I created my Exploratory Survey on the Status of the Research Paper Assignment in First-year Writing/Composition Courses to learn whether the traditional research paper remained as common an assignment in 2009 as it had been in the past. My survey updates results from two previous surveys on the status of this assignment. Ambrose N. Manning’s survey, conducted in 1961, found that 83% of colleges and universities in the United States included the traditional research paper assignment in first-year writing/composition curricula. James E. Ford and Dennis R. Perry’s 1982 survey concluded that 78.11% of the colleges and universities that required first-year writing/composition courses included the assignment, a decline of 5%. My survey results indicate that in 2009, at survey respondents’ schools, only 6% of research assignments in first-year writing/composition courses are traditional research paper assignments, a decline of 72% since 1982, while 94% are alternative ones. This shift appears to reflect trends in scholarship as well as changes in assessment practices, structure of first-year writing/composition programs, and technologies for writing, researching, and teaching.

This essay examines the disappearance of the study of style from rhetoric’s disciplinary research agenda and from contemporary writing classrooms, linking the decline of disciplinary interest in style to contemporary writing handbooks, which tend to treat style in reductive ways. Also pointing out the disappearance of “sentence-based” style rhetorics, the essay argues for a disciplinary re-commitment to the study and teaching of style, one of the original canons of classical rhetoric. The essay ends with several pedagogical examples of how to re-introduce style to writing classroom, as well as an invitation to other scholars to share their approaches to teaching writing style.

This essay challenges writing teachers to consider anew the assigning of politicized or controversial topics in the composition classroom. The author describes his use of writing assignments related to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars/Occupations from 2003 to 2006. Although some writing teachers embraced war-related topics in their classrooms during this time period, others seemed to avoid them out of fear of reading cliché-ridden “blinding binaries” arguments or of facing a hostile student environment. The author argues that the time was right to engage students in critical inquiry into the many war-related topics so as to pursue the truth-seeking mission of higher education. Necessarily, as the questions and issues related to the wars evolved, so too did assessment strategies. The assignments and student writing during this time period also show the value of this writing as a form of social action for students in their communities.

Increasingly, students come to the university with a consumer mentality, which gives students a sense that they are entitled to negotiate their student positions within the university and the classroom. This article, using Directed Self-Placement as a sort of case study, considers the role student-centered assessments and pedagogies play in perpetuating this consumer role and theorizes that we are framing them in a way that makes us complicit. The article addresses questions about what to do as education becomes more consumer driven. What is a WPA--caught between concerns about good pedagogy and pressures from the administration to recruit and retain students--to do when faced with students who want to negotiate their positions in the first-year composition curriculum? And, how do we negotiate ourselves back into a position in which assessment standards and rigor are paramount, even in a consumer world?