College Composition and Communication

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June 2025

  1. Transduction and the Conceptual Overlap between Multimodality and Transfer
    Abstract

    Exploring multimodality and transfer from the perspective of transduction (a multidisciplinary term that describes a change in form as something moves from one state to another) reveals conceptual overlap between the two concepts. Transfer is fundamentally multimodal because anything moving from one “place” to the next must change its form (or modality) in some way. Multimodality also inherently involves a transfer from one context to another. Each concept requires that existing content or knowledge be changed in some way to account for new situations. Multimodality and transfer do not describe a one-to-one duplication, but a transduction, changing form from one context to the next.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025764518
  2. Using Eye Tracking as a Peer Review Tool for Visual and Digital Compositions
    Abstract

    The majority of what we compose, we compose for others. Because audience impact is central to the success of writing and designing, peer review tests how our compositions work in the world. Accordingly, we have built decades of scholarship establishing best practices for sharing our work with others, especially as new technologies emerge. This article argues for the introduction of eye tracking as a tool that can supplement peer review, offering an expansion of what counts as feedback that fosters greater access and agency for students throughout the writing process. The method for incorporating eye tracking to expand traditional peer review modalities moves students from passive research subjects to active users of eye-tracking data. In doing so, students can examine how audiences experience their work, helping to frame revisions of their multimodal compositions and consider what story they most want to tell.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025764542

September 2024

  1. Understanding Writing Instructors’ Feelings toward the Affordances of Multimodal Social Advocacy Projects: Implications for Service-Learning Pedagogies
    Abstract

    This article reports findings from interviews with twenty college instructors who have facilitated multimodal advocacy projects, identifying their affective significance through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of instructor responses, we present the implications of multimodal engagement and what it means for doing social advocacy pedagogies with the community.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20247614

February 2024

  1. Composing to Enact Affective Agency: Engaging Multimodal Antiracist Pedagogy in the First-Year Writing Classroom
    Abstract

    Positioning affective agency as a site of investigation, this study documents how first-year writing students create multimodal antiracist campaigns to critically address the sociopolitical issue of racial justice and to collectively challenge the hegemonic violence of racial profiling. In describing students’ affective engagements with the multimodal campaigns, this study demonstrates the potential of multimodal writing pedagogies in enacting affective agency, weaving antiracist assemblages, and transforming affective relations, all of which will provide starting points for social change and antiracist action.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2024753534

December 2020

  1. Embodied Subjectivities and the City: Intervening in Local Public Debates through Multimodality
    Abstract

    This article describes and reflects on a place-based pedagogical approach to public engagement that uses multimodal composition to insert new discourses into ongoing local debates over university expansion. The public-forming potential of multimodal texts encourages students to imagine new ways of being public and opportunities for adopting community-oriented subjectivities that engage with the issues, people, and spaces in neighborhoods adjacent to campus.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202031036

September 2020

  1. Chicanx Murals: Decolonizing Place and (Re)Writing the Terms of Composition
    Abstract

    Drawing from an interpretive decolonial framework that understands multimodal writing as the act of creatingco-composedknowledge, this article analyzes Chicanx murals as multimodal compositions that exemplify the continuation of the Aztectlacuilolitztlipractice of writing with images. This work also invites rhetoric and composition scholars to reexamine Western understandings of history, particularly the history of writing.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202030893

June 2019

  1. Redefining Writing for the Responsive Workplace
    Abstract

    In this article we argue that mobile, design, content, and social media technologies have fundamentally redefined the role of the writer in the workplace. Rather than the originator of content, the writer is becoming a sort of multimodal editor who revises, redesigns, remediates, and upcycles content into new forms, for new audiences, purposes, and media. This article discusses data gathered from over one hundred hours of embedded workplace research shadowing nine different professional communicators. The data demonstrate the iterative, detailed, product-focused types of work happening within a range of workplace constraints and, in turn, emphasize the need for writers and teachers of writing to recognize the importance of developing a broad skillset to prepare for this kind of work.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201930182

February 2018

  1. Writing’s Rooms
    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201829488

December 2017

  1. Impossible Rhetorics of Survivance at the Carlisle School, 1879–1883
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201729417

September 2017

  1. Pretty Bullets: Tracing Transmedia/Translingual Literacies of an Israeli Soldier across Regimes of Practice
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201729297

June 2017

  1. Review Essay: Pushing the Boundaries of Rhetoric: Visual Materialism, Dialectics, and Hospitality
    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201729144

June 2014

  1. Review Essay: Considering What It Means to Teach “Composition” in the Twenty-First Century
    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

    doi:10.58680/ccc201425451
  2. What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies?
    Abstract

    Through sharing results of an analysis of design language use in several writing studies journals, this article explores why we invoke design in published scholarship. After defining the approach to composing known as design thinking, it then moves to a comparison of design thinking and the writing process and looks at an example application of design thinking in the field. I argue that design thinking not only offers a useful approach for tackling multimodal/multimedia composing tasks, but also situates the goal of writing studies as textual action and asks us to reconsider writing’s home in the university.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201425449

February 2014

  1. Poster Page 17: Multimodality
    doi:10.58680/ccc201424574

September 2011

  1. Indian Ability (auilidad de Indio) and Rhetoric’s Civilizing Narrative: Guaman Poma’s Contact with the Rhetorical Tradition
    Abstract

    This essay invites a critique of contact zone theory and rhetoric’s origin story based on a reading of Guaman Poma’s First New Chronicle and Good Government. I read this writer’s argument for indigenous ability and reshaping of space through picture, map, and text as a multimodal effort that invites attention to classroom rhetorical power dynamics and standards.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201117245

September 2010

  1. Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual and Multimodal Framework
    Abstract

    This article argues that tracing multimodal-multilingual literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces is key to moving composition into the twenty-first century. Key tothis remixing of the field is a situated framework that locates multimodal-multilingual activities in wider genre, cultural, national, and global ecologies.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201011661

February 2010

  1. Interchanges: Response to Cynthia L. Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing”
    Abstract

    Doug Hesse has written a commentary on “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” by Cynthia L. Selfe, which appeared in College Composition and Communication 60.4 (June 2009): 616–63. The full text of the original article is available at the CCC website: www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20109964

December 2009

  1. Site-Specific: Virtual Refinishing in Contemporary Rhetorical Practice
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099473

September 2009

  1. “Yes, a T-Shirt!”: Assessing Visual Composition in the “Writing” Class
    Abstract

    Computer technology is expanding our profession’s conception of composing, allowing visual information to play a substantial role in an increasing variety of composition assignments. This expansion, however, creates a major problem: How does one assess student work on these assignments? Current work in assessment provides only partial answers to this question. Consequently, this article will review current theory and practice in assessment, noting its limitations as well as its strengths. The article will then draw on work in both verbal and visual communication to explain an integrative approach to assessment, one that allows instructors to consider students’ work with visuals without losing sight of conventional goals of a “writing” course. The article concludes by illustrating this approach with an analysis of an unconventional student text “a T-shirt”that students submitted as the final assignment for a relatively conventional writing course.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098319
  2. Negotiating Rhetorical, Material, Methodological, and Technological Difference: Evaluating Multimodal Designs
    Abstract

    The assessment framework presented here draws on theories of reflective practice and mediated activity to update or “multimodalize” the reflective texts students are sometimes asked to compose after completing an essay. The article underscores the importance of having students assume greater responsibility for cataloging and assessing the potentials of the texts they compose both within and beyond the space of the classroom.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098326

June 2009

  1. The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing
    Abstract

    Rhetoric and composition’s increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20097190

February 2009

  1. Heritage Literacy: Adoption, Adaptation, and Alienation of Multimodal Literacy Tools
    Abstract

    This article presents the concept of heritage literacy, a decision-making process by which people adopt, adapt, or alienate themselves from tools and literacies passed on between generations of people. In an auto-ethnographic study, four generations of a single family and Amish participants from the surrounding community were interviewed to explore the concept.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20096971

December 2007

  1. Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.58680/ccc20076391

December 2005

  1. A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing
    Abstract

    This essay presents a task-based multimodal framework for composing grounded in theories of multiple media and goal formation. By examining the way two students negotiated the complex communicative tasks presented them in class, the essay underscores the benefits associated with asking students to attend to the various motives, activities, tools, and environments that occasion, support, and complicate the production of academic as well as everyday texts.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20054030

December 2004

  1. Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key
    Abstract

    Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key is the print version of the multimodal address that former CCCC Chair Kathleen Yancey gave at the 2004 CCCC convention. Discussing the myriad forms and purposes that writing can take today, she asks us to re-examine our beliefs about what writing is and how it should be taught.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20044045

June 2003

  1. Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments
    Abstract

    This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20031501

December 2002

  1. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication
    doi:10.2307/1512155

September 2002

  1. From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing
    Abstract

    In an attempt to bring composition studies into a more thoroughgoing discussion of the place of visual literacy in the writing classroom, I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20021473

December 1995

  1. Rhetoric in Popular Culture
    Abstract

    Preface Part I. THEORY 1. Rhetoric and Popular Culture The Rhetoric of Everyday Life The Building Blocks of Culture: Signs 2. Rhetoric and the Rhetorical Tradition The Rhetorical Tradition: Ancient Greece 3. Rhetorical Methods in Critical Studies Texts Influence through Meanings 4. Varieties of Rhetorical Criticism, part one An Introduction to Critical Perspectives Culture-centered Criticism Marxist Criticism Visual Rhetorical Criticism Psychoanalytic Criticism 5. Varieties of Rhetorical Criticism, part two Feminist Criticism Dramatistic/Narrative Criticism Media-centered Criticism Summary and Review Looking Ahead Part II. APPLICATION 6. Paradoxes of Personalization: Race Relations in Milwaukee The Problem of Personalization The Scene and Focal Events 7. On Gangsta, Written with the Help of the Reader False Claim #1: African American Culture Is Violent False Claim #2: African American Culture Is Sexual False Claim #3: African American Culture Is Crassly Materialistic Conclusion 8. Simulational Selves, Simulational Culture in Groundhog Day 9. Media and Representation in Rec.Motorcycles 10. Two Homological Critiques One: Opening my iPod nano: A homological study of media and discourse Two: Queering the Gecko: Race, Sexual Orientation, and Marginality in GEICO's Cavemen Suggested Readings Index

    doi:10.2307/358335

October 1990

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Creating a Computer-Supported Writing Facility: A Blueprint for Action, Cynthia L. Selfe Computer Writing Environments: Theory, Research, and Design, Bruce Britton and Shawn M. Glynn Fred Kemp Critical Perspectiveosn Computers and Composition Instruction, Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe Bruce L. Edwards Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl Sharon Crowley Audience Expectations and Teacher Demands, Robert Brooke and John Hendricks Alice M. Gillam The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience, Alice Glarden Brand Robert Brooke Coping with Failure.: The Therapeutic Uses of Rhetoric, David Payne Paul W. Ranieri Critical Thinking: A Semiotic Perspective, Marjorie Siegel and Robert Carey Alice Heim Calderonello Effective Documentation: What We Have Learned from Research,Stephen Doheny-Farina Jack Selzer

    doi:10.58680/ccc19908966
  2. Critical Thinking: A Semiotic Perspective
    doi:10.2307/357670