Digital multimodal composing (DMC) allows students to mobilize a wide range of multimodal resources to make meaning. While studies in DMC tended to focus on language-learning contexts, few of them examine its use in content-based courses whereby students are proficient L2 users expected to demonstrate understanding of abstract concepts using DMC.…

This paper presents assessment data from a first-year writing library partnership to examine the relationship between student source use and written synthesis. It finds that first-year students could locate peer-reviewed, scholarly sources but that these sources were poorly integrated in their arguments--if they were used at all. In contrast, it…

This paper reports on a desktop review study of undergraduate and postgraduate English studies (both English literature and English language) module offerings (n = 48) of 24 English departments at 17 South African higher education institutions (HEIs) conducted in 2017. The review focused on the presence and purpose of the term, decolonisation, in…

The search for a common model of instruction in first-year composition began in the 1960s when composition first began to separate from literature in college English departments. Because writing is essentially a methods course with no standard curriculum as one might find in physics or economics, common model has been elusive. A sign that…

Henry W. Sams served on the editorial boards of "College English," "College Composition and Communication," and the "Journal of General Education." He was able to influence the kinds of articles on composition and rhetoric being published throughout this period, and he and his colleagues increased broad awareness of…

Changing a curriculum is already stressful enough without finding new ways to create anxiety, discontent, and rancor. To provide a truly integrated liberal education, the author contends that educators must not only change their curricula--the courses they offer--but they must change what they do in the classroom, the kinds of papers and…

In the last 15 years, writing center scholars have increasingly called for more evidence to validate writing centers' practices. Work by Paula Gillespie (2002), Neal Lerner (2009), and Isabelle Thompson et al. (2009) underscore this need. Missing from these discussions, however, is a thorough understanding of the past and current research…

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…

2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Naturally, historians are thrilled. But what about their discipline? Why and how might Lincoln matter to English studies? In this article, the authors reflect on Lincoln and his influence on English studies. They argue that Lincoln has played or can play an important role in the college English…

Several years ago, when his college first financed a writing program administrator (WPA) position--reassigned time and a budget to pay adjunct faculty stipends for program development--the author met with all the most senior adjunct faculty. "Without you," he told them, "this effort to build a better writing program won't work. Participation and…

Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to represent the ways that students who consciously employ rhetorical and intellectual traditions of Black discourses get penalized according to limited notions of academic writing. A dynamic intersection will be examined to show how this particular group of…

This article addresses the issue of basic writing, demonstrating how one university's basic writing program acts as a steward of writing. The assumption that basic writers only consume resources rather than contribute to academic excellence is rejected. What links the author responses to this issue is a publication of student writing entitled…

The number of first-year writing and writing­-across-the-curriculum programs has been increasing at institutions across the United States, but a similar rise has not been seen in the growth of concentrations in rhetoric and writing as an undergraduate major or minor. In this program profile, the authors describe how the Discourse Studies faculty…

In this article, the authors use two sets of terms--"chronos/kairos" and strategy/tactic--to frame the way they tell the story or the "case" of Professional Writing and Rhetoric's (PWR's) developing identity at Elon University. In doing so, they offer to the readers a framework for identity development that is portable across contexts. The authors…

Traditional priorities of English as a discipline are now significantly at odds with the material circumstances of college English departments. To address these realities, college English needs to become literacy studies rather than literary studies.