The Northeast Ohio Medical (NEOMED) University Writing Center was founded in the winter of 2022 to support its medical, pharmacy, and graduate students. Through trial, error, and creativity, the Writing Center Specialists developed a successful writing center offering collaborative synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Often, graduate education needs a different type of support than undergraduate students do: in-house editing combined with traditional theory. This initiative highlights the importance of writing and editing support in medical education, addressing diverse needs across NEOMED’s colleges and promoting effective writing practices. On February 21, 2022, in a small meeting space between two offices, Brian sat at a large, wooden, boardroom table staring out the large window into the Aneal Mohan Kohli Academic & Information Technology Center, the official name of the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) Library, waiting for the first students to appear for in-person writing tutoring. One week prior, Brian had signed a part-time (20 hours a week) contract to lead a writing center pilot project that ended on June 30, 2024. Brian was the Writing Center Specialist and was tasked with creating a writing center to support the more than 1,000 medical, pharmacy, and graduate students at NEOMED and had less than 30-months to do it. NEOMED is a stand-alone medical university in the rural community of Rootstown in Northeast, Ohio. It is not connected via physical space to any hospital system. NEOMED does not confer any undergraduate degrees but does offer several master’s and PhD programs for its students within its College of Graduate Studies. There are over 600 medical students, 300 pharmacy students, and more than 100 graduate students attending NEOMED. The school is within 50 miles of several teaching hospitals that partner with the NEOMED students in Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown areas. The closest clinical location is a 20-mile drive from NEOMED’s campus. Brian’s background was in English Composition and Rhetoric, having taught at several universities since 2010. He worked in a Writing Center as a graduate student and followed writing center theory closely. Now, he was creating a writing center, carte blanche. He was given a common room and two offices. He had a small budget for paper products, a laptop, a bulletin board, and access to various means of communication. He met with the leaders of the three different colleges and asked the same questions: how can a writing center help your students? The answers were all different and began to mold the theoretical approach. NEOMED was founded in 1973 to meet Northeast Ohio’s critical need for primary care physicians. Much of the writing support for the College of Medicine (COM) was provided by the Assistant Director of Student Affairs and the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. In the College of Pharmacy (COP), the Assistant Dean of Student Success worked with students as they navigated writing assignments. In the College of Graduate Studies (COGS), individual professors were tasked with this writing support. While the individual colleges attempted to support their students in their writing, typically, only the high-stakes professional writing—resumes, curriculum vitae (CVs), personal statements, and letters of intent—were given priority. As an example, the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for the COM reviewed 150-160 CVs and personal statements between May and July each year. The group of third-year medical students submitted their applications for residency programs through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), the system used by medical graduates to apply for specialized training positions in hospitals. COGS, in which Brian had been an adjunct professor since 2018, needed academic writing support for its students. Many of the nine graduate programs had writing assignments throughout the semester. Some of the program’s students wrote master’s theses and others wrote doctoral dissertations. Many of these students utilized the Writing Center for support. Professors in COGS also asked Brian to create several writing specific videos which covered topics on grammar, punctuation, research writing, and formatting. COP had one goal in mind for the Writing Center, and that was supporting their second language learning (SLL) students. The SLL students struggled with plagiarism, understanding prompts, taking notes, research writing, and reaching out for help. In August 2023, 18 months after Brian was hired, funding was allocated to hire an SLL specialist, and Brook was hired to support the SLL students, specifically those in pharmacy. COM had a detailed list of needs for the Writing Center, much of which was high stakes writing. The number one need of the COM was to support the 600+ medical students as they create their professional CVs. Then, the Writing Center was asked to collaborate with the students as they create personal statements for residency applications and research opportunities. Medical students also created oral and poster presentations, journal articles, and many other writing projects. The University provided its students with 20 hours of writing support. Yet, after a week of being open, students did not come for the support they needed. Brian sent emails to cohorts. Announcements were made. It was clear that sitting at a table facing the window to the library and waiting for students to start coming in for in-person tutoring sessions was not happening. The typical, in-person consultation consisted of reading the paper out loud in the undergraduate writing center world that Brian was accustomed to. Undergraduate writing theory was not what the NEOMED students needed. Instead, it took trial and error, a lot of support, a little bit of money, and some creativity to establish the NEOMED Writing Center as a fully funded center of the University. Ultimately, the NEOMED Writing Center pilot program is a story that all graduate schools can use to create their own writing center. By promoting asynchronous sessions, screenshares, and collaboration, a graduate school writing center became successful.

This study examines the use of persuasive language by male and female entrepreneurs in high-stakes negotiation settings, focusing on gendered communication strategies. With a particular emphasis on Aristotle’s modes of persuasion (Ethos, Pathos, and Logos), the research analyzes 44 negotiation conversations from Shark Tank US , Season 11, using a quantitative approach. Data were processed with SPSS to assess gender differences in persuasive strategies. The findings reveal significant gendered patterns: male entrepreneurs predominantly used Logos as a way to emphasize on logical reasoning and evidence to persuade investors, while female entrepreneurs more often employed Pathos, sparking emotional appeals to build empathy and engagement. These differences are discussed in light of social constructivist theories of language, which suggest that gendered communication reflects broader societal power dynamics. The study highlights the challenges women face in balancing authority with warmth in negotiations, a double bind identified in earlier research. This research contributes to our understanding of how gender influences persuasive strategies in entrepreneurial contexts and offers implications for promoting more equitable communication in business settings. It also suggests that future research should further explore how these findings can be applied to support female entrepreneurs in overcoming communication barriers and achieving greater success in negotiation and leadership roles.

Conversations around GenAI and Linguistic Justice are dominating scholarly conversations in composition studies, and yet little work looks at the two together. We argue that the rise of A.I. can serve as a kairotic moment for enacting linguistic justice by returning to expressivist approaches to student writing. We share experiments working with GenAI platforms in attempts to produce diverse voices in writing and then offer our own experiences as writing instructors centering student voice in instruction.

In my sometimes-murky role as a writing program administrator, I often think about Eli Goldblatt's chapter "Lunch" in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum.Goldblatt posits the main job of a writing program administrator is to have lunch with as many people on campus as possible.His advice is simple.I tell myself it's a lesson I already know.Yet again and again, just as I begin to wonder if I should renew that WPA contract the next time, I run into someone new on campus, we discover all that we share in our hopes for our institution, we make a plan or two, and I remember I have Eli to thank.This kind of move characterizes Goldblatt, both as a person and as a writer and scholar.His personability leads, distracting us from the fact that he is also a profound thinker whose writing models what we value most in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies: it gently sets aside our concerns with form-genre form, forms of difference, disciplinary forms-and helps us commune, instead, through practice.For that reason, we are lucky now to have Goldblatt's new book, Alone with Each Other: Literature and Literacy Intertwined, a compilation of his published writing from the beginning of his career in rhetoric and composition to the present, between 1995 and 2022.Divided into three sections by topic-Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Community Literacy, and Poetics and Practice-the collection reveals, at last, just how much is really going on in Goldblatt's work when we see it in its wholeness.In the excellent new introductory chapter, Goldblatt shows us how he's been thinking of his tripartite work all these years, straddling university writing programs and literature departments, community literacy settings, and the poetry community.Goldblatt loosens literacy and literature from their disciplinary forms and reframes them, so that "literacy" denotes reading and writing in the world, and "literature" means reading and writing for art's sake.Then he argues that this reframing allows us to make our way around and through their politicized institutional histories.While we in composition have often lamented our precarity and lesser status in relation to literary study, Goldblatt shows us how to respect our own grounding in our peculiar intersection of college writing, English literature, and English education.But what Goldblatt also achieves-without stating as his aim-is a tender embrace of the varying stances, and dare I say open conflicts, within composition itself.He extols Aja Martinez's work drawing on Critical Race Theory, for instance, seeing a kindred spirit in the conviction that "argumentation divorced from accounts of lived experience too easily leaves oppressive structures in place" (7).He brings this newer critical work into conversation with the earlier energies of the social turn, especially the "often . . .

The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of “symbolic action.” However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley’s edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham’s recent book, Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “right branch”) as well as the more traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as “symbolic action” (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “left branch”). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as “other” to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham’s angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about “symbolic action” as “situated action” that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson’s relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric’s left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not “need to re-engineer rhetoric” to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham’s perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham’s book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thinking, Graham focuses on Burke’s early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke’s later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action), which have been crucial to interpreting him as a theorist of symbolic action, Graham argues that Permanence and Change is directly indebted to a Bergsonian process philosophy that emphasizes the rhetoricity of situations. For the Burke of Permanence and Change (which Graham calls Original Bergsonian Burke [OBB]), there is no ontological or epistemological gap between symbolic action and material situations. Instead, symbolic practices and the situations that underpin such practices (e.g., environmental ecologies, social ecologies, digital ecologies, etc.) can all be conceived immanently, as nested complex dynamic systems that reveal motives toward reality. Hence, according to Graham, available in the writings of OBB is a Bergsonian ontology that emphasizes relational processes all the way down and rejects any Cartesian dualism (or Kantian correlationism) between nature and culture and things and words. For OBB, which is also the Burke Debra Hawhee focuses on most extensively in her book Moving Bodies, symbolic action is the effect rather than the cause of material processes of becoming, and rhetoric is the act of responding to these material processes in a satisfying way that is always itself creative and inventive.After offering a novel way to think about Burke and his materialist contributions to rhetoric, chapter 3 of Graham’s text turns to Carolyn Miller’s highly influential essay “Genre as Social Action” (originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984). As her piece is deeply influenced by Permanence and Change, as well as the writings of Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz, Graham believes that rhetoricians can also read Miller’s formulation of genre as presupposing a Bergsonian ontology. While Miller does not mention Bergson in her essay, Graham argues that by appreciating the influence of Bergson on Burke and Schutz, it is possible to see that Bergson has indirectly influenced Miller’s account of genre. Graham argues that rhetoricians can also appreciate the link to Bergson in terms of how Miller’s project explicitly rejects “modernist materialism and the postmodern fetishization of discourse” (90). For Miller, the situations that produce genres—as repeated patterns of discourse—are not mechanistic and mechanical but active and dynamic processes that sediment through time (what Bergson calls duration). For Graham, then, the resources for interpreting Miller as “in some ways, the [discipline’s] original rhetorical new materialist” are already at play within her text (90). If we simply expand Miller’s understanding of situation so that, like OBB, it accounts for patterning and structuration not only at the social level but also at the flattened ontological level of movement and becoming, then Miller’s Genre as Social Action (GASA) framework can be reconceptualized in terms of a new materialist method that Graham calls Genre as Process (GAP). Whereas GASA conceives of genres as abstract nouns that emerge out of stable social patterns, GAP emphasizes genre-ing, “[t]he processes of structuring activity that occurs in situational hierarchies and guides situated action” (73). A GAP approach also helps realize Miller’s recent call for deeper engagement with new media technologies. As dynamic structures that are always entangled with their larger contexts and environments, new media technologies, such as Twitter, are best approached through a GAP framework that can appreciate the way these technologies repattern the norms of genre (e.g., letter to the editor genre on Twitter vs. traditional letter to the editor genre). Approaching GASA as GAP, then, allows rhetoricians to conceptualize genre in terms of dynamic patterns of circulation that are continually predisposed toward change and entropy. While effective genre deployment, like Burke’s rhetoric, requires kairotic responsiveness (or what Graham, borrowing from Whitehead, calls satisfaction), this situated responsiveness (especially in digital contexts) is itself inventive and, thus, continuous with the patterns of circulation that makes genre itself possible.Chapter 4 of Graham’s book concludes the conceptual portion of his project. In this chapter, Graham argues that a GAP framework can enrich not only traditional rhetorical (left branch) perspectives but also RNM. While Graham identifies as a new materialist rhetorician who favors the ontological turn in rhetorical studies, he believes that part of what makes the GAP framework valuable is its tendency to move RNM back toward a study of “the recurring experiences of practicing rhetors” (122). Too often, Graham argues, advocates of RNM adopt a “zoom-out” (distributed agency) perspective that makes it challenging to locate rhetorical agents’ strategic, situated practices. A GAP approach, by contrast, returns to the situated rhetor without rendering their agency discrete, atomistic, or self-contained. By conceptualizing rhetorical agency as the accomplishment of “structuring structures” that produce performatively enacted boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, GAP enables both a “zoom-out” and “zoom-in” approach that can account for the rhetorical strategies that satisfy particular human situations and exigencies. Graham’s framework, thus, not only improves traditional rhetorical perspectives by making them more process-oriented but also enriches RNM approaches by making them more suited to analyze rhetorical practices and discourses.The remainder of Graham’s book is a sampling of case studies that apply the GAP framework to cultural artifacts. In chapter 5, Graham discusses the qualitative research he produced studying the work of Brandon, a graphic designer who consults with various companies to create novel digital products. Graham argues that the novel digital products that Brandon produces for these companies can be understood through a GAP framework. Across his consulting work, Brandon must demonstrate an ongoing sensitivity to the genre constraints of various situations (that are ecological, social, and digital) to effectively satisfy his clients and consumers—a practice Graham calls “fit foraging.” Graham argues that a clear example of this approach to “fit foraging” is the holiday e-card video game that Brandon produced for the Ryzex Corporation (a UPC scanner manufacturer). After being asked by Ryzex to create a novel holiday e-card that could satisfy the company’s various clients, “Brandon designed a shooting-gallery Flash game that used Ryzex UPC scanners as ranged weapons and barcode-marked boxes as appropriate targets” (126). According to Graham, this shooting gallery game was an excellent example of fit foraging because it combined the genres of the holiday e-card, shooting gallery games, and Ryzex’s unique brand identity to produce a novel outcome.In chapter 6, Graham turns his attention to scholarship on computational rhetoric. Focusing largely on his own work deploying content-analytic methods, Graham argues that these approaches work through an ongoing dialectic between intuition, which he defines as “an experiential approach to metaphysical inquiry” (139), and abstraction. This Bergsonian framing is valuable, Graham argues, because it locates practices of quantification in a GAP framework that understands data as “aggregations of intuitions rendered symbolically so that the patterns, abstracted for the local sites of situated action, become more clearly visible” (149). Hence, for Graham, computational rhetoric should be approached not as “other” to more traditional rhetorical perspectives but as a distinct genre of rhetorical inquiry that is compatible with his larger GAP framework. Graham’s insights in this chapter also have important implications for scholarship centered on the rhetoric of science. Like content analytic methods, scientific inquiry can be understood generally as a process of abstracting the intuitive and forging a fit with material reality through embodied experimentation. Graham’s Bergsonian approach to the rhetoric of science is, thus, compatible with scholars, such as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, without needing to draw extensively on their distinct science and technology studies vocabulary. If we simply start with a Bergsonian relational ontology, Graham argues, all rhetorical practices emerge out of the nexus between intuition, the patterns of stabilization (or duration) that result from intuition, and the processes of symbolic abstraction that attempt to provisionally capture intuition and duration in a satisfying way.In chapter 7, Graham returns to a more specific case study that deals with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Arguing that the Trump moment poses a crisis to traditional studies of presidential genre, Graham claims that a GASA framework can help make sense of Trump’s success as a rhetor. Graham’s method for analyzing Trump’s rhetoric works at two registers. First, Graham shares the results of a quantitative study he conducted to test the widely held conviction that “the 2016 presidential primary [featuring Donald Trump was] . . . more negative . . . [than] prior campaign cycles” (165). Contrary to popular perception, Graham shows that his study reveals that a similar level of negativity characterized previous primary debates and that there is no stark difference. Graham then zooms in on the specific rhetorical strategies enacted by Trump during the primary debates, focusing in particular on his infamous exchange with Marco Rubio about hand (penis) size. Graham’s main argument here is that Trump’s communication during this exchange (and others) can be appreciated in terms of a Laconic rhetoric genre that “leverages the powerful organizing structures of reality TV and Twitter flame wars to supplant the traditional genre-ing processes of political oratory” (176). Graham argues, furthermore, that this same Laconic genre did not work when Rubio deployed it because his situated responsiveness did not align with “the media apparatuses that supported . . . [Trump’s] rhetoric” (176). Graham’s case study in this chapter, thus, shows how a GAP approach to presidential genre, especially when paired with computational rhetoric, can reveal illuminating insights about rhetors. While a historical perspective on negativity in presidential primary debates cannot capture, on its own, the qualities that made the Trump presidency unique, Graham’s GAP framework is able to locate the specific “structuring structures” that made Trump such a powerful contemporary rhetor.Chapter 8 concludes Graham’s text by recapping key theses and offering a glossary that defines key terms. My summary sense of the key takeaway is that Graham offers scholars a new materialist perspective on genre (GAP) that can account for the diverse material structures that pattern symbolic meaning in historically specific contexts. Effective responsiveness to this new materialist conception of genre works in terms of Whiteheadian satisfaction, or fit foraging, which I would describe as an ontologically situated enactment of kairos (similar to the account offered by Debra Hawhee in Bodily Arts). In addition to providing a recap of his project and clearly defining key terms in the book, the concluding chapter of Graham’s text notes some of the book’s limitations. Some of the critical limitations raised here include a need for more careful engagement with cultural rhetorics (i.e., rhetorics that study the performance of identity and embodied subjectivity), applying GAP to old media in addition to new media, and considering GAP more directly in relation to sound studies.While Graham does a good job acknowledging the limits of his project, I’d like to conclude this review by discussing what I perceive as a few more limitations. First, in addition to engaging more directly with cultural rhetorics, Graham’s text could benefit from a more robust theorization of power and its effect on the patterning of genre. For example, while I agree that new materialism should explore the processes that produce the situated boundary of the human, I believe, following the interventions of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Armond Towns, that what constitutes a “fitting” response within this domain is overdetermined by structures of racialization (as well as patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.). Graham’s work does not discuss the boundary of the human in this way, and his case studies seem to overlook the problem of positionality in relation to genre. It would be interesting, as part of Graham’s ontological account of genre formation, if he considered how genres emerge out of historically specific patterns of exclusion and bordering.Second, while I find Graham’s advocacy of “zoom-in” approaches to RNM compelling, I feel that his book could engage more with the nonhuman. Most of Graham’s case studies foreground the materiality of new media, but they say little about concrete extrahuman processes of mattering. I’d like to hear more from Graham about the role of physical ecosystems and nonhuman entities (like plants, animals, and even inorganic matter) in the dynamic materialization of genres. It seems that from an RNM perspective, something as banal as the energy used to power new media technologies would play a constitutive role in genre formation.Finally, there is the question of whether turning to Bergson can resolve rhetoric’s crisis of disciplinary identity. Bergson, after all, is first and foremost a philosopher, and Graham’s project could have benefitted from more argumentative scaffolding to support the case that Bergson was doing philosophy from a rhetorical vantage. Perhaps if Graham returned to some of the earlier disciplinary debates over rhetoric and philosophy that occurred between the late 1960s and early 1980s, he could locate more commonplaces for exploring these tensions and justifying why Bergson’s relational metaphysics should be conceived as an ontological approach to rhetoric.Limitations notwithstanding, Graham should be praised for this important contribution to the discipline. Graham demonstrates a masterful understanding of RNM, computational rhetoric, and thinkers associated with the left branch of rhetoric. And his ability to synthesize all this work into a unified theory is very impressive.I look forward to reading new scholarship in genre studies that builds on this text, and I look forward to following the theoretical debates it prompts with respect to the compatibility between RNM and traditional rhetorical perspectives. I also look forward to future scholarship that situates Graham’s process-oriented account of rhetoric in relation to a larger historical context and disciplinary genealogy. As scholars such as Debra Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, Scot Barnet, and Mari Lee Mifsud have all shown (at least indirectly), perspectives that resonate with the process philosophy of Bergson can be found in Greek antiquity as well as the Homeric period that predates Greek antiquity. More work should be done to connect these historical threads so that rhetoric’s ontological relationship to process, change, movement, and indeterminacy can be fully appreciated.

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.

Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).

This article argues that latrinalia is an important and potentially beneficial source of public writing deserving of educators’ and researchers’ attention. I start by comprehensively reviewing the research record of latrinalia in order to demonstrate its status as a legitimate academic field while surfacing the major trends, questions, and fault lines of latrinalic scholarship. Then, after outlining how most research on latrinalia takes place on college campuses, I trace recent work on spatial practice which implicitly advocates for public discourses like latrinalia in order to make the case that bathroom graffiti is an important but often neglected source of public writing and rhetoric that aligns with contemporary conceptions of composition theory and holds pedagogic potential for the teaching of writing. Lastly, I discuss the limitations and unresolved questions of the field of latrinalia before sketching future directions for research. “The slight scratching of many of the Maeshowe Runes, and the consequent irregularity and want of precision in the forms… of what, it must be remembered, are mere graffiti.” (D. Wilson, Britanno—Roman Inscriptions: With Critical Notes, 1863)

Universities across the globe have begun to invest in transdisciplinary research: a complex form of collaboration that places divergent disciplinary specialists and community members in participatory research aimed at addressing an applied research question. For a collaboration to succeed in this knowledge work, participants must engage in radical boundary crossing among disciplinary and community knowledge cultures wherein language is the substance of these boundaries and crossings. Effective collaboration, communication, and writing are essential to the success of transdisciplinary research, but composition research on collaborative writing has yet to address what collaboration looks like in transdisciplinary settings. This article offers a theoretical synthesis that brings transdisciplinary research theory into conversation with composition theory and pedagogy by providing an overview of the core principles of transdisciplinary research, offering an activity systems interpretation of transdisciplinary research, and outlining a framework for incorporating transdisciplinary collaboration into university composition programs.

Research on writing pedagogy education (WPE) emphasizes the importance of engaging graduate student instructors (GSIs) in mindful reflection about their own practices and about composition theory. Little research, however, has explored what we learn from a systematic, empirical investigation of GSIs’ reflective writing. In this article, we describe a writing assignment we created for a graduate composition theory course that required GSIs to connect their own beliefs and experiences with the theory they read. We analyzed 60 essays to learn how new writing teachers understand and use composition theory. Our analysis shows that GSIs rely on three discursive patterns to write about theory (we call these cite-comment , cite-apply , cite-engage ) and adopt three orientations towards theory (using theory to explain prior beliefs and maintain a teacherly identity , to solve classroom problems and shore up a teacherly identity , and to accept uncertainty and become a reflective teacher ). We discuss connections between GSIs’ discursive strategies and their theoretical orientations. We conclude by sharing how we have revised both this assignment and our training program to help GSIs better engage theory as they reflect on their own experiences. Finally, we explore the implications of what we learned for WPE broadly.

ecent social justice awakenings such as the "Me, too" movement and Black Lives Matter indicate a rising social consciousness that understands that perpetuating privilege is itself a form of complicity. In Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing, Rosanne Carlo fortifies movement against complicity as she decries current undertakings in rhetoric and composition that would discount expressivist writing as integral to the desired outcomes for writing in higher education. In particular, Carlo implores rhetoric and composition scholars to consider the ways in which the field's preoccupation with outcomes and professionalization ignore the material realties of class and race consciousness. Through a careful synthesis of theory, personal explication, and pedagogical example, Carlo offers insight into how a transformative ethos-rooted in place and the material-is central to writing that produces identification across difference.

Drawing upon cognitive writing process theory and research, this study investigates the influence of language of writing, foreign language (FL) proficiency and gender on the revision processes of 77 undergraduate students studying at an English-medium college in Oman. Their first language (L1) was Arabic and their FL was English. The participants produced two argumentative authentic texts, one in L1 and one in FL. Their proficiency in English was assessed using the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Participants’ revisions were recorded and analysed, according to the measures amount, location and type, via keystroke logging. The results showed that the vast majority of revisions in both languages were immediate, i.e. at the point of inscription, and focused on language rather than content. In addition, there was consistent evidence that participants made more revisions in the FL than they did in L1. For ‘total amount of revision’ and ‘immediate revisions’, there was a consistent interaction between gender and FL proficiency. The pattern of the interaction indicated two conflicting tendencies: (a) female participants appeared in general to be more motivated to make revisions in both languages than males, and (b) the less proficient they were in FL the more revisions they made. By contrast, the number of revisions made by the male participants did not depend on their FL proficiency. For ‘distant’, i.e. already written text, and ‘end’, i.e. after producing the first draft, revisions the amount of revision depended solely on the language of writing and gender. Furthermore, the results revealed that when writing in the FL, students with greater FL proficiency attended to content revision more than language revision. Findings are discussed in light of process-oriented writing research and implications for writing research and teaching are suggested.

In Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, Casey Boyle—or rather, the habitual practice referred to as Casey Boyle—participates in rhetorical studies' recurring concern with relations between humanism and posthumanism. Boyle's posthumanist project crafts another space within the field to think about what rhetoric is, what it does, and what it may become. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice recalls the purpose of rhetorical education in the Isocrates and Quintilian traditions—“to become a certain kind of person” (Fleming 1998, 179), but with a posthuman return: Whereas classical rhetorical education aimed at ethically stable character formation—the humanist subject—Boyle's posthuman practice enacts character as in-formation, a process of individuation whereby individual bodies achieve stability, but only for so long—a metastability, which is not an essence, but a series of sense-abilities. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice expands the many ways (euporia) of doing rhetoric, including the many ways things become different without becoming something separate as well as the many ways of being human without becoming something other than human.The book is organized into three parts: “Preface to Practice,” “Theorizing Rhetorical Practice,” and “Practicing Rhetorical Theory.” In part 1's “Questions Concerning the Practice of Rhetoric,” Boyle introduces readers to the work of Gilbert Simondon. Specifically, Boyle brings Simondon's philosophy of information and media-techno-aesthetics into rhetorical studies and demonstrates how his philosophical concepts, such as individuation, transindividuation, transduction, and metastability, may be incorporated into the body of rhetoric. For example, Boyle argues that information—as material processes—informs bodies so that bodies are always already in-formation, or rather, resolving and dissolving individuations. This incorporation activates new rhetorical capacities by which rhetorical exercises, such as the enthymeme, dissoi logoi, topoi, and copia, may be practiced differently, which, in turn, activates new rhetorical bodies, which, in turn, may exercise and be exercised differently.Part 2 begins with “Rhetorical Ecologies of Posthuman Practice.” Three seemingly disparate analogies open up the practice of practice: learning to use the telegraph, the literary style of Deleuze and Guattari, and the development of technical objects. What each practice shares is its self-erasure. Practice for Boyle is not self-preservation or self-improvement because the repetition of practice enacts changing conditions of its existence. Repetition with difference is what Boyle means by posthuman practice: “ongoing, serial encounters within ecologies” (34). Boyle compares practice to Karen Barad's quantum diffraction, accenting the continual entanglement of matter. Posthuman practice does not reflect the same thing over and over again. Instead, it diffracts, creating “new versions of what might otherwise be seen as the same” (34). For example, reflecting on how one wrote an essay does not reflect the writing of that essay; rather, the reflection essay diffracts the writing of that essay. The writer does not reflect; reflection in-forms the writer. According to Boyle, the reflection on writing does not grant privileged access to interiority, decision making, and rationality. Instead, it is another exercise that may be no more or less insightful than any other exercise. Reflective practices, however, have been a dominant pedagogical tool in the field of composition studies. Thus, the chapter offers a concise history of how this reflective practice emerged in skill development literature on metacognition, demonstrating the shortcomings of this humanist orientation. It then surveys posthuman theories both broadly and within the field of rhetoric to emphasize practice as something other than conscious, intentional activity—what he calls serial: “A series is composed of items that are continuous with but also distinct from one another without being separate” (53). Throughout, Boyle amplifies this point: all practices, including writing and reflection in-formation, create novel possibilities in bodies and environments, and for him, this is a posthuman ethic.Chapter 2, “Posthuman Practice and/as Information,” refines the seriality of posthuman practice as a process of information. Boyle incorporates Simondon's “transductive version of information” to show how information is converted across multiple media in a process that in-forms bodies rather than transmitted between preexisting individual subjects (63). Put differently, information is a dynamic structuring process in which bodies “take form” and by which bodies only ever achieve “metastability” (78). Thus, rhetoric as a posthuman practice undertakes “how to initiate structuring movements across the material and semiotic, digital and analog, theoretical and practical, human and nonhuman” (81) as well as “mind and body, rational and sensuous” (88). In this account, rhetoric is an ethic of becoming a particular kind of body in relation, which Boyle illustrates by reorienting the enthymeme. Rather than defining an enthymeme by what it lacks in comparison to the syllogism, the “missing premise,” he argues, circulates among a collective body within an ecology of practice—an ethic of commonplaces. An enthymeme is a structuring process that “activates the already present connective tissues of a community in ways that the purely rational premises of the syllogism does not/cannot” (84). In this way, the enthymeme exercises the euporia (multiple ways) of rhetoric in which the potential for further invention resides.In part 3, “Practicing Rhetorical Theory,” Boyle develops rhetoric and/as posthuman practice through diffractive elaborations of identity, place, and amplification. In chapter 3, “Informing Metastable Orientations,” Boyle reincorporates the rhetorical practice of dissoi logoi and Richard Lanham's “bi-stable oscillation.” Rather than understanding dissoi logoi as limited to “two-fold arguments” and bi-stable oscillation as limited to two subject positions of a singular identity, Boyle argues for a “metastable orientation” that understands identity as the production of “differing stabilities” (23). In this reorientation, dissoi logoi is a way in which individuals become rhetorical to generate a manifold of arguments, not simply two-fold arguments. Similarly, Lanham's bi-stable oscillation expands to metastable orientations that multiply the many subject positions and sense-abilities of bodies. Together, dissoi logoi and metastable orientations exercise bodies as temporary resolutions of disparate tensions. Rather than a Burkean persuasion attempting to achieve identification, a posthuman rhetorical practice follows the transduction of information “to increase, intensify, and inform what [bodies] can do” (121).Where chapter 3 is concerned with the metastability of identity, chapter 4, “Orienting to Topological Engagement,” hunts for the metastability of places. Rather than static places holding preconceived arguments based on fixed repetition, topoi, in Boyle's telling, are “rhythm machines” (126) producing “transversal mediations” (127) and “unique sensibilities” (23). He performs a “strange archaeology” (130) of topoi, digging into the rhetorical history of topoi to argue that a “topos is always a practice of becoming informed and further informing a place” (146). To demonstrate this sense of topos, Boyle uses topology, which is the mathematical study of “how an object remembers its place while undergoing change” (142). Topoi, experienced topologically, are “immanent mediations between an exterior and interior”—foldings and stretchings of place to produce new rhythms (144). Boyle offers the practice of urban exploration to illustrate topoi as topological, noting how the urban explorer appears as both theorist and practitioner, inside and outside the city. Urban explorers enact and are enacted by places as “varying rhythms of difference and repetition” (155). Put differently, topos is both centripetal—a place that gathers—and centrifugal—a place that disperses, or “runs in all directions” (155).The topological tension between gathering and dispersal is complicated further in chapter 5, “Engaging Nomadic Activity,” in which Boyle asks how we might respond to the seemingly always-on, always-there demands of infrastructural connectivity. As with topoi, we are never simply inside or outside; we are never simply online or offline. Rather, we are always mediated by infrastructural networks; we are bodies in-formation as transindividuals. Bringing together Cynthia Haynes's and Vilém Flusser's versions of homelessness, Rosi Braidotti's nomadism, and Adrian McKenzie's wirelessness, Boyle suggests that a feeling of rootlessness, induced by the connectivity of infrastructural networks, is a “pervasive condition of contemporary life” (169). Nevertheless, he advances the possibility of finding rootedness amid rootlessness by amplifying copia as a posthuman practice: both as “an affirmative practice that exercises one's capacity to resolve a singular problem in multiple ways” and as “an ongoing transindividual practice” that exercises one's capacity to resolve the singular problem of contemporary life—a feeling of homelessness—in multiple ways (24). Copia as transindividual practice cultivates capacities for variability: the transindividual is able to work with apparent scarcity to generate abundance, to multiply connections “while also retaining some sense of prior relations” (184), thus generating euporia by proposing this one and this one and this one—each a possible path to follow.The coda, titled “Activating Sense and Sense-abilities,” picks up the question of “this one” by asking “which one?” Boyle argues that rhetoric as a posthuman practice is informed by an ethic of “which one?” rather than “what is?” Whereas the latter grasps after essence, the former proposes possibilities: the transductive euporia of enthymemes, the manifoldness of metastabilities, the rhythmic repetition and difference of topoi, and the itinerant rootedness of transindividuality. Rather than conscious and reflective disputation, rhetoric and/as posthuman practice in-forms bodily dispositions.Throughout, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice continuously exercises rhetoric's body, showing how it may become different while remaining familiar—and how rhetorical scholars might bring a posthumanist sensibility to rhetoric's traditional emphasis on the humanist subject as the body of rhetoric. With his posthuman reorientation, Boyle demonstrates that there is no unmediated exercise of, or access to, our mediated bodies—nor to the body of rhetoric. Importantly, Boyle practices his posthuman sensibility by writing in a style that enacts his argument: layering in examples, making analogical movements, and repeating with variation what he has already written. The reader begins to sense what he is arguing. The style, as posthuman practice, exercises the reader's capacities for following a line of argument among serial encounters.Some argumentative movements, however, may be too linear. For example, Boyle's history of the emergence of reflection within composition studies is written as a reflection of the field, in a linear structure. No winks. No recursion. He moves easily from traditional rhetoric to current-traditional rhetoric to current-critical rhetoric, “outlining the humanist frame … sketching the discipline's turn to reflective practice” (34). However, in presenting the history as a reflection of the discipline's past, Boyle is able to capture more rhetorical force for his argument, that “the practice of practicing reflection creates and sustains an untenable humanist orientation” (48). The reader must then build a relationship between what appears to be a reflective history and Boyle's point about seriality: serial practice “is a part of, but also apart from, any definite linear logic” (53). A similar issue of perspective may arise when considering the different histories of scholars in composition studies and those in communication studies.Boyle's history of “current-critical rhetoric” in composition studies may give pause to communication scholars because it presents a different disciplinary understanding of “critical rhetoric” and the practice of reflection. Critical rhetoric of communication studies in the 1980s and 1990s offered formative expressions of a posthumanist orientation to rhetoric, including post-Marxist-materialist and historical-archival approaches. Critical rhetoric folded into, with, and away from posthumanist orientations of scholarship that decentered human consciousness and amplified complexity in dynamic ways.Although Boyle's discussion of current-critical rhetoric in composition studies does not discuss critical theory, comparing a critical theory understanding of practice alongside his posthuman conception could offer interesting discussions for a graduate course. Raymie McKerrow's critical practice, for example, could spark interesting conversations regarding what each concept of practice affords rhetorical scholars and to what extent a critical posthuman notion of practice, from the critical theory tradition, could be developed (1989). Indeed, a critical practice—praxis and politics—may be required to ensure that rhetoric scholars have skin in the game. For example, Boyle includes the practice of urban exploration without exploring the privileges of urban explorers' bodies, who “discover” the “hidden” and “ruined” infrastructures of cities and who often “conquer” these places through a photographic style that evokes the humanist subject. Similarly, the explication of homelessness as the condition of contemporary life feels unsatisfying when juxtaposed with the exposures of bodies experiencing homelessness in the streets. What ought we do about the actually existing homelessness that prompts the copious transindividuality of chapter 5? If we are to ask “which one?,” we ought to ask “which bodies” are made to endure and which are allowed to perish, again and again. This observation is less a criticism and more a prompt for further reflection, or rather asking again what rhetoric scholars can do.That said, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice is not a work of critical theory or critical rhetoric or a critique of the posthuman condition. Instead, it is an affirmative project, following the philosophical style of Simondon, and, as such, it is interested in challenging us to transform what a rhetorical education can and should do, including the many ways bodies may live together by transforming relationships to build a more generous world.

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students’ development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, Reflection ; White). One assumption about the value of reflection has been that skill in reflective writing also has a positive connection with lower-order writing skills, such as sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. However, evidence to confirm this assumption has been limited to small qualitative studies or deferred to future longitudinal research (Downs and Wardle). In the mixed methods assessment study presented here, we first investigated this assumption empirically by measuring the relationship between evaluative skills embedded in the genre of reflective writing and lower-order writing skills that follow sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. We found a high-positive correlation between reflection and writing assessment scores. We then used qualitative methods to describe key features of higher- and lower-scored reflective essays.

The recent call for replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) research of writing center effectiveness motivated this study. In writing centers, the primary objective is to improve writers through one-to-one conversations. Improvement in writers, defined here in terms of rhetorical awareness, has proven difficult to measure. In this article, the authors describe how they developed a scale to measure rhetorical awareness, specifically purpose, genre, and audience awareness. Using both discourse and content analyses, they applied the scale to student responses on reflection forms collected over two semesters at an HBCU to see if rhetorical awareness might be observable and measurable. Although the responses of students who visited the center more than once within six months did not show changes in their rhetorical awareness, as the authors had hoped, the results seem to reveal more about the social context than individual students, suggesting that current-traditional pedagogy persists. Aggregating data with this methodology may open new lines of inquiry for researchers of writing and allow them to track trends in discourse on writing.

This article explores the scope , foundation , and application of autoethnography in first-year composition and critical thinking classrooms. I broaden autoethnography’s scope from Mary Louise Pratt’s focus on colonial power dynamics to engage rhetoric, discourse, ideology, and materiality at large. I argue that indexing this broader conceptual scope to place-based education produces four key pedagogical effects : to increase students’ awareness of assumptions and practices, their engagement with learning, their opportunities to encounter difference, and their capacity to effect change. Place-based autoethnography, in turn, spatializes writing theory by attending to student geographies. Two assignments—the “autoethnography” and “cultural artifact”—redevelop writing as a space between chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order). I suggest that writing functions as a way to take up space and endow it with place, or value. Mapping the effects and affects of cultural artifacts from their lives, students chart the meaningfulness of objects and discourses in their socialization, leading to the aforementioned pedagogical effects. Consequently, place-based autoethnography is uniquely situated to engage students ( and teachers) with their lifeworlds.

In this interview Dr. Bruce Ballenger and I discuss his career, his many textbooks on writing, his recent collaboration on an extensive study of the revision processes of advanced writers, and the challenges of balancing a career with a foot in multiple academic fields (i.e. composition and rhetoric and creative writing). Dr. Ballenger retired from teaching at Boise State University in the spring of 2018.

Background: Employing natural language processing and latent semantic analysis, the current work was completed as a constituent part of a larger research project for designing and launching artificial intelligence in the form of deep artificial neural networks. The models were evaluated on a proprietary corpus retrieved from a data warehouse, where it was extracted from MyReviewers, a sophisticated web application purposed for peer review in written communication, which was actively used in several higher education institutions. The corpus of laboratory reports in STEM annotated by instructors and students was used to train the models. Under the Common Rule, research ethics were ensured by protecting the privacy of subjects and maintaining the confidentiality of data, which mandated corpus de-identification.Literature Review: De-identification and pseudonymization of textual data remains an actively studied research question for several decades. Its importance is stipulated by numerous laws and regulations in the United States and internationally with HIPAA Privacy Rule and FERPA.Research Question: Text de-identification requires a significant amount of manual post-processing for eliminating faculty and student names.  This work investigated automated and semi-automated methods for de-identifying student and faculty entities while preserving author names in cited sources and reference lists. It was hypothesized that a natural language processing toolkit and an artificial neural network model with named entity recognition capabilities would facilitate text processing and reduce the amount of manual labor required for post-processing after matching essays to a list of users’ names. The suggested techniques were applied with supplied pre-trained models without additional tagging and training. The goal of the study was to evaluate three approaches and find the most efficient one among those using a users’ list, a named entity recognition toolkit, and an artificial neural network.Research Methodology: The current work studied de-identification of STEM laboratory reports and evaluated the performance of the three techniques: brute forth search with a user lists, named entity recognition with the OpenNLP machine learning toolkit, and NeuroNER, an artificial neural network for named entity recognition built on the TensorFlow platform. The complexity of the given task was determined by the dilemma, where names belonging to students, instructors, or teaching assistants must be removed, while the rest of the names (e.g., authors of referenced papers) must be preserved.Results: The evaluation of the three selected methods demonstrated that automating de-identification of STEM lab reports is not possible in the setting, when named entity recognition methods are employed with pre-trained models. The highest results were achieved by the users’ list technique with 0.79 precision, 0.75 recall, and 0.77 F1 measure, which significantly outweighed OpenNLP with 0.06 precision, 0.14 recall, and 0.09 F1, and NeuroNER with 0.14 precision, 0.56 recall, and 0.23 F1.Discussion: Low performance of OpenNLP and NeuroNER toolkits was explained by the complexity of the task and unattainability of customized models due to imposed time constraints. An approach for masking possible de-identification errors is suggested.Conclusion: Unlike multiple cases described in the related work, de-identification of laboratory reports in STEM remained a non-trivial labor-intensive task. Applied out of the box, a machine learning toolkit and an artificial neural network technique did not enhance performance of the brute forth approach based on user list matching.Directions for Future Research: Customized tagging and training on the STEM corpus were presumed to advance outcomes of machine learning and predominantly artificial intelligence methods. Application of other natural language toolkits may lead to deducing a more effective solution.

Multimajor professional writing courses are becoming extremely common in English departments, which presents specific challenges for curricular design because of the diversity of the majors and professional goals of students. This article describes the theoretical, programmatic, and curricular details of a multimajor professional writing course. We argue that the design of a course that places a central focus on writing theory and writing knowledge can encourage learning transfer. Such an approach helps to overcome the challenges of a multimajor course by allowing the study of a common subject among students hoping to enter a number of different professions after college. Our design leans heavily on concrete knowledge domains—genre knowledge, social knowledge, procedural knowledge—and their application to specific disciplinary or professional contexts. The article’s discussion of course assignments and contexts demonstrates how these domains are applied and provides detailed information on our experiences teaching the course.

In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing , fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray’s legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting and fails to do justice to Murray’s broader contributions to the field’s disciplinary ethos.

This case study reports on the experiences of designing and assessing the effectiveness of a faculty development program on writing across the curriculum (WAC). The report focuses on the question: What are the key components of an effective faculty development program to integrate WAC into engineering and scientific courses taught by faculty in those disciplines? Situating the case: Two main models of WAC implementation exist: direct instruction, which uses writing specialists to deliver instruction to engineering and science students, and the department-centered model, which instructs faculty in engineering and scientific disciplines to teach writing as part of technical courses. How the case was studied: A report of the experiences of the authors and the feedback from the participants. About the case: The workshop was aimed at teachers in various disciplines and covered these main topics: fundamentals of writing theory and pedagogy, writing assignment design and assessment, and situating writing assignments in courses across the disciplinary curriculum. It took place over 10 weeks during a 15-week semester and included large- and small-group meetings, consultations with the members of the university WAC program, and peer review of writing assignment drafts. Conclusions, limitations, and suggestions for future research: Key challenges in developing the workshop included designing ways to bridge the conceptual gap between the participants' and WAC instructors' understanding of the role of writing in disciplinary courses, limited time available to the participants, and scheduling challenges. The workshop was given seven times. Most of the faculty participants (90%) generally found it to be very effective or effective. Studies of workshops with larger populations of trainees are suggested.

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that early approach to writing and writers.

To investigate a diverse sample of adolescent writers’ experiences with disciplinary writing, this study compared 66 adolescents’ perceptions of writing through an analysis of interviews as part of a national study. Grounded in a social constructivist framework that stresses the role of agency in the development of writing competence, the study aims to examine factors – including language background and prior writing experiences – that are associated with adolescents’ perceptions of their writing development. The study asked: How do L1 and L2 adolescents’ perceptions of writing development compare? To what extent, if at all, is agency implicated in patterns of variation? Results of the comparative analysis suggest that varying affordances and constraints, and combinations of these, relate to adolescents’ expressed agency toward writing. Affordances include opportunities to select personally relevant subjects and to develop writing through feedback and revision processes; constraints include the use of highly structured writing scaffolds, formulas, and tightly constrained topics. Implications for differentiated scaffolding of writing instruction that might affectively and cognitively engage diverse adolescent learners are discussed.

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 publication of the three works reviewed here relating to creative writing theory and pedagogy mark a point of critical mass for the field of creative writing studies that has been building for decades. This review looks at those books and discusses how they help point the way forward for the discipline.

This article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

This bold and triumphant collection argues from page one until the end that so-called “expressivist” theories and practices have always been “critical,” that they do not stand in direct opposition ...

This article analyzes the rhetoric of public attitudes toward composition, as represented in Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” blog in the New York Times and in comments posted by his readers. Fish denounces the field of composition as highly politicized and anti-academic and advocates instead a belletristic, current-traditional approach. The dialogue between Fish and his audience exemplifies the web of definitions and logical fallacies by which current-traditionalism and belletristic English frame public attitudes. To the extent that composition’s “public turn” involves engaging public opinion, compositionists must anticipate this framing or else find their engagements ineffective, even self-defeating.

Through an examination of archival texts produced at sites of suppressed local rhetorics, this essay situates Oklahoma as a location of writing at the intersection of ecocomposition theory, critical regionalism, and composition pedagogy to establish the need for using local texts and transrhetorical analysis in writing classrooms.

Although current research and professional development on teaching of argumentative writing focus on “best practices,” we offer the construct of argumentative epistemologies to consider how English language arts teachers approach teaching and how they understand their students’ capacity for and interest in argumentation. Drawing on historical emphases in writing theory, we describe and illustrate three argumentative epistemologies: structural, ideational, and social practice. In an observational study of 31 high school English language arts classrooms, teachers’ enacted writing instruction foregrounded either formal elements of students’ arguments, the ideas and content of students’ arguments, or consideration of the complexity and variability of social contexts within which students wrote arguments. Case study analysis of three teachers illustrates the three argumentative epistemologies, how these epistemologies were socially constructed during instructional conversations, and how they were made visible through language use in and about classroom literacy events. These argumentative epistemologies have significance for teacher education, school writing research, and professional development, furthering our understanding of how and why teachers choose to adopt particular approaches to argumentative writing.

James Berlin’s pedagogy employs generalized heuristics grounded in human agency and social-epistemic critique to enable political awareness. By contrast, actor-network theory (ANT) does not explain the composition of reality through pre-fixed heuristics but instead seeks to describe the unique composition of political objects through symmetrical accounts of human and nonhuman agency. ANT-as-pedagogy can be productively applied in the classroom to realize students’ capacities as moralists who comprehend the rhetorical difference between explanation (Berlin) and description (ANT) with regard to their political agencies as writers.

This article examines the limitations of social constructionist theory that conflates collaboration with “conversation,” an idea that not only informs how many writing scholars understand the concept of collaboration itself, but one that also allows writing theorists to argue that all writing is inherently collaborative. After briefly tracing the history of this social turn collaboration theory, the article offers an object-oriented definition of collaboration to initiate a rhetorical framework for understanding what collaborators actually do with their discourse, especially when they compose texts. Following a discussion of Donald Davidson’s concept of triangulation and its relevance for understanding the discursive work of collaboration, the article concludes with a consideration of how this revised approach to collaborative composition reflects the goals of postprocess theory, including the habits of mind discussed in the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing.

This article reconstructs a writing theory on which Fred Newton Scott and John Dewey collaborated in the 1890s. Drawing on technology theorists’ discussions of “technological determinism,” this article critiques the deterministic aspects of Scott’s and Dewey’s thinking, and it suggests that their errors can illuminate determinism’s dangers for contemporary writing theory. The article also discusses some questions that Scott’s and Dewey’s theory raise for study of their later ideas.

In this essay, Branstad discusses how he used service-learning informed by the scholarship on transfer to reimagine current-traditional assumptions common in composition and to create rhetorically-oriented pathways for student success. The evidence of student learning demonstrates the value of implementing service-learning techniques informed by the theory on transfer within the basic writing classroom.

Tiffany Rousculp's Rhetoric of Respect: Recogniz ing Change at a Community Writing Center (2014) is an important book for writing center studies.Not only does Rousculp draw our attention to widely-growing though seldom-recognized community writing centers, but she also helps us see the positioning involved in making these centers sites of social change.This positioning she calls a "rhetoric of respect," or "a different type of relationship, one that is grounded in perception of worth, in esteem for another-as well as for the self" (pp.24-25).Using ecocomposition theory to recognize change, Rousculp contributes to a deeper understanding of micro-changes that emerge and are sustained over time through conditions of flexibility, self-awareness, uncertainty, failure, collaboration, and relationship.These conditions characterize many campus and community writing centers and can be cultivated to greater degrees .when we recognize their purposeful impact for our everyday, local work.Through metaphors of ecocompositionorganism, environment, relationship, place, web-Rousculp identifies and shows the importance of attending to moments of transformation for

Composition theory and pedagogy have variously understood writing as a noun or as a verb, a product or a process. This paper proposes a shift to theorizing writing as a gerund (writing g. ) and argues that this approach opens a space for more productive composition theory. A gerund orientation focuses attention on the virtual and affective qualities of the writing experience—what writing does to and with a writer. The study of writing g., or what this paper calls composition experience scholarship , frees composition scholarship from a pedagogic imperative while at the same time producing theory that has practical application.

Abstract This essay traces the origins of the five-paragraph essay to a form of theme-writing that has deep roots in English education and classical rhetoric, long before the current-traditional period that has been commonly assumed to be the origin. The five-paragraph essay's history and evolution can inform our understanding of its role in writing instruction and why it has persisted for so long. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Janice Lauer Rice for their helpful recommendations. I am also indebted to Mara Holt for her help and encouragement, as well as Carol Mattingly, Amanda Hayes, Andrea Venn, Bryan Lutz, Matt Vetter, and Emily Nunes. 2Part I was published in 1851. 3Walker's textbook was first published in the United States in 1808. 4Walker did not create the term theme or the rules for writing them. While themes were used for writing in Latin, students probably also composed themes in English (the vulgar tongue) long before Walker. 5Many compositionists, seeing some classical roots to the five-paragraph essay, might assume that Aristotle's Rhetoric may have been an influence on the formation of the five-paragraph essay, perhaps citing the five canons of rhetoric (which he does not explicitly outline) and his treatment of argumentation and arrangement. However, there is no evidence that indicates that Aristotle's Rhetoric had any direct influence on the five-paragraph essay's formation.

This article develops a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the co-construction of a written text by a teacher and student from a Vygotskian perspective. Drawing on cultural-historical and sociocultural theories of writing and Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), this case study of a student and teacher interaction in a UK secondary school examines the social mediation of collaborative activity in the negotiation of meaning.While expressivist process theories of writing focus on the development of the authentic voice of the writer, this article contends that the development of a student’s writing abilities requires active intervention by a teacher within a constructed zone of development. Writing is viewed as a situated activity system that involves a dialectical tension between thought and the act of composition.Finally, the article will argue that the recursive and complex nature of writing development is an integral tool in the learner’s own agency in creating a social environment for development.

Ecological inquiry (EI) in research of academic and workplace writing explores interactions between individuals and environments as these entities interpenetrate. This article provides a brief history from the past 3 decades of developments in writing theory. It then outlines the key tenets of EI, highlights how EI is compatible with other models, and presents new and interesting possibilities afforded by this type of inquiry.

The college writing center… . It is a place of political confrontation, where cultural issues involving dialect and values are probed, contested, and negotiated.

In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions —was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.

In this article, two case studies of Internet-based sister classes designed to foster second language learning are described with a focus on student writing. Writing is examined within the context of social constructivist and transformative orientations to pedagogy. In the context of these pedagogical orientations, writing is initially analyzed as communication within an environment that merges writing with speaking and also promotes changes in pedagogy. These pedagogical changes enable students’ writing to become a vehicle for generating new knowledge, creation of literature, and critical examination of social realities relevant to students’ lives.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Given the diversity of types of writing instructors in US and UK tertiary education and the range of their scholarly backgrounds, the likelihood is that most instructors have not participated in research in composition theory or pedagogy, rhetoric, academic literacies, or writing studies. The four projects reported here highlight the research opportunities and capacities of this diverse group, reflecting different types and levels of teacher or practitioner inquiry that involves teachers in studying significant questions arising from their own contexts. The article offers a brief history of practitioner inquiry research in its various forms and traditions; presents the projects themselves, including their aims and framing; and offers specific recommendations for the future of this invaluable form of inquiry. Definitions of action research vary greatly. The term in its broadest sense refers to research conducted in a field setting with those actually involved in that field, often along with an ‘outsider’, into the study of questions influenced by practitioners, rather than solely by ‘experts’ (Noffke 1996: 2). At the end of the day as teachers, we are often left wondering: Are we doing enough? How do we know? These are the essential questions that occupy the hearts and minds of so many of us as we walk into our classrooms (Goswami, Lewis and Rutherford 2009: 2).Teacher research just isn’t like other forms of research, in part because there is no blueprint for how to do it (Goswami, Lewis and Rutherford 2009: 1).

What is currently known about the history of the paragraph has relied on the work of the first English and American compositionists, humanists, and philologists of the late nineteenth century. Alexander Bain and his followers defined the requirements for the English paragraph and believed it had not existed prior to the eighteenth century. Their sole focus, on humanist and historical writing, yielded a distorted, if not an incorrect history of the paragraph. This article begins to correct that view, prevalent since 1866, by examining paragraphs of practical works, such as printed how-to books of the early English Renaissance until 1700. The variety and quantity of how-to documents increased with the growth of knowledge, advent of printing, and emergence and expansion of middle-class English readers eager for books written in an accessible, non-Latinate style. When we examine paragraphs from technical books printed as early as 1490, we find paragraphs that exemplify the qualities stipulated by Bain nearly 400 years later. The existence of well defined and formulated paragraphs throughout the English Renaissance and the seventeenth century in a wide variety of technical book—works ignored by literary scholars pursuing the history of English—suggests that the paragraph is clearly indigenous to the English composition, much more so than modern composition theory has acknowledged. This article explores example paragraphs of these first English printed technical works and begins to expand the history of the English paragraph. Further studies of later Middle English paragraphs in incunabula of practical, liturgical, and historical works will likely show the indigenous nature of the paragraph to English composition and allow scholars to see how the formation of the paragraph helped English writers over 500–700 years ago create complete texts.

In this article, we describe an approach to teaching first-year composition that is built on a qualitative design for undergraduate research and writing. As writing instructors at a state teaching college, we see the need to move our students beyond the boundaries of expressivism, personal narrative, and argument and into the murkier, messier, and more critical territory of considering subjectivities, interpreting cultural texts and contexts, and, ultimately, coming to see the dynamic and dialogic nature of rhetorical situations and knowledge production. We have discovered that asking undergraduates to do field work as a way to enter the academic conversation allows them to shift from high school writing to college-level writing. Inviting them to delve into a primary research project of their own design grants them permission to construct their ownership, authority, and intellectual engagement of ideas. Case studies of the experiences of five student research writers illustrate the process through which, as ethnographers, students become actors in their own learning process.

Postprocess theory questions the usefulness of pedagogical principles. This article proposes a casuistic pedagogy, which offers a stance rather than a method. Casuistry, the art of case-based reasoning, reframes pedagogy as a series of occasions rather than a system of thought, thus providing grounds for a postprocess pedagogy.