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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This essay provides an account of The Ohio State University's (OSU) rhetoric department during the tenure of Joseph Villiers Denney, arguing that he appropriated and repurposed national trends in education and rhetoric in ways that complicate the narrative of rhetoric and composition's decline in the late nineteenth century. In this essay, the…

This article presents a course design of English 450: Theories and Methods of Argument. The course is an upper level course in the Writing concentration of B. A. in English and American Language and Literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, a metropolitan university in the South. At the 400 level, Theories and Methods of Argument is…

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…

In this article, the author argues that compartmentalization in the way that writing education tends to be discussed and therefore understood in the professional discourse of rhetoric and composition should be critically examined and transcended if the field is going to lead the development of undergraduate writing majors. Any new major should be…

The authors describe their individual and collective experiences reconstructing their New Orleans-based university composition program in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They emphasize how the concept of "floating foundations" helps account for changes in their students' interests, and they suggest that this idea is applicable to the…

A symposium in the November 2006 issue of "College English" addresses the question, "What should college English be?" In this article, the author presents his answer to this question--it should be a functional approach to English studies. By English studies he means everything that is done in English departments. Most English departments teach…

Three ways that English department Web sites express, lost-island rhetoric, the rhetorical tropes on these sites, which express an ironic, dialogical tension between being lost and being found in the global economy is discussed. Lost-island rhetoric expresses the profession's own contradictory impulses considering the network, the desire to…

One section of the special issue, Directory of Assistantships and Fellowships for Graduate Study in English and the Teaching of English: 1971-72 and Directory of the Chairmen of Freshman Composition Programs in the Nation's Colleges and Universities," which is available from the National Council of Teachers of English, 508 South 6th Street,…