The author--drawing both on history and on his own experience as faculty member, WPA, department head, and dean--examines the set of practices we associate with the tenure and promotion process, finding that they differ across sites at the same time that they look very similar in their assumptions. His review then culminates in a set of questions…

Rhetorical Roots and Media Future is a multimodal project exploring podcasting as a part of a writing class. The text has two main components: a hypertextual webtext and a seven episode podcast series. The podcasts provide both a basic introduction to podcasting as a classroom activity and the ways in which podcasting provides new ways of engaging…

The following article maps the questions, methods, contexts, and theories presented in published scholarship on writing-related transfer. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to capture representative samples with a focus on recent publications. The article then highlights a multi-institutional research initiative that aims to flesh out the…

The relationship between cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and composition has been a topic that has received much attention in rhetoric and composition's disciplinary conversations, even if current pedagogical practices used to address these matters lag behind in progress. In this essay, the author focuses on how to address linguistic…

This essay offers a rhetorical reading of entertainer Judy Garland's early life writing projects. The author focuses on two open letters Garland published in 1950, in which she talks to the public and press to let them know "the truth" ("Open") about her life and how much her audience means to her. As a troubled celebrity, Garland had for years…

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.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to argue that writing center workers provide a model for reversing the new racism. Methodology: An examination of writing center practices (dialogue and conversation) as well as practices offered by thinkers outside of the writing center (collaborative learning and laboratory learning) is presented. Results:…

In this article, I revisit the Elbow/Bartholomae debate, review recent scholarship on academic writing, and discuss the ways that the mandates of traditional academic writing can further disenfranchise already marginalized students. I suggest that, due to the double consciousness with which these students often live, they come into classrooms…

This study purports to foster the understanding of profession-based academic writing in two different cultural conventions by examining the rhetorical moves employed by American and Philippine thesis introductions in Architecture using Swales' 2004 Revised CARS move-analytic model as framework. Twenty (20) Master's thesis introductions in…

Much of the literature in the field of rhetoric and composition narrates the stories of writers and their writing as told by teachers, administrators, and researchers. In an effort to bring writers' voices to the forefront of these stories, this empirical study examines the types of questions and concerns writers have about writing as…

In this essay, the author aims to show how a specific focus on interactionally emergent and rhetorically negotiated elements of a communicative situation can enrich the study of difference in composition research. She develops this argument by first identifying two strategies used by writing researchers when forwarding new understandings of…

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions--we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively,…

The purpose of a prominent feature analysis is to describe the stylistic flexibility that a young writer, or a group of young writers, exhibits on a given day, with a given prompt. In prominent feature analysis, there are no guidebooks, no rubrics--just student papers and the expertise of teachers. Teachers come to the papers individually and yet…

Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour's theories help expose such pedagogy's limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work…

Recent considerations of threshold concepts in the rhetoric and writing studies discipline fail to consider the role that reading plays in the learning of student writers. This article reports results from a three-part, two-year, empirical study of seventy-five learners enrolled across four sections of a writing-intensive course. The course…