Composition studies seems relatively unified in the belief that “active,” “rhetorical,” and “conversational” modes of reading are students’ best hope for facing the challenges of college reading and writing tasks. As commonplaces, however, these descriptors mask both reading outcomes and the specific practices presumed to support them. Through an analysis of three popular composition textbooks, we disentangle and reveal some of the reading axiologies most fundamental to the field and which we contend these commonplaces gesture toward but leave vastly undertheorized. We argue that more precise explications of these distinct reading axiologies ultimately provide a contextualist framework for reading, helping students approach their reading-writing tasks with greater clarity, flexibility, and purpose.

Especially in the wake of the recent pandemic, asynchronous consulting has become increasingly central to writing center work. Yet writing center scholarship has little attended to the significant impact writer input can have on asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges. Drawing on asynchronous consultation data collected before and after our 2019 redesign of our writing center’s asynchronous system, this comparative study examines the specific effect of the writer appointment form on the nature of both writers’ requests for feedback (RFFs) and consultants’ resulting comments. Our findings suggest that differently designed appointments forms can scaffold significantly different kinds of asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges, especially visible in the different emphases writers and consultants put on issues of correctness, clarity, organization, and the writer’s rhetorical situation. We argue that, particularly in the case of asynchronous consulting—which can easily devolve to a “fix-it” model of consulting—it is important for writing center administrators to design asynchronous platforms that encourage both writers and consultants to more explicitly consider how the specific rhetorical features of a writing task can shape revising goals.

Transfer student writers, who comprise more than one-third of all college students, are simultaneously experienced writers and first-year students at their new institutions. Despite their complicated positions, these students have received very little attention from composition specialists. This article responds to the paucity of attention to transfer student writers by reporting on a multiyear study that alternated between investigations of the experiences of these students and programmatic changes designed to address their expressed needs and concerns. The guiding principle of this work, and of the advice offered to colleagues interested in supporting transfer student writers on their own campuses, is a combination of institutional and student changes or mutual adjustments.