College Composition & Communication - Volume 67, Issue 4, 2016

In this case study, an accomplished academic writer struggles to produce very brief game summaries for a local newspaper as part of the service requirements to his son’s community football team. An analysis of his experience demonstrates the universal challenge of transfer regardless of prior knowledge or meta-awareness of rhetorical strategies for writing in new or unfamiliar settings and argues for a more nuanced understanding of existing ability, disposition, context, and genre in the deployment of knowledge for writing.

This article explores the relationship between first-person pronoun use and “personal” writing. First, a quantitative examination of 160 papers written for a college literature class reveals how frequently students actually self-reference. Then, three categories of first-person references are developed: General Claims, Process Claims, and Personal Claims. These categories illuminate important differences in first-person pronoun use, including the degree to which each type is genuinely personal and their wide-ranging rhetorical possibilities.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites.

View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

The authors report on a study of writing transfer using a relatively novel method. Specifically, they use screencast videos to study the work of a dozen undergraduates who had taken first-year writing and were now enrolled in an interdisciplinary biology class. The authors argue that students were able to adapt to the writing requirements in the biology class because they implicitly understood themselves to be engaged in Carter’s metagenre of “research from sources.” Because students in this study had been asked to engage in that metagenre at least since high school, they believed their writing habits were established well before first-year writing, and consequently they have trouble recognizing the influence of such a course on their subsequent work. The study also revealed that students coordinated multiple texts simultaneously in order to engage in processes akin to what Howard has called “patchwriting” but also similar to the habits of professional writers. Whereas professional writers have well established networks for seeking information, the students in this study worked in relative isolation, using a few sources found haphazardly through library or Google searches. The authors suggest that instructors spend more time helping students develop effective networks of information, including experts and organizations in addition to published sources.

This article argues that composition should be involved in the study and teaching of graduate level writing. It goes on to argue that independent consulting offers a viable way for compositionists to share expertise with graduate students and programs, as well as to expand opportunities for participation in the profession.

Reviewed are:—Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies

Carmen Kynard A Language and Power Reader: Representations of Race in a “Post-Racist” Era

Robert Eddy and Victor Villanueva, editors