College Composition & Communication - Volume 56, Issue 1, 2004

This is an attempt to define what being a responsible and responsive user of English might mean in a world ordered by global capital, a world where all forms of intra- and international exchanges in all areas of life are increasingly under pressure to involve English. Turning to recent work in linguistics and education, I pose a set of alternative assumptions that might help us develop more responsible and responsive approaches to the relation between English and its users (both those labeled Native-Speaking, White or Middle Class, and those Othered by these labels), the language needs and purposes of individual users of English, and the relation between the work we do and the work done by users of English across the world. I argue that these assumptions can help us compose English against the grain of all systems and relations of injustice.

Using historical and contemporary documents, including student texts, this article examines why and how both novice and experienced writing teachers, including the author, continue to struggle with tacit allegiances to traditional forms while trying to facilitate dialectical writing in their classrooms.

This article describes how readers from a graduate program in anthropology evaluated student writing in a general education course. Readers voiced the concerns of their discipline when they focused on the stance writers assumed and how they made value judgments.

Working-class academic narratives reveal a number of common themes, like dual estrangement and internalized class conflict. A less popularized motif is the bookish child who is catapulted out of her working-class origins. But some working-class academics, like myself, were not academically ambitious as children. I am a nontraditional working-class academic, and my distance from narratives of “gifted” ascent may actuallybring me closer to my students.

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and (2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment. Based on the evidence of our longitudinal study, we conclude that the story of the freshman year is not one of dramatic changes on paper; it is the story of changes within the writers themselves.