AbstractThis article examines the value undergraduate research adds to writing centers in their role as anchor institutions within English and across college and university campuses. It focuses on a pilot project conducted by a team of mentored peer tutors who researched the accessibility of writing at Marquette University. Their successes and failures show how, beyond research findings, undergraduate research experience can be consequential for practitioners and their communities.

When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal cohort study that examined students’ writing, writing development, and attitudes toward writing throughout their college years and one year beyond. Drawing in particular from interview data, we trace relationships between students’ complex and creative negotiations with intellectual property and shaping tensions within the academy, arguing for renewed pedagogical approaches that affirm students’ writerly agency as consumers and producers of intellectual property.

This essay reports on the first two years of the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal study aimed at describing as accurately as possible all the kinds of writing students perform during their college years. Based on an early finding about the importance students attach to their out-of-class or self-sponsored writing and subsequent interviews with study participants, we argue that student writing is increasingly linked to theories and practices of performance. To illustrate the complex relationships between early college writing and performance, we explore the work of two study participants who are also coauthors of this essay.