When pondering how to contribute to this special issue, the author was startled to realize that their career, the journal's history, and the development of the discipline--rhetoric and composition/writing studies (RCWS)--had run in parallel for 50 years. This essay tells a story of how "generation" came to matter in rhetoric and…

Some educators have described clinical documentation as "scut". Research in medicine has focused on documentation's communicative value and not its function in learning. With time being an important commodity and electronic health records changing how we document, understanding the learning value of documentation is essential. The…

This study expounds how the analysis of move and transitivity in the method, result, and discussion sections contributes to the advancement of novice writers' writing skills by providing a writing pattern applied when composing research articles. To this aim, a qualitative approach with descriptive technique is employed to encapsulate and explain…

In the fifty-some years that "Composition Studies" [formerly "Freshman English News"] has been mapping the composition and writing field, much attention has been given to so-called minoritized writers. The initial analysis of minoritized writers in "Freshman English News," for instance, was almost entirely framed by…

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer…

This exploratory study focuses on the use of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tool, by undergraduate engineering students in lab report writing in the major. Literature addressing the impact of ChatGPT and AI on student writing suggests that such technologies can both support and limit students' composing and learning processes.…

This research was motivated by some multicultural classroom students' reactions to practicing writing argumentative text including the fact that Indonesia's adult literacy rate of 95% is not accompanied by the ability to recognize and adopt composed facts, which on average is very little. This research was formerly aimed to depict how…

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer's adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman's sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing…

Revisiting the writing assignments that the author has given to his sophomores and juniors over the past four years, he can identify patterns that have complicated their writing development. This article explores how Aristotle's enthymeme can serve as an effective prewriting tool for literary analysis in the high school classroom. By foregrounding…

Situated in a newly constructed Digital Intellectual Commons on the first floor of the library, the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research is enviable. The promise of innovation is visible in the design and reflected in the names of each area of the Commons. Writing itself seems central here at Jackson State University (JSU), a…

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…

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…

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…

Process-based composition pedagogy has ignored the question of "doneness": the criteria used to decide when a piece of writing is complete. This article uses survey results from first- and second-year composition courses to challenge common beliefs about how students determine when writing assignments are sufficiently completed. We find…