By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet's "JAC" article ("Composition as a Management Science"), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field's key terms in…

Around 1986, inventional researchers began to presuppose an externalist philosophy of mind, thereby ushering in the postprocess era. Ecological composition and posthumanism, now understood as postprocess inventional models, present direct pedagogical applications, allowing different objects (e.g., databases, search engines) to qualify as writing…

Composition researchers have become increasingly concerned with the issue of knowledge transfer: the use of knowledge and skills learned in one setting to complete tasks in a different setting. In terms of writing-related knowledge transfer, research suggests that rigid rules and formulas for writing do not transfer as successfully as flexible…

Research in sociolinguistics offers important understandings of the social dynamics impacting how language is acquired, used, perceived, and treated in the U.S. and beyond. It provides opportunities to critically examine societal structures and attitudes surrounding language (including personal beliefs) that create and uphold social and racial…

This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one hand, from the poststructural through the posthuman, our most vigorous theories challenge classical notions of selfhood and agency. On the other hand, from institutional assessment through writing about writing, composition's most vigorous practices…

Since writing in the disciplines (WID) is focused on learning how to write formal documents of a professional register, it is important to note that each field or discipline has its own style, structure, and format when it comes to writing, and most composition courses seldom facilitate the transfer of these specialized skills in the classroom.…

Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

This article asks, "what in the broad and excessive definitions of composition and rhetoric keeps us from talking about personality and temperament alongside other issues of identity?" Pulling from scientists, queer theorists, and composition scholars, I explore the lived experiences of introverts and highly-sensitive people, which often…

The debate around student personal essays has dissipated in recent scholarship, though it still remains a highly contested subject. This dissertation study examines three main criticisms surrounding student personal essays from the theorists James Berlin, Lester Faigley, and David Bartholomae. These critiques are that students don't attend to…

This article uses systems and complexity theory to illustrate key characteristics of writing as a complex system. This illustration reveals how writing works on multiple levels of scale, and adds to the body of theoretical knowledge that can be taught within the discipline of writing studies. In so doing, it shows how a complex systems writing…

This article begins by asking readers to make a modest supposition: HBCUs are, perhaps, one of the last frontiers for sustained feminist praxis-administratively and pedagogically. The authors write that they struggle with the situation, and find it both lamentable and paradoxical, since many HBCUs were originally founded and/or administered by…

The Rhetoric* of Writing Assessment uses strategic variations of rhetorical theory to reimagine writing assessment's complicated disciplinary past and rethink its foundational concepts through its multifaceted rhetorical situatedness. Although scholars such as Bob Broad, Brian Huot, Patricia Lynne, Norbert Elliot, Edward M. White, and Kathleen…

Disability studies (DS) within rhetoric and composition has productively challenged us to reexamine our commonplace assumptions about "normal" students and enabled us to understand the generative capacities of disability as critical lens. Such presence has created more space for more minds and bodies not only in classrooms but among…

This article analyzes the decline of linguistics in rhetoric and composition PhD programs in terms of the "linguistic memory" (Trimbur) of composition. Since the field of linguistics once offered the primary means for composition to address the structural, psychological, sociohistorical, and cultural dimensions of language in student…

This article argues that the field of Rhetoric and Composition has long harnessed the active potential of metaphor to change its own practices but has considerably overlooked student use of metaphor--a particularly urgent oversight given the metaphorical battleground that constitutes the discourse of contemporary higher education. Using this…