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Student error analysis is an area of investigation that can shed light on how students learn. It can also serve as a pedagogical tool to increase students’ awareness of the most common types of errors to avoid. Quality of student output, however, isn’t solely determined by the number of errors students make, but also the extent to which students successfully employ certain other discourse-related strategies to improve their compositions. This paper argues that, aside from grammatical concerns, and at least from a discourse point of view, students already possess much of the knowledge they need in order to write better compositions. Both second (L2) and heritage (HL) learners of Spanish typically already possess some advanced writing skills in English, but we have observed that when attempting to write in Spanish, many of these same students will resort to more remedial means of presenting and/or expressing their ideas. In other words, unaware that so many discourse skills are transferable from English to Spanish, students will not necessarily apply the same strategies, or at least to the same degree, as they would if writing a similar essay in English. This paper, therefore, provides ten tips that students can draw on to improve both the presentation and expression of their ideas in compositions. Recommendations are divided into two categories, the first being aspects a student should always keep in mind when approaching any piece of writing, while the second are negative tendencies that are quite common, but which a student should necessarily avoid.

The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

Growing numbers of scholars in composition studies support translingual orientations in their postsecondary writing classrooms. However, translingual orientations are rarely extended to elementary school writers, who are often asked to compose exclusively in Dominant American English. Drawing on theories of translingualism and emergent biliteracy, we use case study methods to examine children’s translingual writing in a highly linguistically diverse second-grade classroom. We pay particular attention to students who had not had formal instruction in languages they tended to use orally, documenting the creative and strategic ways in which they wrote. Among other strategies, students repurposed English sound–symbol correspondences in developmental spelling, composed strings of non-Roman symbols, and remixed multilingual environmental print. They also engaged in translingual writing for a range of purposes, such as expressing pride, connecting with audiences, and indexing identities. Our findings suggest the potential of moving translingual perspectives beyond postsecondary contexts and into elementary classrooms.

User-centered design (UCD) as a concept has begun to enter composition studies, particularly through scholar-teachers of technical communication. We question further incorporation—specifically, the collision course of industry-driven language such as “efficiency” and “expediency” and the potential positioning of students as “users” in the composition classroom. We argue that this positioning places us in unproductive opposition to multimodal composition. Rather than a wholesale incorporation of UCD into the composition classroom, we outline a “theory + play” approach that combines scholarship in rhetoric, speculative design, and multimodal composition. This approach, we argue, better aligns with the political and social investments of Johnson’s (1998) theory of user-centered technology, in which our students are critical makers and engaged citizens in the public sphere.

Rhetoric and composition, as an academic discipline, argues for a strong link between scholarship and practice. However, restrictive publisher agreements, limited distribution channels, and percept...

While the field of composition studies has recognized that online writing instructors need professional development, less is known about what to educate teachers and administrators to do or how to do so. To better understand both who online writing instructors are and what they need, this study investigated to what extent the Jungian personality types might reveal what online writing instructors need and want in training and professional development. To research these questions, we developed a mixed-methods study using a nationwide survey of online instructor and administrator preferences and professional development needs, searching for potential patterns among participants; we requested that participants take and self-report data from the Jungian Typology Test (JTT), a variant of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Our findings indicated significantly high percentages of Introverted types, iNtuitive types, and iNtuitive-Feeling types compared with the general population. Further, we found that Introversion and Extraversion may make a difference between enjoying and disliking online writing instruction (OWI), being an iNtuitive-Thinker and an iNtuitive Feeler may lead to preferring different OWI teaching strategies, and that educating OWI teachers and WPAs by harnessing their Jungian personality preferences may help with developing targeted, practical professional development.

As a component of the Community of Inquiry Framework, social presence is typically defined as students “feeling real” enough to interact with and learn from peers online. This article complicates social presence for an online writing instruction (OWI) context, differentiating between social presence, social comfort, attitudes about online learning, and social learning. The study was initially designed to examine graduate students’ perceptions of social presence as an element of online teaching and learning in two sections of an Online Composition Pedagogy course offered in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the project, since students were now learning about hybrid and online pedagogy against the backdrop of their own experiences as emergency remote students and teachers. Analysis of 21 students’ reflections written during the courses indicates that distinguishing between social presence per se and social comfort, attitudes, and learning helps to account for the individual and social contexts of course participants. Ultimately, this article argues that simply inviting students to “feel real” or positioning yourself as a “real” instructor is not sufficient for establishing the types of social interactions that composition studies values.

This study addresses the need for attention to conflicts surrounding voice in composition studies in conjunction with recent research demonstrating the rhetorically complex array of writing moves in which social network users participate. Together, these areas of inquiry present a need for research into social network users’ rhetorical awareness of writing practices. The article presents a study of one first-year college student’s Facebook activity. I analyze Facebook screenshots and interview data to describe the participant’s construction of voice in writing and of a persona on the social network site. Findings reveal that the participant has gained literacy in Facebook as a secondary Discourse as evidenced by her rhetorical awareness in Facebook activity. The participant demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of rhetorical functions within Facebook by hiding her personal opinion, crafting a persona characterized by non-mainstream interests, and paying attention to readers’ behavior to distribute content they found interesting at times they were most likely to engage with it. I conclude the article by discussing applications for the first-year composition classroom that can be drawn from the study findings and from students’ existing writing practices on social network sites.

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment prompt. To supplement such free-play invention strategies and anticipate problematic student projects, this essay suggests to view digital sampling through a rhetorical ethics of care perspective and offers a pedagogical heuristic for ethical in(ter)vention through the concept of vulnerability. Considering digital sampling through a heuristic of vulnerability entails a questioning of all sampling practices as potential acts of wounding or caring in the hopes of helping students develop into more sophisticated rhetors capable of producing nuanced compositions and engaging with ethical issues of digital media.

This article explores the emphasis on reading instruction in the classical pedagogical technique of imitatio. It briefly surveys scholarship in literary and composition studies to trace a short history of this pedagogy before turning to contemporary descriptions of reading pedagogy and showing how imitatio interacts with such practices.

In game and composition studies, an increased scholarly attention has been paid to affect as it relates to the formation of habits. However, the current discussion of affect has not been extended to gamers’ identity performance in multimodal composition practices. In this article, I argue that aleatory procedure—one type of affective game design that centers on the random and unknown processes of rhetorical invention—has the potential to transform gamers’ gender and racial identity performance in flux. To explore the value of aleatory procedure in modulating the affective relations of game play, I conducted screencast recordings, stimulated recalls, in-depth interviews, and observations with Fortnite gamers who were randomly assigned avatars of different genders and races. Findings suggests that aleatory procedure invites players to engage in a fluid affective identity play that is not restricted to individual players and their desires, but rather is in a constant process of transformation both within and across affective assemblages. Based on the findings, I conclude this article by discussing the implications of the aleatory method for critical literacies and multimodal composition.

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

This essay is concerned with contemporary writing center and composition studies and focuses on including fiction in both the theory and practice of writing centers and classrooms. Stemming from contemporary theorists such as Andrea Lunsford and Min-zhan Lu, my work incorporates Sapphire’s (1996) novel, Push, so as to highlight the unique perspectives fiction can give as to how we approach teaching and tutoring students. Offering fiction as impacting both theory and practice – in its potential inclusion within tutor-training syllabi, for instance – I assert that fiction is an untapped resource for writing center and pedagogical studies that is often overlooked or cast aside. By also observing race and education theorists such as Laura Greenfield, Karen Rowan, and Victor Villanueva, my analysis of Sapphire’s work makes evident the potential for fiction to more thoroughly inform our approaches towards past, present, and future writing center and pedagogical studies.

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies theorizes agency as irreducible to human cause-and-effect. While this theory infiltrates many disciplinary conversations, however, our reliance on the terms students and teachers within pedagogical discourses manages our rhetorical imagination of pedagogical agency by committing us to individual, human agents every time we invoke these terms. Rather than expel these terms and the important work they underwrite, we can draw on social systems terminology of elements and relations in order to account for the ways that students and teachers emerge as agents and to imagine alternative conceptualizations of pedagogical agency.

Many writers find that freewriting is crucial to their work, and it has been around long enough to be part of the common language within composition studies. Freewriting is defined as the sustained, often timed, approach to writing-without-stopping. What is “free” is the direction the writer may take and the freeing of ideas through writing. Despite the recognized benefits of freewriting, it has seldom been studied in secondary classrooms, and teachers may be reluctant to implement it on a regular basis. This article presents case studies to examine what, if any, benefits are found when daily freewriting is implemented. Two junior high school classrooms were studied for a semester. Data included student freewriting samples, interviews with students, pre and post surveys on students’ views of writing, and observational notes. In addition to the qualitative data, a collection of quantitative data (fluency rates and pre and post writing apprehension scores) created a mixed-method study. Findings include many benefits from regular freewriting. The classroom routine provided a sense of peace in a very busy day; freewriting helped develop confidence and comfort with writing; student writing quality showed flexibility in thought and style of writing depending on topic; and students engaged with course content. Several implications are made for teachers, including the importance of carefully establishing the routine and expectation that students will write during this time. In addition, teacher modeling of the freewriting showed a positive influence on the students’ writing experiences.

Educational theorists emphasize the importance of creating a classroom environment that encourages positive or productive student resistance to dominant social discourse. This article revisits work in critical pedagogy, feminism, and composition by focusing on the challenges of teaching a first-year writing course on the theme of masculinity. The gender imbalance of this class, with a majority of male students, combined with the course theme, contributed to an environment that raised unanticipated questions, which prompted the reconsideration of the intersections of critical, feminist, and composition pedagogies. In this class, the dynamics worked against a process of critical inquiry and reflection and instead often reified dominant view-points and social positions, specifically with respect to gender. This article concludes with evidence of how practices in composition studies, especially student-instructor conferences, helped to redirect some of the reactive resistance encountered in the classroom.

Composition studies has recently increasingly engaged with economic concerns, as evidenced by the 2012 Watson Conference on “Economies of Writing” and a corresponding special issue of JAC. However, that increased engagement has not reflected an increased engagement with economic scholarship, resulting in a rhetoric that represents economy as either beyond intervention or a metaphor for non-economic phenomenon. Attention to economic scholarship can provide composition studies with a rhetoric that opens possibilities for economic agency.

Despite commitments by composition studies and English education to using technology in the writing classroom and to developing teachers’ “critical technological literacy” ( Selfe, 1999 ), not much has been written about how graduate programs can help secondary English teachers develop their own critical perspective on digital literacy and on teaching with technology. Recognizing this gap in scholarship, I created a series of assignments (The National Digital Literacy Narrative Project) to engage aspiring secondary English teachers in critical considerations of how public rhetoric about technology and literacy complicates composition studies scholarship and the contexts in which they will teach. This article analyzes the NDLN Project and what it teaches writing teachers—and composition studies—about 1) the benefits of analyzing public rhetoric regarding technology and its impact on literacy practices, and 2) the need for graduate programs in composition studies to pay attention to writing teacher education for secondary English teachers. I present the results of the NDLN Project by sharing the stories of three students whose coursework and comments reflect the ideas, experiences, and changing views of the larger group.

Composition studies concentrates on students, not texts. We in this field want to know who our students are. What abilities to use language do they bring to the academy? What new kinds of intellectual work are they able to do? What challenges does academic discourse pose for them? These are research questions we explore with rigor but also compassion and, sometimes, admiration. My favorite origin story claims that this field's modern iteration sprang from reluctance to use first-year writing courses, required at most universities, simply to eject the “boneheads.” Instead, we learned from Mina Shaughnessy and others to regard even the most struggling undergraduate writers as agents, operating among intersecting and competing discourse communities. For us, student writers are not solitary creators, nor are they intertextual blurs.

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janice M. Lauer’s “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline,” in which Lauer looks back to the field’s “pioneering efforts” at cobbling together a disciplinary identity—as she articulated, the field of rhetoric and composition’s most important questions “would have remained isolated and unexplored as they had been for decades if it were not for … a shared trait of these early theorists—their willingness to take risks, to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional training into foreign domains in search of starting points, theoretical launching pads from which to begin investigating these questions” (21). This interview reengages Lauer’s suggestion that the field’s early boundary-crossing transformed rhetoric and composition into a multifaceted and dappled discipline composed of a manifold of theoretical and onto-epistemological perspectives.

Second (L2) and heritage (HL) language learners face a variety of similar challenges when they approach the writing of Spanish compositions. Practitioners have often suggested peer editing as a prefinal step to help identify student writing errors that can be corrected before submission of a final product. However, some studies reveal that student writers do not always trust feedback from their classmates and hesitate to follow through with peer recommendations to the same extent they will from their instructors. This paper suggests an enhancement to the traditional peer editing process that combines a semester-long training program in peer and self-evaluation along with a research-based instrument for a more comprehensive evaluation of Spanish compositions. The instrument is versatile enough to serve students who place at different levels of proficiency along both L2 and HL learner continuums. The paper argues that by becoming a better peer evaluator, one in turn becomes a better self-evaluator. This new process returns control to students, creates more self-reliant writers, and empowers them to significantly improve their essays prior to submission. The paper concludes with the suggestion that if students adopt this process and continue its use it for future compositions, they can eventually become sufficiently trained to the point at which application of evaluation criteria becomes part of their normal mental routine before submitting any written work.

DePalma and Ringer's article proposes an eclectic, multidimensional, and multidisciplinary framework of adaptive transfer of writing. They define the new view of transfer as dynamic, idiosyncratic, cross-contextual, rhetorical, multilingual, and transformative. Using a transformative experience of eleven nurses who transition from school to work, DePalma and Ringer illustrate the elements of their framework. However, their explanation raises a number of questions, specifically the following: the scope of the framework and its relevance to diverse educational and professional settings; the relationship of adaptive transfer and language and writing socialization; the view of reshaping writing in genre studies; and the role of methodological and pedagogical choices in the adaptive transfer framework.

Composition studies has accepted a reductive view of dogma as an acritical commitment to received knowledge that precludes inquiry. As a result, composition gives short shrift to the role that basic beliefs play in any act of inquiry. But certain forms of humble dogma can and do serve as essential starting places for asking questions—even for skepticism and doubt. The writings of St. Augustine and Lesslie Newbigin exemplify such approaches to dogma and offer rhetorical educators a new terministic screen through which to value the role that beliefs play in inquiry.

This article draws on genre theory in a biliteracy context to analyze how one US–Mexico border-crossing graduate student used her genre knowledge and meta-knowledge in her first language, Spanish, as a resource for navigating disciplinary-based genres in her second language, English. The student's strategic use of her L1 genre meta-knowledge from non-university contexts to realize academic literacy tasks in her L2 represented a form of recontextualization, where meanings move and get re-shaped across contexts. This strategic negotiation, in turn, served to disrupt the notions of ‘novice’ and ‘expert’ that are prominent in the composition studies literature on second language writers, where students are seen to be moving on a linear trajectory from novice to expert status in academic writing. The article discusses implications for genre-based research and pedagogy for multilingual learners crossing linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries in their academic studies.

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

This review examines Susan Miller's Norton Book of Composition Studies in the context of the undergraduate writing major. Miller's anthology provides a thorough snapshot of the field of composition, representing the impressive scope of composition studies with 101 unabridged works of composition history, research, theory, and practice. Although this anthology was compiled to support instruction in both undergraduate and graduate classes, the reviewers suggest that undergraduates and some graduate students may require more contextual information about the collected works to better understand the major themes, issues, struggles, and successes of the field.

In this paper, we argue that discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition studies have focused primarily on the reuse of past learning and thus have not adequately accounted for the adaptation of learned writing knowledge in unfamiliar situations. In an effort to expand disciplinary discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition studies, this study theorizes a construct forged from collective insights on transfer of learning in the fields of educational psychology, education, and human resource development—namely, adaptive transfer. We define adaptive transfer as the conscious or intuitive process of applying or reshaping learned writing knowledge in new and potentially unfamiliar writing situations. Because adaptive transfer acknowledges both the reuse and the reshaping of prior writing knowledge to fit new contexts, this framework could have important implications for L2 and L1 writing pedagogies and research in the areas of contrastive rhetoric, English for academic purposes, and writing across the curriculum.

Most research on the development of genre knowledge has focused on genre learning in either a first language (L1) or a second language (L2). This paper highlights the potential of a biliteracy perspective on genre research that combines insights from literacy and bilingualism in order to examine how multilingual writers develop and use genre expertise in more than one language. From a theoretical point of view, the theorization of genre and genre knowledge in composition studies has developed relatively independently from the theorization of language and language proficiency in second language studies. It is argued that conceptually untangling the interrelated nature of genre, writing, and language expertise is a prerequisite for understanding multilingual genre learning. Research on genre learning and genre variation across languages and within multilingual communities is then reviewed to shed further light on the interrelationship between genre and language knowledge empirically. Pedagogical implications for better addressing the needs of multilingual writers are suggested.

Evangelical-Christian graduate students negotiate identities that separate their religious and academic communities of practice. Drawing on bell hooks's notion that marginalized groups must speak for themselves, this essay argues that evangelical graduate students in composition studies must seek involvement in formal conversations on writing, through journal articles, presentations, and appropriate venues in ways that embody rather than restrain their evangelical identities. In order for these students to seek such involvement, it is imperative that graduate instructors begin a dialogue about the potential ways in which restraint impacts students in our efforts to acculturate them into composition.

In a world of declining institutional budgets, decreasing student enrollments in departments that until now may have had the luxury of separate composition classrooms for heritage and non-heritage students, not to mention individual student schedule limitations, the steady increase in enrollment of L1 or heritage students in composition classrooms which were before primarily geared toward L2 learners has created a new reality and the urgency to rethink the organization, sequence, and emphasis placed on topics and structures in the classroom. The purpose of this case study was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of L1 and L2 student composition error data collected from a sample of fifteen students enrolled in a Spanish Composition (SPAN 302) class at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). Specific objectives for this project were to determine from the data collected: 1) the frequencies with which L1 and L2 student participants committed word- and sentence-level errors in their compositions; 2) how error frequencies compare between L1 and L2 students over a semester’s time, and in particular, with the writing of a series of five different compositions, each targeting a more advanced level of writing proficiency; and 3) how knowledge of both similarities and differences between these two groups might be applied to enhance the author’s current pedagogical model that could work for future students from both groups in a single classroom.

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories , or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history. The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies—inflected by feminist research, new literacy studies, critical theory, and digital media studies—provide teacher-scholars a promising set of strategies for conducting research and for representing students' work and our own scholarship in digital contexts.

This article examines the disappearance of the student as a site for theoretical investigation. It considers the ramifications of this development for the disciplinary self-identification of composition studies and for a larger understanding of pedagogy as self-reflexive praxis.

While plagiarism is often viewed in terms of ethical binaries, scholars in composition studies have recognized plagiarism as part of literacy practices governing identity construction. In this light, what is at stake is how writers construct identity by positioning stance-claims according to the standards of respective discourse communities. For nonnative English speaking (NNES) writers, this potentially presents a daunting task due to developing linguistic proficiency and culturally specific practices. Using Ivanic's (1994, 1997, 1998) “aspects of writer identity” and Hyland's (1999, 2005) notions of “stance” and “engagement,” this paper examines essay drafts written by Annie, an NNES writer identified as a “plagiarist,” analyzing how her choices construct identity in and through discourse. Further, the study considers Annie's journals, exploring how different aspects of identity shape her choices. Analysis reveals how Annie negotiates the competing demands of Ivanic's “autobiographical self,” “discoursal self,” and “self as author” in her writing—three strands of identity that prove essential to her development as a writer. These findings suggest that a developmental perspective is needed in understanding writers like Annie and provides for some pedagogical principles and practices that might facilitate acquisition of academic literacies in the ESL composition classroom.

This paper highlights the largely unacknowledged theoretical and pedagogical contributions of Austin Phelps, the accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and teacher of rhetoric, in two ways: First, it demonstrates that Phelps's methods of instruction depart from the documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the mid-nineteenth century in that he endeavors to teach the sermon as a form of civic engagement. Second, it shows how Phelps's discussions of the unconscious in the process of composing and his insights into the role of emotion in the writing process anticipate aspects of the process movement in Composition Studies.

This study details the development and results of a campus-based writing assessment plan that was mandated by a state-wide university system in order to explore the “value-added” from a writing program curriculum to undergraduate students’ competence with written expression. Four writing samples (two timed essays and two conventional essays) that are produced before, during and at the close of enrollment in the writing program are scored for critical thinking, genre knowledge, rhetorical skills, and mechanics. The results indicate that local campus student achievement related to writing is comparable with performance captured by nationally normed technologies and larger assessment projects at similar state universities. The data also suggest significant performance difference related to the institutional position of students’ instructors as well as students’ own enrollment status. The article concludes that while the data produced by this research project are compelling, the policy and political implications of the undertaking suggest greater sensitivity to the institution's culture and program direction as well as its impact on instructor morale, student learning environment and the place of composition studies in the university.

Computers and writing scholarship is increasingly turning towards the network as a potential pedagogical model, one in which writing is intimately connected to its social contexts. The use of wikis in first-year composition classes can support this networked pedagogy. More specifically, due to unique features such as editability and detailed page histories, wikis can challenge a number of traditional pedagogical assumptions about the teaching of writing. This article shows how wikis can challenge assumptions in four categories of interest to composition studies: new media composition, collaborative writing, critical interaction, and online authority. The analysis demonstrates that wikis, while not automatically revolutionary to composition pedagogy, hold significant potential to help facilitate pedagogical changes.

In this essay I examine the problematics of mainstreaming within one site of composition studies research—the composition anthology. Specifically, I apply articulation theory and feminist disability theory to argue that the mainstreaming of disability narratives within composition readers, when articulated with a theory of individual subjectivity, legitimizes the belief that accommodation is an individualized process. Thus accommodation becomes synonymous with “fitting in,” a definition that locates the responsibility for adaptation within the “abnormal” body rather than within the institutions and ideologies that construct it as such.

Feminist authors in Computers and Composition have generally favored social constructionist approaches to identity, yet a subtle reliance on essentialist assumptions about women (sometimes tied directly to the body) still exists. In order to explore this phenomenon, I rely on the theories of Diana Fuss and Elizabeth Grosz to unpack the essentialist/constructionist binary. Then, relying on Laura Brady's explication of “strategic” and “tactical” deployments of essentialism in composition studies, I discuss two previous articles in Computers and Composition that successfully negotiated issues of women's identity partly through essentialist assumptions. The ways in which the articles under discussion here essentialized teenage girls become stepping stones toward a reconstruction of girls’ identities. Thus, although essentialism can be problematic, feminists interested in writing and technology can still take what Diana Fuss calls a “‘risk’ of essence” to further feminist goals.

I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

“You cannot represent a field if you ignore half of it,” wrote John Lovas (2002: 276), our late dear colleague. John was referring to an odd state of affairs in composition studies: the work of those who do most of the teaching of basic writing and first-year composition in this country — community college faculty — is rarely represented in our field’s most visible scholarly publications. John had done his research

With genre now viewed as a fundamental element of writing, both second language writing and mainstream composition studies have seen an increased focus on the question of how writers learn genres. The purpose of this paper is to review key findings from 60 empirical studies that have investigated this question. To this point, research has typically studied genre learning as it occurs either through professional or disciplinary practice or through classroom instruction; almost no studies have looked at the same writers as they traverse these multiple domains. I therefore categorize studies as taking place in either “practice-based” or “instructional” settings and identify trends in the research findings from each setting. After examining one study which takes place in multiple settings, I tease out some of the commonalities and distinctions between learning in practice-based and instructional contexts and between first language and second language genre learning. On the basis of this comparative review of research, I suggest future directions for the interdisciplinary study of genre learning.

Distance education (DE) programs at many universities have been initiated to generate new efficiencies for the academic process, particularly cost efficiency and pedagogical efficiency. In writing studies, this move toward digitally mediated instruction has, in some classrooms, recreated practices that resonate with the pedagogy that resulted from Current-Traditional Rhetoric (CTR). Thus, a trace of distance education's and composition studies’ parallel narratives demonstrates that writing studies has already addressed some of the questions (and concerns) that online writing instruction raises. By specifically focusing on the tensions created by negotiating cost efficiencies and pedagogical efficiencies with communication efficiencies and medium efficiencies, we interrogate current administrative decisions as well their pedagogical outcomes. We conclude by proposing strategies for rearticulating future narratives about online writing instruction in potentially productive ways.

The difficulty of resolving the contradiction between personal and academic writing, experience and analysis, and local and global phenomena resides in deeper binary oppositions that continue to haunt us. Time and space, history and structure, are the larger frameworks in which we operate. Understanding the dialectical relationships of these coordinates illuminates the material and social processes of the production of culture, language, and history, suggesting a theoretical perspective based on a unity of opposites rather than their polarization. Through reflection on a course taught according to these principles, the author argues for a dialectical writing pedagogy.