College Composition & Communication - Volume 61, Issue 2, 2009

While internationalization has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different in their approaches or rhetorics, appear to lack what we have; and how we might avoid colonialist intervention or offer consultation. These import/export focal points create key blind spots in our awareness of deep and rich writing research and programming traditions internationally, of how we fit—or do not fit—into this broader world, and of missed opportunities for self-reflection and growth.

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.

The article describes and analyzes the exclusion of LGBT content in composition courses by reporting on a study of how queerness is (and is not) incorporated into first-year writing courses. The authors critically examine the presence or absence of LGBT issues in first-year composition readers; offer analyses of how some first-year readers handle issues of queerness; and consider how queerness, when it is included in composition textbooks, is framed rhetorically as a subject for writing. The article concludes with recommendations for those seeking to explore issues of sexuality in ways that are productive for students, other faculty, and our profession. Ultimately, the authors demonstrate that, while some ground has been gained in understanding sexual difference as an important domain for students to explore, there is still much work to be done in creating textbooks that invite students to think critically and usefully about the interconnections among sexuality, literacy, and writing.

Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they “see” in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals.

This article examines the historiographic trajectory of rhetoric and composition studies by analyzing archival research practices, using Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad as our analytical tool. We rely on a Burkean framework of “scenes, acts, agents, agencies, purposes, and attitudes” to invigorate our understanding of historiographic methods and to open up new possibilities for future histories of rhetoric and composition.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of “race” through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in College Composition and Communication and College English since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what “race” is has grown increasingly vague, despite its use as a commonplace from which to begin scholarly discussions. I argue that we must rearticulate our own racial ideologies in order to become more aware of how we use “race” persuasively for our own purposes.

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory—intersectionality, copresence, and disidentification—are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk of the article, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is examined to illustrate what engaging in alternative rhetoric from a marginalized cultural position may mean in practice.

This article defines applied rhetorical work as integral to the intellectual work of writing program administration and asks our professional organizations to classify it as such within our position statements. With a specific case, it offers a generative framework for representing and assessing the work’s scholarly commons for professional review.

When examined rhetorically, Savannah River Site Community Preparedness Information calendars from 1994, 2004, and 2008 represent living rhetorical practices aimed at changing the public mind. My technical communication classroom at USC Aiken is uniquely situated for us to examine documents constantly generated by the site’s Public Affairs Department.

In the technical communication classroom, the received wisdom is that good instructions should “stay out of the way” of the users’ engagement with technological systems.This article draws on Burke’s concept of perspective by incongruity and on examples of instructions produced during the Women’s Health Movement to demonstrate that sometimes instructions can—and should—take on a more critical, system-disrupting stance.

This article examines the rhetoric of resistance used by South African anti-apartheid journalists to expose the links between the apartheid government and death squads.By utilizing allusions, repetition, and a concept I refer to as “subversive enthymemes,” these journalists managed to reveal publicly information about death squad activity in a context of overwhelming constraints almost a full decade before these facts were confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for “high-risk” minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary antiracist writing instruction.

This historical exploration tracks changes in rules concerning figurative language in nineteenth-century composition-rhetoric textbooks. The century’s lessening of millennium-long restriction of the poetic allowed not only creative writing into academia but composition as well, as composition at its beginning was intertwined with creative writing. In order to advance as a discipline, creative writing needs to investigate its history in addition to developing its theory and practice. Understanding the initial but largely overlooked union of creative writing and composition can help reconfigure English studies.

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women’s colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women’s education in speaking and writing.

As they prepare to teach writing, new teachers should respond to writing assignments that we deliberately design to be difficult, exploratory, or critically reflective, so that they may better develop flexibility and engagement as learners, teachers, and theorists in the field of writing instruction.

Responding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of plagiarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism; second, it examines transnational political contexts for writing pedagogy; and third, it offers a Daoist understanding of language.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

In this article we provide a “portrait” of an exemplary writing teacher and the social construction of authority he established with students in two courses. The portrait demonstrates that teacher authority is most essentially a form of professional authority granted by students who affirm the teacher’s expertise, self-confidence, and belief in the importance of his or her work. We find that professional authority is neither oppressive nor incompatible with de-centered methods, effective instruction, or the kind of assertive teacher authority required to effectively lead a class. In this way, effective instruction and teacher authority become mutually reinforcing reciprocal processes.