College English - Volume 76, Issue 3, 2014

Contributing to everyday writing research, this article reports on an interview study of retired women who use writing in the context of the household. Supported by an analysis of participants’ writing artifacts, it describes the social and material gains the women effect via mundane writing forms including menus and grocery lists. Such practices are acquired from the women’s workplaces and families, and an extensive analysis of one case in particular highlights the convergence of literacy practices, ethnic heritage, and material conditions to consider the impact and significance of writing practices handed down through family knowledge, or “rhetorical heirlooms.”

This essay examines the lived literacy experiences of six multilingual immigrant writers, arguing that their everyday multilingual practices foster a distinct rhetorical sensibility: rhetorical attunement—an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. Rhetorical attunement is a way of acting in the world as a multilingual writer that assumes linguistic multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across linguistic differences. The essay shows that multilingual writers aren’t aware of this quality of language a priori, but come to know—become rhetorically attuned—across a lifetime of communicating across difference.

This article reconstructs a writing theory on which Fred Newton Scott and John Dewey collaborated in the 1890s. Drawing on technology theorists’ discussions of “technological determinism,” this article critiques the deterministic aspects of Scott’s and Dewey’s thinking, and it suggests that their errors can illuminate determinism’s dangers for contemporary writing theory. The article also discusses some questions that Scott’s and Dewey’s theory raise for study of their later ideas.

In this brief essay, Richard Ohmann reflects on his time editing College English and on the various roles played and agency acquired by an editor of a flagship journal. Ohmann’s essay responds, in part, to the March 2013 CE symposium, “What Is College English?”