Composition studies seems relatively unified in the belief that “active,” “rhetorical,” and “conversational” modes of reading are students’ best hope for facing the challenges of college reading and writing tasks. As commonplaces, however, these descriptors mask both reading outcomes and the specific practices presumed to support them. Through an analysis of three popular composition textbooks, we disentangle and reveal some of the reading axiologies most fundamental to the field and which we contend these commonplaces gesture toward but leave vastly undertheorized. We argue that more precise explications of these distinct reading axiologies ultimately provide a contextualist framework for reading, helping students approach their reading-writing tasks with greater clarity, flexibility, and purpose.

This article argues for repositioning voice within BIPOC histories and contributions to the fields of English/rhetoric/composition studies. By reinvestigating the affordances and constraints of Expressivist-driven definitions of “voice” and the contemporary applications of imitation writing assignments, this article demonstrates alternative approaches to teaching and thinking through voice in writingbased courses.

This article outlines the concept of readiness to learn (RTL) as a framework for explaining students’ differentiated engagement with the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum. As documented in student voices, RTL operates along a continuum ranging from preparing to engage, on one end, to enacting TFT, on the other, with beginning to engage in the middle.

In our introduction to this special issue on cultural rhetorics, we as editors recognize that members of the field maintain many different approaches and frameworks. This diversity suggests that the work of prioritizing emplaced stories over universalizing theories brings cultural rhetoricians together, making research and teaching accountable first to communities, rather than the academy, and continuously examining our ethical commitments to O/others. This work, then, requires that scholars situate themselves within networks of places and spaces, cultures and peoples, power and privilege, so that we may practice relationality and accountability, actively seeking to make meaningful connections within and across research sites, and create space for silenced voices while building a more just world and disciplinary community.

In this article, we call for translingual praxis—an antiracist and decolonial pedagogy that interrogates, with students, language ideologies and their political histories. Amplifying the voices of scholars of color, we provide a rationale for and illustrate four strategies for delinking our language work from the legacies of racism and colonization.

This essay explores the implications ofThe Elements of Styleas a universally received narrative about literacy. I recontextualize the book as a product of 20th-century histories of literacy as normative middle class desires, and as a response to Cold War era ideologies of a white national language.

A limited mixed-method study revealed that students could alter written style after direct style instruction, but the effect faded quickly. Instead, students reverted to culturally structured intuition to make conscious, contrary choices. Thus, direct instruction in precise forms of style should probably yield to methods that build culturally structured intuition.

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.

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.

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

This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategicallyin an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization andto strengthen the voice of the president.

Our pedagogical histories lean on textbooks, institutional records, and the words of famous teachers. Students rarely appear in situ. Here, the voices of two very different Progressive Era students cast spotlights on the shadows of long-ago classroom practices—offering a liveliness that is difficult to recover, but worth seeking.

Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism, Walter H. Beale Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric, Paul Butler Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition, Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English, Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies, James Ray Watkins Jr.

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.

Responses to Rosalie’ Morales Kearns’s “Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy” and Johnathan Alexander’s “Gaming Student Literacies and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.”

This essay examines women’s commencement addresses presented from 1910 to 1915 at Vassar College. These addresses are significant because they reveal the students’ rhetorical education and the “available means” upon which these women drew in developing a public voice. By prompting reflection and the potential for change, the commencement addresses also demonstrate the civic importance of epideictic rhetoric.

This essay interrogates the concept of “clarity” that has become an imperative of effective student writing. I show that clarity is neither axiomatic nor transparent, and that the clear/unclear binary that informs the identification of clarity as a goal of effective student writing is itself unstable precisely because of the ideological baggage that undergirds its construction. I make this argument by finding the traces of composition’s insistence on student writers’ clarity in the attacks on the writing of critical theorists.

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 article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women’s colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women’s education in speaking and writing.

A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives—Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps, and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self—shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these writers experiences, manages, and ultimately resolves, to greater or lesser degrees, his conflicts over masculinity, at least textually speaking, and does so, moreover, in ways that are linked to his views on literacy and education.

Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the modes of argumentation practiced by this subculture of the current feminist movement, one which is firmly grounded in the larger public sphere.

Sirc’s essay also uses the writing course as touchstone “this time, to wrestle initially” with the issues Allen Tate pondered in his 1952 essay . . . “The Man of Letters in the Modern World.” Sirc challenges contemporary instructors of writing, claiming that “the vox pop criticism of iTunes writing represents a new Attic style, one well worth studying and teaching to.”

Creative writing workshops typically feature a gag rule and emphasize purported flaws. This structure limits students’ meaningful engagement with each other’s work; positions the author as inherently flawed; and positions other participants as authority figures, passing judgment without articulating their aesthetic standards. I propose an alternative structure in which authors lead discussion; the work is treated not as inherently flawed but as “in process”; and discussants articulate their expectations about “good” writing rather than allowing them to function as unspoken norms.

Reviews of: “Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century” by Sarah Robbins; “Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Writers” by Lindal Buchanan; “Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930” by Wendy B. Sharer.

Review Essays: Defining Dialect David Johnson American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward Do You Speak American? Robert MacNeil and William Cran A Teachers’ Introduction to African American English: What a Writing Teacher Should Know Teresa M. Redd and Karen Schuster Webb.

Writing in personal genres, like autobiography, leads writers to public voices. Public voice is a discursive quality of a text that conveys the writer’s authority and position relative to others. To show how voice and authority depend on genre, I analyze the autobiographies of two writers who take opposing positions on the same topic. By producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions, student writers gain agency.

This is a written version of the address Akua Duku Anokye gave at the CCCC meeting in New York on March 24, 2007.

This essay reports on a university-school oral history project at an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. It theorizes the dialectic of place and history as expressed in the voices of the school community and goes on to suggest some tenets for a public sphere pedagogy rooted in material rhetoric and economic geography.

Margaret Himley and Christine Farris respond to Phillip Marzluf ’s article, “Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices,” in the February 2006 issue of CCC. Phillip Marzluf responds to them, with his original article readily available through the CCC Online Archive (formerly CCC Online): http://inventio.us/ccc.

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students’ vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may, consequently, lead to exoticizing and stereotyping students’ linguistic performances.

At the same time that compositionists have shown a renewed interest in public writing, neoliberal social and economic policies have dramatically shrunk the spaces in which most students’ voices can be heard. In this essay I argue that from twentiethcentury working-class struggles in the U.S. we and our students can acquire the tools necessary to work against this latest wave of economic privatization and concomitant suppression of public voice and rights. If we can resist the common academic assertion that we live today in a radically distinct postmodern, postindustrial society, we can return to capitalism’s long history for examples of the creative and persistent ways in which ordinary people have organized to claim living room.

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This article describes how readers from a graduate program in anthropology evaluated student writing in a general education course. Readers voiced the concerns of their discipline when they focused on the stance writers assumed and how they made value judgments.

This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, andteacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

An earlier version of this article was delivered as the Chair’s Address at the Opening General Session of the CCCC convention in New York, March 2003. I review the current mission and position statements of the organization by calling attention to the ways in which our current social and political climate challenges our ability to meet our goals and support our positions. I weave into my text the “voices” of historical black women who called for response in their own time and even in ours.

Intercultural rhetoric, like the project of empowerment, is the site of competing agendas for not only how to talk across difference but to what end. The practice of community- based intercultural inquiry proposed here goes beyond a willingness to embrace conflicting voices to an active search for the silent resources of situated knowledge in an effort to build a collaboratively transformed understanding.

This article echoes Robert J. Connors’s call for a reexamination of sentence pedagogies in composition teaching and offers an explanation of the unsolved mystery of why sentence combining improves student writing, using insights provided by work in contemporary research in linguistics and in language processing. Based the same insights, I argue that we invite words and phrases, the true members of sentences, to important positions in writing classes and describe practical methods for doing so.

This article represents stories of eight former composition students, Appalachian working class women, who move from silence in the academy to voice in their communities to a more self–confident identity without destroying the community from which they came. The author argues that compositionists need to consider the two–edged nature of literacy; how literacy serves first generation, nontraditional learners; the intergenerational effects of literacy; the importance of expressivist writing as a transition into academic literacy; and the importance of region and class in multicultural conversations.

We regularly chastise students for placing quotation marks around words that are not direct quotations. Yet, as this research shows, professionals use nonstandard quotations routinely and to rhetorical advantage. After analyzing the various purposes nonstandard quotations serve, I argue student use of the marks jars us not because it departs from good practice but because, through them, students invoke voices we do not want to recognize.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and his irenic view of the cultural other inform this article that builds the multiple voice of the eloquent “I” as a dialectic self-construction where codes of meaning are inscribed. The eloquent “I” cultivates a deepened self-dialogue and offers students an epistemological and rhetorical discipline, bearing witness to their imaginative, meaningful interiority and their written, public articulation of it.

This article compares entrance-to-the-profession narratives of the past thirty years. Selecting major theorists and senior and junior minority scholars, the author describes their efforts to become professionals in the field. The Native American author argues for including Other voices in analyzing the history of composition studies.

Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies. Covering a diverse range of rhetorical pursuits and historical eras, the selections look closely at such fascinating topics as the bold speech of ancient Egyptian women, the rhetorical genres of mother's manuals and women's commercial writings in the Middle Ages, the sexual stereotyping of prose style in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment, and exhortations for racial uplift by nineteenth-century African American women.

Ttives of the teaching of writing in United States colleges have inevitably excluded or simplified moments and facets of history in the service of asserting order within their comprehensiveness. While no curricular history means to include references to all the composition activity going on in the country, their representational figures, both professors and colleges, often present cases which ought to be understood as demographically, ethnically, or racially limiting. One striking absence from the broad histories of writing instruction in English and across the curriculum in American colleges is the composition instruction done at historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). On the other hand, the history of African American higher education has itself generated a vast literature, including chronicles of Howard University, Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Atlanta University, many journals, including the Journal of Negro Education, as well as countless articles, scholarly books, and textbooks written by HBCU faculties, students, and alumni. This literature and its sources demonstrate that from the late

These essays by Old Dominion University students deal with two questions: What impact do their own race, class, gender, and ethnic identities have upon them as students? How do their culture and the university culture interact to affect their ability to learn?The focus of these essays is on the overlap between the students identities as students and their identities based on gender, race, class, and ethnic origin. The project began as an assignment in a women s studies class at Old Dominion University in 1993, when students in a mixed graduate and undergraduate course were asked to write a brief analysis of themselves as students, accounting for the impact of gender, race, and social class on what they studied, what they heard in class, how they were treated in the classroom, how they treated others there, and what their level of comfort in the university was. Invited to add other variables, such as religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or disability if they considered these significant to their identities as studentsthe students were urged to consider not only the disadvantages these various identities gave them but also the privileges and advantages.The resulting essays stimulated great interest in what students had to say and led to the formation of The Broad Minds Collectivemade up of four students from the class as well as its instructorwhich set about the task of soliciting and collecting additional essays. Although most essays contain overlapping themes, the editors detected four motifs that encompass virtually every essay included in the book. the section Cultural Perceptions and Assumptions, students show their awareness of how culturally defined categories affect education.Essays in Belonging and Alienation in the Classroom discuss the students level of comfort in the classroom and the degree to which they feel they belong at the university. The essays in Making Sense of Our Lives Through Education reveal the students use of education to learn more about the forces that shape them. In Search of an Education highlights students efforts to wrest what they feel they need from a college education.Rather than presenting a multicultural educational theory or conducting a sterile sociological study, The Broad Minds Collective has allowed students to speak for themselves. Abstraction is replaced by stories of personal conflict, struggle, and victory.

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