On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

This essay traces a branch of translingualism in US college composition to the era of open admissions, when the emergence of basic writing precipitated a new kind of reading on the part of composition teachers and a new understanding of what error or language differences might mean. It locates one of the antecedents of a translingual approach in the close reading derived from literary studies that developed out of the experience of basic writing, from Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations to David Bartholomae’s “The Study of Error” to the present-day work of Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner.

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

The 1966 Dartmouth conference has long been regarded as a landmark in the history of American college composition. Meriting new attention, however, is the role it played in affirming the notion of “the native speaker,” a concept important to the postwar Anglo-American language alliance behind the meeting.

Rhetoric and composition, as a new academic field

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

Tracing the effects of the “laissez-faire” postcolonial politics of language in the United States, which in fact enabled English to become the dominant language through cultural rather than institutional means, the essay then suggests how the linguistic memory that emerges from decolonization and nation building continues, often in unsuspected ways, to influence the language policy of the modern U.S. university and U.S. college composition. The author argues for a national language policy that moves beyond the notion of language as a right, with its lingering assumptions of English monolingualism as an ultimate goal, and instead fosters a linguistic culture where being multilingual is both normal and desirable.

Abstract Rhetorical criticism has generally considered the public memorial speech as a moment of re‐establishing societal equilibrium and unity after the disruption of death. In the case of the Worcester Firefighters Memorial Service in 1999, however, the unifying impulses of the speakers both create a public forum for the memorial service and prevent it from cohering. While the eulogists draw on ceremonial conventions of epideictic rhetoric, the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric blurs as the memorial speeches become the occasion of differing, divided, and uncertain claims about how the public is constituted and who has grounds to memorialize the dead. Accordingly, we argue that neither unity nor disunity has rhetorical priority, placing the burden instead on rhetorical analysis to account for the complex relations between unity and disunity.

Rhetoric and Composition As Intellectual Work, edited by Gary A. Olson, reviewed by Joseph Harris; The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education, by Mary Soliday, reviewed by Bruce Horner; The Testing Trap, by George Hillocks, Jr., reviewed by Joan A. Mullin; An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa, by Philippe-Joseph Salazar, reviewed by John Trimbur; Writing and Revising the Disciplines, by Jonathan Monroe, reviewed by Carl G. Herndl.

In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.

Composition has neglected the circulation of writing by figuring classroom life as a middle-class family drama. Cultural studies approaches to teaching writing have sought, with mixed success, to transcend this domestic space. I draw on Marx’s Grundrisse for a conceptual model of how circulation materializes contradictory social relations and how the contradictions between exchange value and use value might be taken up in writing classrooms to expand public forums and popular participation in civic life.

myth was well established in our minds and embedded in our job descriptions. Then, with typical irony, we punched our own ticket by using hard won, added on research to validate our service role. Let me put it another (only slightly exaggerated) way: as Writing Center Director my priorities are teaching, service, service, service, and then research—on our service. One step to develop the potential for systematic research in writing centers, as distinct from occasional research about writing centers, is to attempt to renegotiate the writing center statement of purpose, rewrite its myth of origins, so that research is a featured character, not a walk-on part. That might make for an interesting situation. It might mean, for instance, that research output, not the number of students served, would be the primary justification for writing center viability. It might mean that writing center directors would carry research appointments, and research budgets to go along with them, and job descriptions that have high expectations for publication in exchange for job security and promotion. It might mean that writing center training and procedures and environment would all change to meet the needs of research and publication. Is such a “renegotiation” desirable or even possible? Another way to get at this same issue is to ask, are we, the readers of The Writing Center Journal and The Writing Lab Newsletter, the research community to which we want to remain a viable contributor? Or is the research community that we seek to influence larger, more diverse, and less interested?

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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When it first appeared in 1976, this groundbreaking exploration of the influences of capitalism on the profession of English touched a nerve among educators and inspired Library Journal to declare, This book should be read by all thoughtful Americans. Now, 20 years later, in a substantial new introduction that recontextualizes the book, Richard Ohmann addresses the critical furor over its initial publication, evaluates his own arguments in the aftermath of the Cold War, and locates the profession of English in the thick of the hotly contested culture wars. A remarkably prescient book whose claims have withstood two decades of fierce debate, English in America is widely considered to be as relevant today as ever. Wise, witty, and urbane, it has much to teach all students of English.

John Trimbur, Robert G. Wood, Ron Strickland, William H. Thelin, William J. Rouster, Toni Mester, Maxine Hairston, Responses to Maxine Hairston, "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" and Reply, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 44, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 248-256

Why write together? the authors ask. They answer that question here, in the first book to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing.Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education.The authors urge a fundamental change in our institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work. They conclude with the injunction: Today and in the twenty-first century, our data suggest, writers must be able to work together. They must, in short, be able to collaborate.

sharply and clearly than I had been able the pedagogical problem I want to explore here. He or she noted, with an undisguised exasperation I understood all too well, God knows, the seniors in my personal essay class still seem to want to read even the best of essays as if the essays belong to [a] 'monological regime of silence and facticity' (citing one of the phrases that appears below). This comment was

John Paul Russo. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 843 pages. Robert J. Connors, ed., Selected Essays of Edward P. J. Corbett. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. xxii + 359. W. Ross Winterowd, The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 226 pages. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xii + 557 pages. Chris Anderson, ed., Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. xxvi + 337, 1989.

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the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code