College Composition & Communication - Volume 67, Issue 2, 2015

This article demonstrates that the terms of the debate over whether college is “worth it” undermine composition’s mainstay arguments for relevance. In light of students’ market-driven motivations, the article posits a citizen-worker perspective in composition that refuses the compartmentalization of economic, cultural, and civic functions of college.

This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. Ipresent a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and pedagogical attention.

Motivated by a fear that she may have plagiarized, the author considers the possibility that plagiarism might be understood as a transgression against reading as well as against writing. Drawing on Philip Eubanks’s work in Metaphor and Writing, the article proposes that one reason for composition studies’ ambivalent relationship to reading is that we possess a reading prototype that equates all reading with literature. A significant effect of the prototype is a conceptualization of reading in terms of volume, which understandably transmutes reading desire into reading anxiety. This article suggests that paying attention to the ways in which we find the things we read can help to assuage this anxiety.

This essay explores the pedagogical project of integrating digital archival research into the undergraduate classroom. We contend that rather than simply asking students to

Examination of the perspectives and experiences of faculty, graduate student instructors, and undergraduates participating in a WAC/WID program shows how discipline-focused WAC/WID principles are often resisted, interrogated, and subverted by all three groups of stakeholders. New disciplinarity, especially its concepts of borderlands and elasticity, offers a promising focus for WAC/WID.

This is a written version of the address that Adam Banks gave at the CCCC Convention in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, March 19, 2015.

Reviewed are: Stylish Academic Writing Helen Sword The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Steven Pinker