Basic writing, which developed as a field within the larger discipline of rhetoric and composition, has a tumultuous past and an uncertain future. What began as an academic response to a perceived literacy crisis with the rise of open admissions in the late 1960s has continued to grow and reinvent its structures, theories, and practices as new…

This dissertation examines how nomenclature and the act of naming shapes disciplinary identities for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition. The discipline is named differently by many of its members, sometimes called "composition studies," "writing studies," "composition and rhetoric," "rhetorical…

This study yields a broader understanding of the "development of rhetorical instruction in the American college" (Gold 15) by focusing on the composition programs at two little studied universities. This dissertation addresses the descriptions of composition courses as these appear in the course catalogs of two different kinds of…