This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

Like other seemingly ordinary materials (cookbooks, street art, scrapbooks, etc.) the subject of our investigation “holy cards or (in Italian) immaginette” often function as rich repositories of personal and cultural memory as well as indicators of popular literacy practices. But to relegate them to the category of ephemera, as is customary with materials of this sort, diverts attention from their significant cultural and pedagogical value.

Examining a range of visual images of executions, both legal (the executions of convicted murderers) and extralegal (the lynchings of innocent African Americans), in still photographs and in Hollywood films, the authors suggest that while such images may flatten and neutralize the popular debates and politics surrounding the issues, this is not inevitable, and that if we work at sustaining careful attention to its operations the image is neither self-evident nor doomed to obscure the political.

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In an attempt to bring composition studies into a more thoroughgoing discussion of the place of visual literacy in the writing classroom, I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition.

Review of the book Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours: Writing Program Administrators Tell Their Stories (edited by Diana George).

Diana George, John Trimbur, The "Communication Battle," or Whatever Happened to the 4th C?, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 4, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 682-698

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