rhetorics, appear to lack what we have; and how we might avoid colonialist intervention or offer consultation. These import/export focal points create key blind spots in our awareness of deep and rich writing research and programming traditions internationally, of how we fit—or do not fit—into this broader world, and of missed opportunities for self-reflection and growth.

Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they “see” in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the “rhetoric of injury” informing racial accountability in the post-civil rights era.

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

Contemporary composition classrooms have understandably distanced themselves from the elitism associated with the terms taste and propriety. However, writers do need to learn how appropriate discourse is rhetorically negotiated. Understanding and reinventing propriety’s rhetorical function can enable students and teachers to develop notions of propriety that consider complex histories and perspectives.

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.

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.

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

This article offers a critical perspective on the default mode of freshman composition instruction, that is, its traditionally middle-class and white racial orientation. Although middle-classness and whiteness have been topics of critical interest among compositionists in recent years, perhaps the most effective challenge to this hegemony in the classroom is not in our textbooks or critical discourse but in what many of our students already consume, the ghettocentricity expressed in the music of rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Eminem.

In this article, I assert that plagiarism is a literacy practice that involves social relationships, attitudes, and values as much as it involves rules of citation and students’ texts. In addition, I show how plagiarism is complicated by a discourse about academic dishonesty, and I consider the implications that recognizing such complexity has for teaching.

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

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John Hollowell, Michael P. Clark, Steven Mailloux, Christine Ross, Responses to "Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse:Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Dec., 2004), pp. 329-334

In this article, I argue that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can complement and extend existing critical and radical writing pedagogies; CDA provides the theoretical and methodological context that can articulate explicitly the relationship between language practices and politics. I use CDA to analyze texts that circulated on the campus of Miami University, Ohio, surrounding a conflict that exacerbated ongoing disputes about diversity, access, and standards, and I discuss how CDA might inform composition pedagogy.

Community service learning in college-level composition has been widely proclaimed as a microrevolution in higher education. Advocates enthusiastically assert that both faculty and student participants report radical transformations of their experiences and understanding of education and its relation to communities outside the campus (Adler-Kassner et al. 1). This pedagogy, they argue, addresses writing as a situated, social act and points us toward a curriculum of textual studies based on [rhetorical] inquiry into variation in discourse (Bacon 53). Students write about the community in journals and rhetorical analyses of mission statements, or with the community in an urban

This article links failed reform to failed education through a case study of an annual collaborative revision of a program textbook in the Composition Program at the University of California at Irvine. Review of successive editions of the program’s Student Guide to Writing at UCI reveals a progressive retreat from the program’s pedagogical commitments and the reappearance of product-oriented instruction.

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of academic and personal writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey's views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

Christine Ross, Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Dec., 2003), pp. 302-329

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of “academic” and “personal” writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey’s views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing.

Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or parlor traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space - and the debate about who should occupy that space - Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman's proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years. While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women's words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge white middle-class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman's place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife. Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women's roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the quiet woman must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women's space in historical discourse.

Communitarianism and compositionists’ use of the concept of “communities of discourse,” while intended to promote inclusive discourse, can easily fall prey to the myth of progressivism, ignoring the relative costs of discursive conflict or the pressures of consensus and conformity.

Introduction Part I: Premises and Foundations 1. Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write 2. A Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response The Uses of Binary Thinking Part II: The Generative Dimension 4. Freewriting and the Problem of Wheat and Tares 5. Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience 6. Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice 7. The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing 8. Voice in Literature 9. Silence: A Collage 10. What Is Voice in Writing? Part IV: Discourses 11. Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues 12. In Defense of Private Writing 13. The War Between Reading and Writing - and How to End It 14. Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage Part V: Teaching 15. Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond Mistakes, Bad English, and Wrong Language 16. High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing 17. Breathing Life into the Text 18. Using the Collage for Collaborative Writing 19. Getting Along Without Grades - and Getting Along With Them Too 20. Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook Pat Belanoff, co-author 21. Writing an Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View

After reviewing my career as a teacher of composition and literature and as a writing program administrator of writing across the curriculum, I discuss the potential of poetry across the curriculum as an important tool for writing “against” the curriculum of academic discourse. When they write poetry, students often express meaningful thoughts and emotions not readily available to them in disciplinary languages and contexts.

I begin with an analogy: teaching research-based argumentation and critique in composition studies is like learning how to perform hip-hop music. My analogy's focus on argumentation does not exclude traditional methods of argumentative pedagogy based on models like Stephen Toulmin's complex hierarchies or the Aristotelian triad of deliberative (offering advice), forensic (taking a side in a debate, often a legal or controversial matter), and epideictic (a speech of praise or blame appealing to an already won-over audience) discourse. Instead, I pose the analogy as a first step towards developing alternative or additional ways to engage composition students with the argumentative essay. In choosing hip-hop as a model for the composition essay, I attempt to draw upon a dominant form of contemporary culture familiar to the majority of students I encounter in my classrooms. Does a relationship between hip-hop and com-