This paper argues that instructors should prioritize the teaching of peer review. The authors have encouraged collaborative peer review by making it the most important work of their first-year writing course.

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.

ABSTRACTWalter Fisher's narrative paradigm has sparked intense debate about the role of narratives in rhetorical scholarship. The theory has subsequently been followed up by numerous criticisms and revisions. This article argues that especially the latter can benefit from a complementary phenomenological perspective that Fisher himself placed within the original paradigm. Through the Heideggerian concepts of building and dwelling, rhetoric within the narrative paradigm may be seen as a primary means for engaging with both individual and communal goals and exigencies, providing a more nuanced account for how people care for and act on the narratives in their lives.

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

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.

The research article is a staple genre in the economy of scientific research, and although research articles have received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, little attention has been given to the important development of Registered Reports. Registered Reports are an emerging, hybrid genre that proceeds through a two-stage model of peer review. This article charts the emergence of Registered Reports and explores how this new form intervenes in the evolution of the research article genre by replacing the central topoi of novelty with methodological rigor. Specifically, I investigate this discursive and publishing phenomenon by describing current conversations about challenges in replicating research studies, the rhetorical exigence those conversations create, and how Registered Reports respond to this exigence. Then, to better understand this emerging form, I present an empirical study of the genre itself by closely examining four articles published under the Registered Report model from the journal Royal Society Open Science and then investigating the genre hybridity by examining 32 protocols (Stage 1 Registered Reports) and 77 completed (Stage 2 Registered Reports) from a range of journals in the life and psychological sciences. Findings from this study suggest Registered Reports mark a notable intervention in the research article genre for life and psychological sciences, centering the reporting of science in serious methodological debates.

This study aims to explore the process of reading during writing. More specifically, it investigates whether a combination of keystroke logging data and eye tracking data yields a better understanding of cognitive processes underlying fluent and nonfluent text production. First, a technical procedure describes how writing process data from the keystroke logging program Inputlog are merged with reading process data from the Tobii TX300 eye tracker. Next, a theoretical schema on reading during writing is presented, which served as a basis for the observation context we created for our experiment. This schema was tested by observing 24 university students in professional communication (skilled writers) who typed short sentences that were manipulated to elicit fluent or nonfluent writing. The experimental sentences were organized into four different conditions, aiming at (a) fluent writing, (b) reflection about correct spelling of homophone verbs, (c) local revision, and (d) global revision. Results showed that it is possible to manipulate degrees of nonfluent writing in terms of time on task and percentage of nonfluent key transitions. However, reading behavior was affected only for the conditions that explicitly required revision. This suggests that nonfluent writing does not always affect the reading behavior, supporting the parallel and cascading processing hypothesis.

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.

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.

Using student poems and reflections collected over several years, the author examines the impact of a role-playing game experience on introductory creative writing students’ openness toward taking risks, revising (and improvising) playfully, and working with limitations or rules. The role-play uses Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions as a model—particularly the diabolical game that unfolds between directors von Trier and Jørgen Leth—and requires students to “remake” a poem of theirs three times according to sets of rules designed specifically for them by the instructor in face-to-face meetings.

This article describes an interdisciplinary partnership that resulted in the introduction of a writing coach into an MBA class on critical and analytical thinking. By examining the response to this role by the writing coaches themselves and by the students enrolled in three sections of this new course, this exploratory study endeavors to answer the question: How can a writing coach best support student writing in an MBA course? Major findings are that students predominantly liked receiving written feedback and mini-lectures by the writing coaches, mini-lectures were met with mixed reviews, and there was a strong perception by participants that their writing had improved.

Many EAL (English as an Additional Language) scholars enlist text mediators’ support when faced with the challenges of writing for international publication. However, the contributions these individuals are able to make in improving scientific manuscripts remains unclear, especially when language professionals such as English teachers do this work. In this article, we explore this topic by examining how three mediators employed their very different expertise and brought different processes to bear on the same discussion section of a medical manuscript written by a novice scholar in China. We find that successfully mediated texts are often the result of an interplay between the mediator’s expertise and the relationship between the participants. Our findings contradict those of previous studies that question the role of English teachers in this process and have the potential to inform both text mediation practices and revision studies.

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and one by keyboard. Our results show a beneficial effect of text processing software, in terms of both the qualitative and quantitative writing output. A hierarchical cluster analysis was used to detect distinct performance groups in the sample. These performance groups mapped onto three differing working memory profiles. The groups with higher mean WM scores manifested superior writing complexity using a keyboard, in contrast to the cluster with the lowest mean WM. The results also point out that more revision during the writing process itself does not inevitably reduce the quality of the final output.

Our article examines the challenges that “outsiders” face as academic leaders in higher education, with a special emphasis on the specific complications prevailing in the rhetoric and composition fields within English studies. We survey descriptive statistics and historical evidence to locate several of the problems confronting women and others newly and provisionally admitted to—and more often, still excluded from—the highest levels of academic leadership. Then, we bring together feminist-revisionist advocacy tools and Ernest Boyer’s alternative vision for “engaged scholarship” to suggest ways that leadership work formerly categorized as simply administrative duty or mere service be recognized for its broad-ranging impact both on campuses and the public domain.

Although multiple studies have found that peer review is an effective instructional practice for the teaching of academic writing in K–12 settings, little research exists that documents students’ views of peer review and the features that make peer review tasks useful or challenging for writing development. In this study, we investigated high school students’ perceptions of peer review through a questionnaire administered to 513 students from four schools who had used SWoRD, an online peer review system. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our findings demonstrate that most students viewed peer review as helpful to their writing development and that students consistently viewed three features of the SWoRD peer review system as most beneficial: anonymity of writers and reviewers, opportunities to review other students’ writing, and feedback from multiple readers. Students reported difficulty with managing conflicting reviews and wording their feedback. Our study contributes to existing research on peer review of writing by suggesting that secondary peer review activities would be more helpful to students if they considered students’ concerns about social positioning and face-saving, allowed writers to receive feedback from multiple reviewers, and taught students how to manage conflicting reviews. Additionally, our study suggests that the benefits of reviewing have been greatly underestimated in existing research and that students would benefit from more opportunities to give, as well as receive, feedback on academic writing.

This article uses Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to explore how literature instructors can use eighteenth-century novels, many of which bring attention to themselves as creations of the writing process, to encourage their students to reflect on their position as writers in the twenty-first century. Gulya proposes teaching Tristram Shandy and other self-referential texts within the context of writing studies. This approach helps our students recognize the close relationship between writing and cognition and, by so doing, brings their attention to writing as a process as well as a product. Gulya also outlines some of the major benefits of encouraging students to think about writing as a process, including more vibrant peer-revision sessions and an increase in students' tendencies to take intellectual risks in their writing.

The purpose of this article is to share how classroom incorporation of technology with feminist pedagogy in mind both elicited and constrained learning opportunities in a large, blended class setting. Technology selection, assignment revision, and changes to teaching practices are addressed. We conclude with recommendations for teachers facing similar circumstances.

Conducting online peer review with students from other sections allows for a more writing-focused process.

This article investigates the spatial politics at work in composition and rhetoric's turn toward revisionist historiography. Drawing on critical spatial theory, the author seeks to answer a fundamental question: What would it mean to formulate a historiography for composition that brings an interrelation of space and time, of spatial and historical work, to the fore? This article expedites this foregrounding by highlighting the ways in which the divisions between time and space have already grown increasingly tenuous in our revisionist historical scholarship and by providing this interrelatedness a vocabulary—a space-time hermeneutic—to highlight and predict its theoretical and political implications.

This article describes a sequence of assignments to guide students through an informed effort at making contributions to Wikipedia that persist, and suggests ways this set of exercises in social informatics may also serve a number of common goals in a variety of writing, literature, and other courses: analyzing and writing for explicit editorial guidelines (“standards” in information science, “house style” in editorial practice); understanding, conforming to, and even negotiating conventions of genres and subgenres; collaborating online; writing for an audience that not only is real but also talks back; and developing deep understanding of revision and the writing, editorial, and publication processes. Students first learn Wikipedia policies and practices and analyze the historical development of articles before they make contributions. The pedagogical opportunities arguably outweigh the concerns of those who doubt the credibility of an open-authored encyclopedia.

This essay details the foundational theory as well as the practical problems that led to the creation of this class project that focuses on authentic audience and persistent revision practices. The author won a Diana Hacker Award.

In this article, I explain how integrating Google Drive into your classroom can help prepare students to participate effectively in workplace writing practices and can promote student responsibility, collaboration, and effective revisions.

Instructors recount the challenges and successes that accompanied a collaborative peer review project between first-year college students at two institutions.

“Watkins contributes to social class theory by basing his revisionist history on non-English majors and by seeing our capital not in decline inside the university, but as a provider of developing forms of cultural capital outside the university.”

Students revise a course assignment prompt in a dual-credit class to develop their conceptions of the meaning of revision.

In an effort to better understand how to help students engage more fully with the feedback process, this article examines the role of the writer as solicitor of feedback in composition textbooks, noting that textbooks don’t appear to offer sufficient tools to move students from “Do we have to?” to “Can we, please?” in peer review, and includes pedagogical suggestions that will encourage students to become engaged writers who are able, and willing, to solicit feedback and participate in peer review.

Drawing on the notion that revision involves the performance of a writer’s identity in a conversation with herself, this article argues for conceptualizing revision as ecstasis and ventriloquism. By using the metaphor of ventriloquism to translate theory into heuristics for teaching revision, it enacts an underlying argument that pedagogy is metaphor. In doing so, it offers four practical strategies for teaching students to revise.

Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.

Writing scholars interested in stakeholder attitudes need ways to reconstruct them from archives because (a) interview/survey studies are not always feasible (particularly in historical work) and (b) the question/answer format of these studies may exclude key attitudes that emerge in unprompted expressions of opinion. Accordingly, this article argues for filter theory—a pragmatic model of interpretive attitudes—as an effective hermeneutic for archival reception studies. Complementing a previous study of administrative attitudes about the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project, the present study applies filter theory to a sample of ranchers’ written opinions about the Project. The main findings are as follows: Ranchers and administrators differentially value resident rights versus Project goals; ranchers warrant resistance to the Project based on these misaligned attitudes; nonetheless, both groups value the ideal of a balanced environment and evidence collected on the ground. These findings suggest the need to redefine rhetorical resistance and common ground as arguments warranted by mis/alignments between groups’ interpretive attitudes. They also indicate revisions to initial recommendations for extending rhetorical common ground in the Project.

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

This article describes a pilot study on developmental writers’ attitudes toward and use of instructor-written feedback in multiple sections of a precollege-level writing— course at our college.

Color highlighting is used to connect revision mini-lessons to teacher comments that are easy for students to identify and quicker for teachers to generate electronically.

How to engage students in the Commedia and involve them in the pleasure of decoding the rich density of Dante’s allusions to historical, literary, and Biblical characters? This article suggests that a class on the Inferno can be enriched by creating a wiki that encourages and facilitates individualized research, peer evaluation, and frequent teacher feedback.

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of “academic writing” present at these writing programs. Findings suggest that writing specialists have managed to permeate U.S. first-year writing assessment with certain progressive assumptions about writing and writing instruction, but they also indicate critical areas for revision, given such documents’ critical gatekeeping role at postsecondary institutions. The study also raises a broader question about the difficulties of rhetorically constructing “writing ability” in a way that is consistent with the contextualist paradigm dominant in contemporary writing studies.

Steel Wagstaff , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/essays-into-silence-noise-and-john-cage ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) I present here the results of "The {Silence} Project," a multi-part creative research project that engages with ideas of chance, silence, and noise through the work of John Cage, the American avant-garde composer. The project began with an experimental prose essay that borrowed the formal structure of Cage's famous 'silent' composition 4’33” to examine the importance of silence and noise in Cage’s thought and speculate about the poetic implications of Cage’s use of constraints and chance operations in his composition practice. As part of a graduate seminar taught by Jon McKenzie, over the next four months I submitted this essay to two substantial remediations which drastically altered the form, content, and argumentative thrust of the original essay. I converted the prose piece first into “{Sile / nce},” a graphic essay produced with Adobe InDesign that attempted to imitate the look and feel of a large, visually rich, and typographically varied glossy magazine. Next, I remediated the piece a further time, creating “The Silence Film: Essays into Noise, Silence, and John Cage,” a short film loosely structured around the conventions of Pecha Kucha, a fixed-duration presentation format that features twenty images shown for 20 seconds each. In each case, the project underwent significant revisions, changing shape and adopting radically different content in order to explore the properties of the media in which it was composed and the software tools I was just beginning to use (primarily Adobe InDesign, Audacity, and iMovie). In each specific case of remediation, the structural properties and representative capabilities of the selected forms and formats offered both interesting opportunities and significant challenges, especially when it came to depicting the implications of Cage’s subversion of common…

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.

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures and underlying cognitive processes. They used these measures to analyze pauses, bursts, and revisions and found that (a) burst lengths vary depending on their initiation type as well as their termination type, suggesting that the classification system used in previous research should be elaborated; (b) mixture models fit pause duration data better than unimodal central tendency statistics; and (c) individuals who pause for longer at sentence boundaries produce shorter but more well-formed bursts. A principal components analysis identified three underlying dimensions in these data: planned text production, within-sentence revision, and revision of global text structure.

AbstractThis article discusses two twentieth-century examples of humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within philosophy and rhetorical studies. The article begins with Martin Heidegger's antihumanist provocation and examines Ernesto Grassi's response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next it takes up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compares Grassi's defense of rhetorical humanism within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff's reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger's and postmodernism's philosophical antihumanism. These two rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the future.

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.

Circulating written drafts and conducting roundtable reviews are two important document-development activities in many work sites. Previous studies suggest that review processes are frustrating for participants and have substantial inefficiencies caused by conflicting participant purposes. This article presents two case studies of the document-review practices for clinical study reports from a large pharmaceutical company, paying particular attention to whether review efforts contributed to improvements in document quality. Findings suggest that document review did not lead to demonstrable improvement in report quality. The authors offer recommendations for improving document-review practices.