This article reflects on where and how empirical research, focusing particularly on college/adult writing and literate practice, has appeared over the last century in the complete runs of English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Recounting our story of the empirical scholarship published in NCTE’s journals, we first appraise what has been meant by empirical research over the century and clarify how we define it for this article. We then frame that definition by considering how alternative discourse has regularly offered a significant counterpoint to that research. We next turn to the central theme of our reflections, the expanding scene of writing that has developed across the century. Finally, we conclude by considering emergent interests in global scholarship on writing and literate practice.

Tracy Santa and Harvey Wiener have each written a commentary on Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen J. Lunsford’s article Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study, which appeared in the June 2008 issue of CCC.

This essay reports on a study of first-year student writing. Based on a stratified national sample, the study attempts to replicate research conducted twenty-two years ago and to chart the changes that have taken place in student writing since then. The findings suggest that papers are longer, employ different genres, and contain new error patterns.

Although Toulmin models of argumentation are pervasive in composition textbooks, research on the model's use in writing classrooms has been scarce'typically limited to evaluating how students' essays align with the model's elements (claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing) construed as objective standards. That approach discounts Toulmin's emphasis on context. In contrast, this study of a major university's summer composition program for high school students employs Wenger's notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin's notion of response to trace how classroom contexts mediate students' and teachers' understandings of a Toulmin model. The article presents a case study of a controversy that emerged when participants attempted to identify the main claim in one student's essay. The controversy arose, the analysis suggests, as participants positioned competing tacit and explicit representations of claims with/against other rhetorical terms (for example, thesis), variously interpreted the assigned tasks, and negotiated over tasks and texts.