In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are shared in this article.

Bronislaw Malinowski introduces influential ideas of context to rhetoric when he rejects texts and etymology to argue that meaning is determined by tangible, embodied circumstances. I turn to ancient texts and Kenneth Burke's reading of Malinowski to argue that we order—and are ordered by—rhetorical contexts that are composed of hierarchical designs, oppositional ideas, and material bodies.