College Composition & Communication - Volume 57, Issue 2, 2005

Maxine Cousins Hairston, one of the architects of the contemporary discipline of rhetoric and composition, died July 22, 2005, at the age of eighty three.

This essay reports on the first two years of the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal study aimed at describing as accurately as possible all the kinds of writing students perform during their college years. Based on an early finding about the importance students attach to their out-of-class or self-sponsored writing and subsequent interviews with study participants, we argue that student writing is increasingly linked to theories and practices of performance. To illustrate the complex relationships between early college writing and performance, we explore the work of two study participants who are also coauthors of this essay.

Academically oriented first-year seminars can be good venues for teaching many of the concepts important to WAC programs, including extended engagement with a research topic and situated writing. A qualitative study of a first-year seminar program at the University of Calgary highlights faculty members’ and students’ responses.

This essay presents a task-based multimodal framework for composing grounded in theories of multiple media and goal formation. By examining the way two students negotiated the complex communicative tasks presented them in class, the essay underscores the benefits associated with asking students to attend to the various motives, activities, tools, and environments that occasion, support, and complicate the production of academic as well as everyday texts.

Despite the widespread acceptance of many kinds of nonliterary texts for first-year writing courses, primary scientific communication (PSC) remains largely absent. Objections to including PSC, especially that it is not rhetorically appropriate or sufficiently rich, do not hold. We argue for including PSC and give some practical suggestions for developing courses and designing assignments using PSC

2005 CCCC Chair’s Address: Who Owns Writing?

Review Essay: Language, Identity, and Citizenship Keith Gilyard Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism Dexter B. Gordon, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Catherine Prendergast, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity and Literacy Education, Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva, eds., Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 2004.