The natural inclination of writers is toward mindlessness or inattention to the present moment despite the benefits understanding the present can bring to writing. Although temporal consciousness is apparent in notions of writing as a process or of writing as situated in a rhetorical context, these ideas largely overlook the present. Buddhist Mindfulness can help with the development of kairotic or present-moment specific practice by including impermanence in the rhetorical context, by emphasizing real time in composing, and by providing access to intrapersonal rhetoric. Increased understanding of the temporal factors of writing calls for an Eastern-mind progymnasmata in rhetorical praxis.

This article examines text-based locations (textrooms) as a third strand of the extracurriculum of composition. Through a diachronic analysis, I examine the nineteenth-century periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book and three twenty-first-century blogs as coauthored classrooms or powerful sites of women’s informal writing education.

The outsider ethos established by Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Donald Murray in their early books is a driving force behind process pedagogy. Close textual analysis of these theorists can help writing instructors better understand the role of ethos in process pedagogy and in their own teaching.

In 1854 Eliza Leslie—an author well known for her recipes, adolescent literature, and short fiction—slipped in advice to fellow women on how to write and publish under the cover of an etiquette manual. Between pages devoted to table settings, church decorum, and shopping, Leslie upheld women's right to write during a time of significant cultural ambivalence about female authorship. Leslie used the genre of an etiquette book to perform a complicated rhetorical act that simultaneously normalized, validated, and informed mid-nineteenth-century women writers at a time in which women's desire to write faced significant challenges.

This historical exploration tracks changes in rules concerning figurative language in nineteenth-century composition-rhetoric textbooks. The century’s lessening of millennium-long restriction of the poetic allowed not only creative writing into academia but composition as well, as composition at its beginning was intertwined with creative writing. In order to advance as a discipline, creative writing needs to investigate its history in addition to developing its theory and practice. Understanding the initial but largely overlooked union of creative writing and composition can help reconfigure English studies.