This article reports findings from an institutional ethnography of university stakeholders’ writing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the affordances of this methodology for professional and technical communication. Drawing on interview transcripts with faculty and administrators from across the university, the authors contextualize the role of writing in the iterative, collaborative, distributed writing processes by which the university transitioned from a traditional A–F grading scheme to a pass or fail option in just a few business days. They analyze these stakeholders’ experiences, discussing some effects of this accelerated timeline on policy development, writing processes, and uses of writing technologies within this new context of remote teaching and learning.

Master’s programs have been absent from writing studies’ scholarship on graduate education, primarily because they are not sites of disciplinary research. The MA, however, should be valued in writing studies for its demographic and curricular diversity, its responsiveness to local conditions, and its intra- and  interdisciplinary flexibility.

Reviewed are: Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, by Anis Bawarshi; The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, edited by Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko; and Writing Genres, by Amy J. Devitt.

Keywords in Composition Studies is the first systematic inquiry into the vocabulary of writing teachers and theorists. In brief yet heavily researched essays, contributors explore the development of and interconnections among fifty-five of the most consequential words in the field. It is with these critical terms that the contemporary field of composition has been composed, and in this sense, Keywords in Composition Studies is an introduction to the principal ideas and ideals of compositionists. Yet this book is neither dictionary nor an encyclopedia; it does not attempt to capture the established knowledge of unified discipline through its vocabulary but rather explores the multiple layers of meaning inhabiting the words writing teachers and theorists have depended and continue to depend on most. Each essay begins with the assumption that its central term is important precisely because its meaning is open, overdetermined. The purpose of each essay is to foreground range of meaning signified by its central term rather than to pinpoint a meaning. In this sense, Keywords in Composition Studies is practical model for reading the texts of an expanding and unsettled field.