College Composition & Communication - Volume 60, Issue 1, 2008

This article examines Yale’s “Awkward Squad” of basic writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, “pre-Shaughnessy” site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of basic in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic standards of correctness applied uniformly to all colleges and universities.

This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for “high-risk” African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism within present-day writing programs.

This article explores the emotioned dimensions of racist discourses at an all-white public high school. I argue that students’ racist assertions do not always or even often originate in students’ racist attitudes or belief. Instead, racist language functions metaphorically, connecting common racist ideas to nonracist feelings, values, beliefs, and associations that are learned in the routine practices and culture of school.

Closed Systems and Standardized Writing Tests by Chris M. Anson; "Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments" by Les Perelman "Genre, Testing, and the Constructed Realities of Student Achievement" by Mya Poe; "The Call of Research: A Longitudinal View of Writing Development" by Nancy Sommers.

Newsletter for Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty

Writing about Writing as the Heart of a Writing Studies Approach to FYC: Response to Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions” and to Libby Miles et al., “Thinking Vertically” by Barbara Bird; “Response to Miles et al.” by Douglas Downs; “Continuing the Dialogue: Follow-Up Comments on “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions”” by Elizabeth Wardle.

Reviews of: “Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century” by Sarah Robbins; “Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Writers” by Lindal Buchanan; “Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930” by Wendy B. Sharer.

Reviews of: “Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location” by Lisa Ede; “Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies” edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Lahoucine Ouzgane; “Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference” by Nedra Reynolds.