Traditional Rhetorical Genre Study (RGS) methods are not well adapted to study exclusion because excluded information and people are typically absent from the genre, and some excluded information is simply unrelated to the genre because of genre conventions or social context. Within genre-based silences, how can scholars differentiate between an item of silenced information that suggests exclusionary practices and another item that is unrelated to the genre? This article serves as an example of how augmenting RGS with rhetorical listening and silence can benefit our pedagogy, research, and practice. Incorporating exclusion gives a more complete understanding of a genre’s social action and responds to cross-cultural issues with genre practices. To illustrate the benefits of this combination, the article draws from the researcher’s ongoing inquiry into the construct of the “well-rounded individual” that has become routinized in the U.S. résumé and cover letter.

Rhetorical Genre Studies has noted the importance of emotion to the study of genre, focusing on how writers’ attitudes and dispositions influence their perception of a genre. To continue to validate emotions as part of the experience of creating and shaping genres, this study traces the emotional valences of one writer, “Jocelyn,” in shaping the genre of a sorority recruitment video, a genre of media used in sororities nationwide to showcase the sorority in a desirable way. Analyzing an interview with Jocelyn and coding the images in Jocelyn’s video and her model text for their rhetorical function suggests that Jocelyn replicated the rhetorical aims of her model text but selected certain images that were emotionally resonant for her and her group. Jocelyn is inspired to shape the genre to the extent that she finds the existing genre emotionally inadequate and emotionally inauthentic to represent her group. Jocelyn’s video “remakes” herself and her friends as “sorority girls,” but also “remakes” the sorority in a way that’s both palatable and emotionally authentic for her. I suggest the metaphor of “settling in” to genre to represent the embodied feedback loop writers use when they take up a new genre and unpack this metaphor for explaining the role of emotion in genre pedagogy.

In Carolyn Miller’s Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre, she revisits her assertion that genres are cultural artifacts and questions the nature of the relationship between micro-level, individual speech acts, and macro-level genres and systems. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze meta-genre accounts of the dissertation posted on the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) listserv, a forum for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Within this discourse, I identify transitional threads —moments when the discussion shifts, which show the relationship between micro- and macro-level interaction on the listserv as well as constructions of the dissertation within Writing Studies. CMC highlights how micro-level speech acts aggregate and are impacted by macro-level culture, and it showcases the heterogeneity inherent in the rhetorical community of the listserv.

In this interview, Carolyn Miller describes the origins and struggle to bring to publication her now-landmark article Genre as Social Action (1984) and its subsequent uptake as a powerful explanatory construct across many disciplines. Readers will also find an account of the fall—and subsequent resurrection—of interest in genre in rhetorical and communication studies as well as thoughts on a research agenda for new scholars in genre studies.

In this profile we describe changes to the composition program at Missouri University of Science and Technology, prompted by the hiring of the university’s first writing program administrator (WPA). We describe our efforts to implement evidence-based best practices in undergraduate writing courses in a context where very little program specific evidence was available. We also describe how challenges of effecting change at a university largely composed of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students has meant that many of the changes have been framed by the spirit of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives. Several new methods of assessment have been introduced to the program, including instructor feedback, student surveys, and skills tests. Allowing assessment to drive standardization has begun a process of measuring the transfer of student knowledge we believe other departments will find interesting. We close by outlining unresolved issues and ongoing challenges as the program moves forward.

Two-course writing sequences are valuable because they extend the time that students spend focused on developing as writers and researchers, yet they cannot rely on a “more is better” argument to justify their ongoing implementation, especially when general education curricula are shrinking and one course often looks much the same as the other. This program profile describes how West Virginia University is adopting a proactive stance on preserving and advocating for two-course writing sequences by recasting its second, sophomore-level course as an essential building block in the formation of undergraduate research identities. By combining axiologies of research identities with those of genre, metagenre, and metadisciplines, the program at West Virginia University is reshaping and repositioning its writing curriculum to more adequately address the diverse needs of students on pathways to many different disciplines.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

With distance education on the rise, a new program at the University of New Mexico provides an innovative way to teach first-year composition in a fully online format. The program, called eComp (short for Electronic Composition), insists that instructors receive formal and educational training before working in the model. In addition, the curriculum taught within the first-year writing courses attends to multimodal literacies, and students receive help with their drafts from various sources, including instructional assistants who are tutors embedded in each course shell. This profile describes the program, including the scholarship that informed its design, the pilot project, and results from a small-scale assessment. Furthermore, we discuss future expansion of the program. This program description can serve as a model—in whole or in part—for other English departments when structuring a successful, integrative online program that emphasizes teacher training and multimodal literacies.

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the “language” of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal compositions. The second section, montage style editing, as it appears in The Odessa Steps Sequence from Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, establishes that an awareness of “style” can bridge the gap between print and new media literacy. The third section outlines one advanced writing assignment called a “montage tap essay” in which students use a free online platform called Tapestry to create an interactive essay that ostensibly takes into consideration the particular cinematic affordances of editing, design, and writing.

This article presents an argument for the “re-turn” of essayist literacy in multimedia and multiliteracy contexts. For its democratic, pedagogical, and intellectual potential, essayist literacy is too important to be removed from composition curriculum, but it needs to be re-imagined within a diversity of essay traditions, including the turn toward multimedia writing undertaken in diverse writing classrooms. This article analyzes the findings from a study of one such ‘re-imagined’ essayist literacy unit/assignment in a composition course designed to focus on multiliteracies at a research university in the Northeast United States.

The Virtual Workplace Ethnography is a first-year composition assignment that positions students as knowledge makers by requiring them to apply a theoretical lens (“Working Knowledge”) to a video representation of a workplace. The lens provides multiple terms for analysis of workplace behaviors in context, providing a scaffolding for apprentice ethnographers that allows them to take an informed stance on their research. The “virtual” aspect addresses the complex ethical issues raised by ethnography by substituting a fictitious setting for an actual site. The essay explores the challenges of the assignment, offering examples of student texts and student metacommentaries on the work. The essay argues that this assignment addresses longstanding concerns about the challenges of making meaningful writing assignments in FYC and concludes by exploring the potential of the assignment in distance education.

Drawing on the stories and words of GTAs themselves, this article works to complicate our narratives of GTA resistance within practicum courses by situating this resistance in the larger process of identity formation and graduate school. I explore the way that GTAs’ dual roles as students and as teachers intersect with teacher preparation, particularly practicum courses. Finally, I offer suggestions for teacher preparation programs that stem from my study, my experience, and the scholarship in the field.

This article reenvisions fallacies for composition classrooms by situating them within rhetorical practices. Fallacies are not formal errors in logic but rather persuasive failures in rhetoric. I argue fallacies are directly linked to successful rhetorical strategies and pose the visual organizer of the Venn diagram to demonstrate that claims can achieve both success and failure based on audience and context. For example, strong analogy overlaps false analogy and useful appeal to pathos overlaps manipulative emotional appeal. To advance this argument, I examine recent changes in fallacies theory, critique a-rhetorical textbook approaches, contextualize fallacies within the history and theory of rhetoric, and describe a methodology for rhetorically reclaiming these terms.

Attention to stories compositionists tell about teaching and learning reveals some of the ways that teachers orient to disability in the classroom. This article argues that these “anecdotal relations”—relations that are created and disseminated through narratives people share about disability—can frustrate productive negotiations with disability in the classroom. Two anecdotal relations receive particular attention in this article: disability as personal and disability as threatening. Critically recasting these anecdotal relations may offer potential for creating writing classroom spaces that welcome disability.

Existing pedagogical approaches to research source use commonly frame sources as materials to be incorporated into texts. The worknets project presented in this article provides an alternative concerned with slowly tracing associations along semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, and choric aspects of the research source and across the contexts from which it was produced. These four sets of associations complement established approaches to source use while also illuminating qualities of a source that draw on network logics to support rhetorical invention and inquiry processes across the disciplines.

In this interview, Dr. Thomas Newkirk discusses his work in the field of Composition Studies over the past several decades. Newkirk argues for a vision of composition that maintains the connection between teaching and scholarship and re-affirms the significance of the field’s historical service-based mission of providing high-quality writing instruction to students across the age-span.

In 2004, the University of Kansas (KU) launched an interdisciplinary Graduate Writing Program as part of a larger initiative to reduce time to degree rates and increase degree completion rates. Serving both domestic and international students, this program employs a rhetorical genre-based approach in a series of courses organized around the genres of graduate school and beyond. In these Graduate Studies courses, students become ethnographers of the research and writing practices of their disciplines while writing their own texts and developing their professional identities. In addition, the Graduate Writing Program fields a Summer Writing Institute and offers workshops for students. The program supports departments and faculty members through consultations and workshops on such topics as how to mentor graduate writing. This profile—part program description, part theoretical construct—outlines the history and structure of the program as well as the academic and cultural challenges that graduate students and their mentors face. It argues that rhetorical genre studies is ideally suited for teaching graduate writing and supporting students as they create their professional identities.

This program profile examines efforts by WPAs at York College, a senior college in the CUNY system, to adapt to externally imposed changes and develop a locally meaningful writing program. 1999 marked the end of remediation at four-year (senior) colleges in The City University of New York. The elimination of developmental writing at CUNY’s senior colleges was accompanied by a university-wide mandate for WAC. Fall 2013 marked the start of a university-wide set of general education requirements that will partially eclipse existing local requirements. Between these two bookends, WPAs—drawing on a mindset of relative agency and informed by an awareness of the curricular and institutional positioning of writing—carried out local efforts to build a more effective and coherent program.

This program profile describes the efforts needed to develop a new writing program at a small college. The author explores how she cultivated relations with disciplinary faculty to collaboratively redefine a “problem” into an opportunity by adopting Krista Ratcliffe’s technique of rhetorical listening. She then outlines the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) components of the writing program. Additionally, the author offers lessons learned about writing program development and building productive college-wide relationships as well as some precautions. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on small college writing programs by addressing issues of program development and explores the possibilities of rhetorical listening for writing program administrators.

This article features the diaries and letters of a college student, John Price, who attended Denison University from 1917 to 1921. It shows how Price was pushed and pulled into writing in the extracurriculum by his literacy sponsors, which resulted in his founding a humor magazine as “the jock” took over as “the big man on college campuses” across the US. The article explores how writing in and for the extracurriculum among male college students developed, historically, in tandem with the emerging “modern college man identity.”

Recent explorations position multimodality as a largely curricular practice wherein the body typically is not figured as a potential mode of meaning making.  Such a projection not only fails to acknowledge extracurricular uses of such a rhetoric but also fails to acknowledge the role of the body in and especially for composing.  In hopes of countering this limited yet common understanding of multimodality, I consider an Auburn University 2004 defensive football play and sketch a picture of how embodied multimodality figures heavily in the literate activity surrounding college football. I end with a brief word on how Gunther Kress’s theory of multimodality encompassing the material and the bodily—two important concepts at play when examining football as literate activity—informs classroom practice through paving the way for embodied multimodal pedagogies.  Ultimately, I hold that an analysis of extracurricular embodied multimodality in college football invites student-athletes to hone a beneficial form of second-nature embodied rhetoric absent in curricular multimodality.

Writing centers can be staffed wholly or partially by tutors with little training in science writing. This article suggests that an emphasis on scientific rhetoric, not content, may be most useful for training tutors and developing handouts and checklists to aid novice science writers in invention and revision. The article also suggests that a training program in science writing can be informed by local science faculty’s major concerns. However, these faculty discussions toward tutor training should be supplemented through WAC-WID and genre research to retain a training focus on the connection between scientific thought and scientific writing, science writings’ primary genre families, and the delivery of scientific writing to different audiences.

Approaching definitions (and the act of defining) as inherently political and ideological, this article argues that there is a lack of definitional precision surrounding critical pedagogy and its core terms (e.g., student empowerment ). This lack of precision can impede the successful and ethical implementation of critical pedagogy in the composition classroom. This article calls for a deeper articulation of what critical pedagogy is and does, and for sharing definitional power with students by enlisting their help in this articulation. Inviting students to participate in such definitional work may mitigate resistance by offering students a greater say, and a greater stake, in their own education. Defining these terms more precisely may also help instructors to enact and communicate critical pedagogy in a more open and purposeful way.

Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer (LGBTQ) representation in composition readers remains limited and is frequently nonexistent. In addition, the LGBTQ-related materials that do find their way into composition readers are often problematic. In this essay I explain why WPAs and composition teachers should be concerned about LGBTQ representation in composition readers, and offer suggestions as to the kinds of LGBTQ content to include in readers that might then be used as part of an anti-homophobic pedagogy. I argue that WPAs and composition teachers can take specific steps—both within their composition programs and without—to move us, along with publishers, toward improving LGBTQ representation in our textbooks and in our classrooms. By doing so, we can help shape composition readers that are more inclusive and more representative of LGBTQ subjectivities, while also creating more inclusive and welcoming classroom environments for our LGBTQ students.

“Sharing” is a ubiquitous yet largely unexamined term in composition scholarship and practice. Scholars and teachers use the term widely to talk about practices such as peer review, collaboration, and student-teacher conferences, all of which have been used to support the relevance of composition as a social and communal act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, sharing has been aligned historically with assumptions and values that emphasize individual productivity at the cost of exploring the affective and ethical costs of social engagement and interaction. This article investigates tensions in the historical practices of sharing that create openings for alternative ways to understand and value the complex encounters writers undergo when they interact in the space of the writing classroom. Specifically, the article explores how sharing might be revised in composition studies to draw attention to the affective, corporeal, and ethical consequences of interpersonal contact.

This article reviews insights from place-based education and ecological models of writing to show how these theories can work together to shape locally focused composition pedagogies. From place-based education, the researcher takes an emphasis on physical specificity, and from ecological models of writing, the researcher takes an emphasis on discursive constructions of places. Both orientations to place are applied to an undergraduate professional writing class in Houston, an environment that illustrates vividly how unique physical changes interact with competing discourses in the present moment. The researcher describes a revision to a major writing assignment and discusses a need for assessment criteria that allow instructors to see the value of place-based and ecological models of writing.

In this interview, Jess Enoch talks with Cheryl Glenn about her professional career as a leading scholar in feminist rhetorical studies. Through their exchange, Cheryl discusses the emergence of feminist historiography in our field; she identifies important trends in feminist research, and she pinpoints areas of scholarship that feminist rhetoricians might continue to explore. They conclude the interview with Cheryl underscoring the importance of feminist community building, collaboration, and mentorship.

This review playfully approaches Rickert’s book through the lens of sonic rhetorical studies, focusing on the parts that seems most useful to scholars in this area. Naturally, then, it is presented as an exercise in practicing sonic rhetoric, with a dynamic, loose conversation between two sound scholars enlivened with a number of musical and sonic clips that exemplify the spoken parts of the review. The review is presented through multiple playback options to make it easier to digest in small chunks, but those sections are fluid, and the experience makes most sense when heard all together.

This profile presents Stetson University’s writing program at the moment of transition from a typical one-course writing requirement housed in the English Department to an embedded, cross-curricular, multi-course writing requirement. The first stage of this transition was triggered when a new conceptually-based, writing intensive General Education curriculum required the development of WI courses; the second stage, building upon the faculty development initiatives surrounding WI course implementation, saw a broader infusion of writing instruction throughout the Stetson curriculum and the rejuvenation of the University Writing Center with a multidisciplinary support philosophy. As a result of these core changes in Stetson’s writing instruction, the one-course writing requirement is obsolete; writing instruction at Stetson is incorporated both vertically and horizontally.

This program profile describes how a writing center embedded within a major school of business negotiates its unique positionality. Tracing both the successes and shortcomings of a writing initiative tasked with improving the school’s quality of writing, the profile offers a number of insights on both WAC and writing center work, including how to enact curricular change, encourage faculty to incorporate writing into their classes, maintain programmatic continuity with frequent turnover of graduate student administrators, and consult effectively with undergraduate students. Several sites of analysis are addressed, as the initiative seeks to remain committed to its mission while encountering various challenges.

This program profile examines the storied and conflicted five-decade genealogy of the Stony Brook University writing program. From the points of view of former administrators of this program who were faculty members during two of its most significant transitional periods, the authors make a case for the utmost importance of faculty community and reflectiveness, discourse-empowered advocacy, and shared governance to the well-being of postsecondary writing programs. In this context, the profile maintains a particular focus on disciplinary identity formation, including its effects on curriculum, working conditions, and placement and assessment practices.

I argue in this article that digital composing practices require composition teachers to rethink the way we articulate learning outcomes and conduct classroom assessment. To accomplish this, we must revise the language we use to talk about outcomes and assessment in the context of new media. We also need to better understand how technologies are changing student compositions, thus driving the need to change our learning outcomes and assessment practices. The purpose of this article is to provide rationales and strategies for doing so, as well as classroom activities that can be used to assess new media compositions.

This essay considers the long-standing challenges, in both practice and theory, to collaborative writing in the first-year classroom. I argue that Hannah Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality are useful frameworks for thinking constructively and practically about teaching argumentative writing through collaboration. I explore these concepts in terms of foundational scholarship on written collaboration, such as Candace Spigelman’s work on writing groups and intellectual property, as well as recent considerations of evolving technological resources (Howard). Ultimately, thinking through Arendt, I offer examples from my own classroom practice, and also generate a series of questions designed to support instructors’ incorporation of collaborative writing and thinking across their own diverse contexts. My goal here is not to suggest that there is a singular “best practice,” but rather to demonstrate the ways in which Arendtian concepts can foster complex and scaffolded pedagogies of collaboration in the first-year classroom.