College Composition and Communication
64 articlesJune 2025
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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.
June 2024
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Abstract
This study examines how ten faculty at research-intensive institutions work with peer reviews, a process with potential to support faculty writing development and that plays a central evaluative role in professional success. The grounded theory approach revealed the importance of acts of recognition in the peer review process, facilitating a more collaborative experience.
February 2024
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How Do We Know It Works? Feedback Loops to Raise the Messy Middle in Online Formative Peer Assessment ↗
Abstract
Qualitative and then quantitative analysis of student review comments assessing peer review instructions found that students needed even more direction and structure than initially given. Specifically, shorter feedback statements—a twenty-one-to forty-word range—can be useful if they provide both evaluative and suggestive comments to guide revision.
June 2022
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Abstract
In this praxis-focused article, I reflect on incorporating what disability justice activists call “collective access” into the composition classroom through a semester-long, class-wide “Accessibility Best Practices” assignment. I show how asking students to recursively address access together helped them approach writing itself as a collaborative and revisionary process.
February 2022
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A Social-Constructionist Review of Feedback and Revision Research: How Perceptions of Written Feedback Might Influence Understandings of Revision Processes ↗
Abstract
This social-constructionist review of research illuminates the ways in which feedback, reflection, and revision are all inherently relational processes. Research suggests that university students’ perceptions of feedback shape their revision processes, though it appears that their preferred types of feedback may not always lead them to make effective revisions.
February 2021
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Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness ↗
Abstract
Critical language awareness offers one approach to communaljusticing, an iterative and collective process that can address inequities in the disciplinary infrastructure of Writing Studies. We demonstrate justicing in the field’s pasts, policies, and publications; offer a model of communal revision; and invite readers to become agents of communal justicing.
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Abstract
This article argues composition researchers should make replicating previous research a greater priority because replication is a valuable tool that facilitates invention, collaboration, transparency, and revision, and its overwhelming absence in composition studies narrows the generalizability of writing research. I posit a replication agenda to encourage scholars to replicate and reproduce results by building disciplinary and institutional spaces for the practice to thrive.
December 2020
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Abstract
If, as I argue, student-to-student peer review is animated by “improvement imperatives” that make peer review a form of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” then rhetoric and composition will need to imagine theories and structures for peer review that do not repeat cruel attachments. I offer slow peer review as a strategy for queer rhetorical listening that maintains our commitments to peer review without the limitations created through the improvement imperative.
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Revising a Scientific Writing Curriculum: Wayfinding Successful Collaborations with Interdisciplinary Expertise ↗
Abstract
Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because 1) their academic expertise is often not writing and 2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of existing instructional materials. While many writing studies scholars have the expertise to assist their STEM colleagues with such tasks, how to do so—and, more fundamentally, how to begin such efforts—is not commonly focused on in the literature stemming from these collaborations. Our article addresses this gap by detailing an interdisciplinary Writing in the Disciplines (WID) collaboration at a large, public R1 university between STEM and writing experts to redesign the university’s introductory biology writing curriculum. The collaborative curriculum design process detailed here is presented through the lens of wayfinding, which concerns orientation, trailblazing, and moving through uncertain landscapes according to cues. Within this account, a critical focus on language—what we talk about when we talk about writing—emerges, driving both the collaboration itself and resultant curricular revisions. Our work reveals how collaborators can wayfind through interdisciplinary partnerships and writing curriculum development by transforming differences in discipline-specific expertise into a new path forward.
February 2020
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Re-Engaging Rhetorical Education through Procedural Feminism: Designing First-Year Writing Curricula That Listen ↗
Abstract
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.
September 2019
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A Study of the Practices and Responsibilities of Scholarly Peer Review in Rhetoric and Composition ↗
Abstract
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.
June 2019
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Abstract
Forty years ago, Nancy Sommers identified dissonance and the ways in which writers respond to incongruities between “intention and execution” as a core competency of revision. While still a challenge for student writers, dissonance now takes different forms, particularly for advanced student writers who embrace theories of revision but struggle to implement the practices. Unspoken, these experiences of dissonance become internalized as fear-based narratives and scripts that negatively impact student writers. Through in-process reflection, this study surfaces the ways in which students navigate the dissonance by adapting, or rescripting, their fear into a productive element of writing and revision. To better understand the interplay of strategy and struggle, we argue that revision pedagogies for advanced student writers must take the emotional work of revision into consideration
February 2019
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Abstract
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.
September 2018
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Abstract
This article offers a genealogy of the deliberative policymaking of the WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0 Revision Task Force. Interviews with Task Force members reveal that the revised statement presents composing, technology, and genre as “boundary objects,” in order to preserve the document’s kairos for as long as possible.
June 2018
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Revision and Reflection: A Study of (Dis)Connections between Writing Knowledge and Writing Practice ↗
Abstract
This essay brings to light new evidence about the relationship between revision and reflective writing in the first-year writing classroom. Based on a robust study of student work, we illuminate a variety of complex relationships between the writing knowledge that students articulate in their reflections—including how they narrate their course progress, approach teacher commentary, and make decisions about their revisions—and the actual writing practices they execute in their revised essays. The essay offers pedagogical innovations that help students use reflective writing in ways that support substantive revision.
September 2013
September 2012
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Abstract
Rhetoric and composition historiography has recently undergone a rapid transformation as scholars have complicated and challenged earlier narratives by examining diverselocal histories and alternative rhetorical traditions. This revisionist scholarship has in turn created new research challenges, as scholars must now demonstrate connectionsbetween the local and larger scholarly conversations; assume a complex, multivocal past as the starting point for historical inquiry; and resist the temptation to reinscribeeasy binaries, taxonomies, and master narratives, even when countering them. This essay identifies and analyzes these challenges, posits responses to them, and suggestsexemplars for future practice.
June 2012
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Abstract
In this Symposium focused on peer review, Irwin Weiser—drawing both on history and on his own experience as faculty member, WPA, department head, and dean—examines the set of practices we associate with the tenure and promotion process, finding that they differ across sites at the same time that they look very similar in their assumptions. Weiser’s review then culminates in a set of questions useful as a heuristic for the multiple stakeholders involved in the process. In the next and complementary article, Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher—drawing on their varied experiences as authors and publishers of a journal and several book series—provide a historical review and consideration of peer review in publishing. They find that scholarly peer review, from the question of signed reviews to the practices of digital publications, is in the midst of change, but that at the same time, a reviewing process of some sort is still the mainstay of publishing.
December 2010
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Abstract
This article argues for and models an approach to writing program assessment that relies on study of the writing practices of program graduates as a way to inform revisions in curriculum and teaching practices. The article also examines how conducting such assessments can help nondisciplinary publics understand the nature of composition studies.
December 2009
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Abstract
Based on a study of observable changes author-users made to three Wikipedia articles, this article contends that Wikipedia supports notions of revision, collaboration, and authority that writing studies purports to value, while also extending our understanding of the production of knowledge in public spaces. It argues that Wikipedia asks us to reexamine our expectations for the stability of research materials and who should participate in public knowledge making.
September 2009
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Toward a New Critical Framework: Color-Conscious Political Morality and Pedagogy at Historically Black and Historically White Colleges and Universities ↗
Abstract
With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.
June 2009
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Abstract
There has been little discussion of hospitality as a practice in college writing courses. Possible misuses of hospitality as an educational and ethical practice are explored, and three traditional and still tenable modes of hospitality are described and historicized: Homeric, Judeo-Christian, and nomadic. Application of these modes to instructional situations may lead to new and sometimes counter-establishment methods, in terms of course objectives, shared labor of teacher and students, writing assignments, response to writing, and assessment of student work. Perhaps the most radical form is transformative hospitality, which accepts the possibility that host and guest, teacher and students, will all be changed by their encounter, a potentiality that is characterized by risk taking, restlessness, and resistance to educational entrenchments. Traditional hospitality as practiced in writing classrooms does not mark a return to student-centered pedagogies of past decades but does stake out a position that might be considered marginal apropos the current political and educational climate in the United States.
December 2007
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Revisions: Rethinking Joseph Janangelo’s “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts” ↗
Abstract
The next entry into our “Re-Visions” feature—a series that offers reconsiderations of particularly significant work in CCC—is a reappraisal of Joseph Janangelo’s “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts,” which originally appeared in February of 1998 (volume 49.1, 24– 44). In addition to commentaries by Anne Frances Wysocki, Collin Gifford Brooke, and Jeff Rice is a “comment on the comments” by Joseph Janangelo. The subject of these commentaries is readily available for reference at the CCC Online Archive (www.inventio.us/ccc). I welcome your feedback on this feature and suggestions for subjects of future “Re-Visions.”
December 2006
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Abstract
This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.
June 2006
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Re-Publish or Perish: A Reassessment of George Pierce Baker’s The Principles of Argumentation: Minimizing the Use of Formal Logic in Favor of Practical Approaches ↗
Abstract
In preparing Suzanne Bordelon’s article for the February issue of CCC, the editorially unthinkable happened: An earlier version of her fine article replaced the final, wellrevised version as it went to the printer. In addition to my profuse apologies to Professor Bordelon, I have decided to publish the correct version of the article, delaying until September my publication of Janet Eldred’s review essay of several books on technology. The silver lining, in this instance, is a teachable moment, a rare glimpse for readers of CCC into an accountable but ultimately human (and I hope humane) editorial process: Bordelon’s article, quite good to begin with, was judged an “accept with revisions,” and she revised the article extensively and well, passing muster with a final read by one of the first reviewers and me.
December 2004
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Interchanges: Responses to “Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program’s Textbook” ↗
Abstract
Preview this article: Interchanges: Responses to "Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/56/2/collegecompositionandcommunication4046-1.gif
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Responses to "Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse:Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook" ↗
Abstract
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
December 2003
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Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program’s Textbook ↗
Abstract
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.
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Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook ↗
Abstract
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
February 1998
December 1997
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Abstract
[This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations. - Journal of Advanced CompositionIn Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by revision, urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life. Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study: to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision. In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.
February 1996
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Abstract
Housewives and Compositionists Akua Duku Anokye Mapping the Terrain of Tracks and Streams Suellynn Duffey What’s It Worth and What’s It For? Revisions to Basic Writing Revisited Judith Rodby
October 1995
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Abstract
This accessible and versatile text has been used in college English, creative writing, and composition courses, as well as middle and high school classrooms, college remedial and honors programs, graduate seminars, and teacher training courses. Chapters move through the writing process as students find a focus, choose a genre, develop a draft, and find a voice. Murray is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
October 1994
May 1994
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Abstract
Learning how to revise may well be the most excruciating part of writing - frequently it is what makes or breaks new writers. Now, in this unique and highly useful book, Jay Woodruff gives some of America's finest contemporary writers an opportunity to talk with passion and professionalism about revision - about the hard work of their writing. Books on writing generally offer prescriptions and proscriptions about this craft so hard to learn instead of evidence. But in A Piece of Work Woodruff's incisive questions guide five writers - Tobias Wolff, Tess Gallagher, Robert Coles, Joyce Carol Oates, and Donald Hall - through specific examples that enable the reader to see how good writing becomes better. From the first draft through various revisions and finally to the printed version of a single piece of each author's work, Woodruff traces the full course of the revision process. While we might prefer to picture all authors as Coleridge, with the perfectly formed lines and stanzas of Kubla Khan emerging from a dream, the truth of the matter is that the development of a final text is often as much a hard-won discovery as it is an initial inspiration. A Piece of Work offers a road map to that discovery.
May 1991
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Abstract
Preview this article: Peer Review and Revising in an Anthropology Course: Lessons for Learning, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/42/2/collegecompositioncommunication8928-1.gif
February 1990
May 1989
February 1989
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Abstract
Many current books by and for people in our business encourage the use of peer response groups as a means of enhancing learning. Almost none, however, translates this potentially powerful idea into workable strategies and techniques. Few comment usefully on the difficulties involved in the response group process, or on reasonable goals and outcomes, or even on the activity's deeper intellectual and behavioral implications. Sharing Writing is for teachers who are serious about helping students learn to work in response groups. In addressing both theoretical and practical concerns, Spear provides answers to two essential questions: What can writing teachers do to help students become good peer readers? How do peer response groups contribute to student growth as writers?
October 1988
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Abstract
Word processors, as teaching machines, are currently caught in something of a backlash. Just a few years ago, we heard they possessed almost magical powers for student writing and writing instruction. Now, before some of us have even had a chance to try them for ourselves, researchers have begun to tell us that computers do not really help student writers much after all. On the contrary, they warn, when students' performances with text editors are judged against their performances with pen and paper, inexperienced writers, those whose typical revising behaviors are actually editing behaviors, continue to edit exclusively and with increased frequency on the word pro-
October 1986
February 1986
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Abstract
Preview this article: Detection, Diagnosis, and the Strategies of Revision, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/37/1/collegecompositionandcommunication11246-1.gif
October 1985
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Preview this article: Applied Word Processing: Notes on Authority, Responsibility, and Revision in a Workshop Model, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/36/3/collegecompositionandcommunication11757-1.gif