This article explores historical debates over the relationship of composition to rhetoric, arguing that these debates resonate with contemporary arguments about first year writing and undergraduate and graduate programs in writing and rhetoric. Analyzing early scholars' articulations of the differing aims of undergraduate and graduate studies,…

The encounters of writing center tutors and clients, this essay argues, are tensional, asymmetrical, and productive negotiations of a coauthored "we". As authorship and authorization are discursive processes, we offer an empirical examination of how personal pronouns mark important shifts in the dynamic creation of a shared academic manuscript in…

While comics have received widespread acceptance as a literary genre, instructors and scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have been slower to adopt comics, largely because of a lingering difficulty understanding how the characteristics of the form relate to our work in the classroom. Using as guides the "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

This article takes survey and interview responses from undergraduate writing majors in two independent writing programs as points of departure for reflection on the disciplinary work of writing studies. Though scholarship about writing majors focuses on these programs as sites for the distribution of disciplinary expertise, students in this study…

This article explores the relationship between teacher authority and flaming in asynchronous online communication. Teachers who rely on what I call stabilization and universal applicability--two concepts emerging from a liberal democratic theory--may actually be preventing a full and robust understanding of the complexities of 21st-century…

The authors' perception, as specialists at the intersection of disability studies and composition studies, is that disability has arrived--in the sense that it is now on most peoples' radar. Most have come to think of it as "Disability 2.0": the state where acceptance of disabled students and teachers as belonging in our…

As an advanced rhetoric and composition doctoral student, I taught Engl 3135: Visual Rhetoric, a three-credit upper-level course offered by the Department of English at Georgia State University. Mary E. Hocks originally designed this course in 2000 to, in her words, "introduce visual information design theories and practices for writers [and]…

That a successful professional life in Rhetoric and Composition depends on a PhD, a tenure line, and an extensive publication record is complicated by the demands that family makes on a professional life. The notion of "making it" in Rhetoric and Composition can also complicate how the field judges the contributions of its participants and the…

Responding to Michelle Ballif, D. Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford's "Women's Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition," this article provides a more expansive definition of "making it," and argues that not only should we focus on women who are professionals in rhetoric and composition at institutions other than the Research I schools and…

This article examines Donald M. Murray's ideas about what he considered the essential solitude of all writing and what happens within that solitude. Murray, a pioneer of the process and modern expressivism movements in composition, identified a number of forces that he felt were at work within his mind whenever he wrote; this complicated aloneness…

This article contests the prevailing assumption that composition scholarship has only recently begun to theorize the role of the writing program administrator. While many contemporary scholars accept the idea that the field mainly offered practical "how-to" articles early on in its history, the author rereads work from past decades to show…

This article describes LIT 730: Teaching Composition, a three-credit graduate seminar in American University's Department of Literature for master's-degree students interested in teaching composition. The Literature Department offers both an MA in Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing, and attracts applicants with a flexible "teaching…

English 106: Introductory Composition is a mandatory four credit hour course offered at Purdue University. English 106 is offered by the English department through the Introductory Composition at Purdue program (ICaP), supervised by the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) of first-year composition (FYC). Students enrolled in English 106 gain…

Penn State Hazleton sits at the very edge of town, on the top of a large hill, literally, as far removed from Hazleton as it possibly can be. Only a handful of professors actually live in Hazleton, and nearly all students return home for the weekend. Compared with the main campus, the student population at Penn State Hazleton is quite diverse.…