Terms used to describe writing support workers in higher education, as well as the location of their employment have sparked a long history of debate in writing center studies but have led to only scattered empirical research. The author examines the history of this debate addressing connotations of various terms and then aims to verify actual naming practice. The present study investigates the impact such debates have had on writing center practice by assessing public web pages from 575 university writing centers to see what terms are generally employed. The study shows that “writing center” is the most popular name for the location of writing tutorial services and that “tutor” remains the most popular term. This finding suggests that “center” has won out over other terms, but the popularity of “tutor” is much less decisive. At institutions with higher enrollment, in R1 institutions, and in the case of graduate student employees, the use of the term “consultant” increases. The general prevalence of the “writing tutor” and the rise of the more recent “writing consultant” and other variants may suggest a lag between scholarly critique and writing center practice, but it could also derive from institutional context. Alternative tutor terms could be employed, but an empirical study of efficacy would be needed to move naming from the realm of lore and conjecture.

In this article, we share our experiences with the ongoing language and literacy practices and pedagogies of a bilingual, community-based writing center located in South Philadelphia's Italian Market. This writing center -one in a network of sites across Philadelphia and southern New Jersey -targeted bilingual, Latinx children from ages seven to eighteen. For the past four years, we have partnered with the center to create a translanguaging space. Here, we reflect on the experience of offering translanguaging writing workshops.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

Writing mathematical proofs is a key component of writing in the discipline in mathematics. Historically, many students have struggled in pursuing this endeavor, particularly during their early exposure to the process. To help students progress toward the goal of being able to consistently create well-written proofs, I present an incremental approach used in a course for elementary education majors who are concentrating in mathematics. This approach uses daily low-stakes writing assignments. Using this instructional technique, I found that student engagement improved and that, overall, better mathematical proofs were written. One more instructor at my institution has already adopted the same methods, and I expect more to do so.

This symposium brings together a range of scholars to consider what economic forces have driven the development of independent writing programs, and how such programs are susceptible to economic conditions and pressures, perhaps even more so than neighboring disciplines in the humanities.

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet’s JAC article (“Composition as a Management Science”), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field’s key terms in actuality undergo (and perform) a political-economic function. This exploration forms the basis for an analysis of how the knowledge domains of the field can be more clearly defined through an effort to reframe the field as “writing studies,” for the purpose of moving beyond the worn out commonplaces and labor exploitation associated with first-year composition.

This article examines Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo, the only extant Spanish-language narrative written by a slave, to illuminate Manzano’s reception of rhetoric, or rather his rejection of it. This reception is briefly situated in the context of contemporary receptions of belletristic rhetoric within the Cuban literary circle that solicited Manzano’s life story. Additionally, the article brings rhetorical terminology to what critics have observed as Manzano’s developing agency through the process of writing his narrative and selecting its content. Providing a view of rhetoric from the margins, Manzano’s narrative offers a critique of the complex relationship between oral and written discourse and the slave’s ability to be seen as truthful.

This essay invites a critique of contact zone theory and rhetoric’s origin story based on a reading of Guaman Poma’s First New Chronicle and Good Government. I read this writer’s argument for indigenous ability and reshaping of space through picture, map, and text as a multimodal effort that invites attention to classroom rhetorical power dynamics and standards.

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Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

With the personnel cutback in agricultural extension services at a time when farmers need to receive more agro-technical information than ever, the need for efficient written communication channels between extension and farmers grows. This is especially true for small farmers, like those living in Moshavim, in Israel. A representative sample of 171 farmers were interviewed. They had quite good reading habits and fewer reading problems than could be expected. Farmers also made good use of the extension publications which they received. The main problems encountered were a weak distribution system and the necessity for authors of extension pamphlets and brochures to consider more the special needs of small farmers. The findings in this study reinforce earlier data from other countries on the potential (and actual) value of written communication as an agricultural extension tool.

A conceptual framework for assessing scientific journal quality, both on intrinsic and on relative scales, is outlined. Several quantitative tools for objective estimation of relative quality are discussed, including volume use, citation analysis, quality sampling, and rejection rate analysis. The identification of factors that contribute to journal quality, and the implications for quality control, are briefly considered.

My object in the research reported here was twofold: to describe, in an exact manner, the development of structure in children's compositions; and to find out the differences in that development between the two ethnic groups which make up most of Israel's population: the Europeans, belonging to the culturally and economically privileged; and the Orientals, who are for the most part disadvantaged (Kleinberger, 1969; Adler, 1974) . There is an interesting difference of approach regarding the investigation of structure in children's speech and writing (and perhaps in other areas as well) between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in Germany and Switzerland. The Americans seem to prefer exact descriptions and comparisons; accordingly they tend to develop very detailed categories but (perhaps necessarily) restrict their research to clauses and sentences (Loban, 1963, Strickland, 1962, Evertts, 1968) . The Germans and the Swiss, on the other hand, devote much attention to the composition as a whole; but their accounts (and again, perhaps necessarily) , are of an impressionistic nature, and often rather sketchy. Exact figures are not often given; instead we get general descriptions, from which may be learned that the main direction of structural development is from total unawareness to requirements of organization normal in children aged about 4 to 7 towards ever increasing levels of orderly arrangement and advance planning during the course of elementary and secondary education (Furrer, 1948; Gausman, 1966; Hillebrand, 1965; Kupfer, 1968; Miller, 1962; Obrig, 1934; Salber, 1959; Sanner, 1964) : In my research I tried to combine these two lines of approach: the quantitative bent of the Americans, requiring precise definitions and differentiations, and the German-Swiss focus on the composition as a unified whole, to be dealt with in its totality.

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Abraham Blinderman, Catherine Q. Baskervill: A USAFI Student's Belated Testimonial, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 19, No. 5, Intergroup Relations in the Teaching of English (Dec., 1968), pp. 323-329

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