The constantly changing nature of literacy, brought about by the Internet and other forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs), has pressed researchers and practitioners to seek new ways of addressing the complexities of reading comprehension and writing on and with the Internet. In this brief interview, members of the New…

Contemporary argument increasingly relies on quantitative information and reasoning, yet our profession neglects to view these means of persuasion as central to rhetorical arts. Such omission ironically serves to privilege quantitative arguments as above "mere rhetoric." Changes are needed to our textbooks, writing assignments, and instructor…

The purpose of this workshop paper is to understand the ways that women and men who work in the field of composition-rhetoric studies can more fully understand and articulate ways to enable women writing students to use more fully the new kinds of technology that proliferate in the digital realm. The material is based on the author's twenty-six…

Historians of rhetoric and composition need to be more explicit and specific about their investigative methods when reporting their research, states this author. This should be done in a systematic and incremental way that both highlights the uniqueness of archival study and creates the depth and breadth of knowledge required to begin…

If you do not wish to construe philosophical discourse as simply a discourse of cognition, a theoretical discourse; if you think it is also a practical, ethical discourse: how should you write? How should you frame the ethos, the authority of your discourse? This article represents an extended preface I wrote and rewrote obsessively over a period…

Amy Lynch-Biniek begins by introducing popular yet controversial concepts presented in the Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's "They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing" (NY: Norton & Company, 2006). As stated in the book's introduction, the goal of Graff and Birkenstein's text is "to demystify academic…

Drawing on the case of a student of his who, like Herman Melville's Bartleby, simply preferred not to write, the author argues that current celebration of technology encourages passive resistance. He emphasizes that authentic, productive classroom experiences derive from in-person interactions that directly connect in relevant ways to students'…

This article aims to clarify where and how Christian privilege occurs, what its effects are, and how to overturn it. The study of Christian privilege and how it impacts public education on an institutional and pedagogical level is important work and an essential building block in dismantling religious oppression (both of and by religious groups).…

David Wiesner's 2007 Caldecott Medal-winning "Flotsam" blends the events of everyday life with the surreal. As he often does in his picture books, Wiesner plays with size and scale, opening "Flotsam" with a full-page illustration of a sand crab and the enormous eye behind it before pulling back on the second page to reveal the creature's actual…

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

Originally published in a 1984 issue of "College English," Stephen North's article "The Idea of a Writing Center" has over the years been much cited in writing center scholarship. Even so, this scholarship as a whole did not proceed to gain much presence in "CE" and other broadly-oriented composition journals. Reconsidering North's piece, the…

In commenting on Coulter and Smith (2009), the author explores issues related to the place of the political in education research and in literature, but especially in forms of narrative research that possess both scientific and literary dimensions. More specifically, the author examines four sets of issues related to the researching and writing of…

Because of the way it prioritizes "interruption" and calls into question the very possibility of producing coherent, self-contained narratives, the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida is often thought to be intrinsically anti-narrative in its very structure; and yet there are those who insist that, to the contrary, deconstruction is a narrative…

Valerie Miner muses in "Writing and Teaching with Class:" "I've always carried that Miner suspicion that laboring with words is not real work . . . Should I be doing something useful?" (1993, 74). If working-class academics face uneasy negotiations between their disciplines and their home cultures, which may include deployment…

The purpose of this essay is to discuss current views of public writing and contribute notions of qualitative research and cultural geography to these conversations. The author also provides two pedagogical examples of how these contributions inform student writing and civic participation in various public spaces. The author believes that public…