The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and…

A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is "What about reading?" In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)--remix--to revisit in three…

Although the phrase "college and career readiness" has been in circulation since the mid-2000s, it has become nearly ubiquitous in discussions about K-12 and postsecondary education, especially in the last two years. In spring 2010 an unprecedented collaboration led to the development of the "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing," an…

The constitution of "rhetoric and composition" as a discipline is the subject of a long-standing and ongoing debate that grapples with what each of the terms might be said to signify in relation to the other, and why. Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships…

Stanley Fish in his new book ["Save the World on Your Own Time" (New York: Oxford UP,2008)] says that composition studies presents "the clearest example" of what is desperately wrong in the academy, because in writing classrooms, he says, "more often than not anthologies of provocative readings take center stage and the actual teaching of writing…

Food writing, like cooking, offers control over at least a small slice of an otherwise refractory world. As practiced by writers so good that whether they can cook or not is beside the point, food writing is most often upbeat and nurturing, providing successes and triumphs--modest and major--for readers to feast on, with occasional glimpses of…

Americans are obsessed with heroes, and they seemingly create them from anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere. This predilection is also clear in American histories. Their belief in heroes shows their connection to their society and culture, their willingness to follow someone in their social settings, and their belief that good people who…

Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years,…

The author reports on and analyzes the inclusion of parody in her sequence of assignments for a graduate composition theory seminar. She contends that having students write parodies of particular theorists and theoretical camps enables them to gain critical leverage that they might not otherwise obtain on a field (in this case, composition…

This author investigates Mexican women journalists' writing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These women were at the center of the Latin American transnational experience--as female pioneers in the creation of a new mestiza rhetoric that reflected writing from the standpoint of inclusion that was resistant to oppressive ideologies. A…

One of the most important contributions of writer-teacher Wendy Bishop was to argue for the interconnectedness of creative writing and composition studies. By doing so, Bishop insisted on the importance of studying what writers do when they write. Because her pedagogy was driven by reports of individuals from a culture that had seldom been heard…

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty's relations with other faculty and with the academic institution as a whole.

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a…

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…

The fiftieth anniversary of the Strunk and White edition of "The Elements of Style" is an appropriate occasion for considering its enormous popularity. Especially interesting is the esteem for the book held by Theodore Kaczynszki, convicted as the Unabomber. His embrace of Strunk and White's values points to a kind of violence and primitivist…