Often, composition instructors struggle to encourage STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students to see the relevance of writing courses to their personal goals. Students' lack of recognition of the importance of literacy skills can lead to disengagement in required college writing courses compared to their so-called…

The teaching of literacy/language arts and mathematics is not a pairing traditionally found in classrooms. However, there are ways to link the two vital core subjects. This article will explore using writing as a tool for students to work through mathematical processes by integrating writing and literacy curriculum as a subject to complement, not…

Comparing legal, policy, and statute writing--from stone records of ancient Britain civil servants to opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court--this article demonstrates how weaving threads of textual language variation and change can innervate writing in the disciplines and history of the English language courses, particularly courses designated for…

This article addresses key issues in WAC/WID regarding translation and biliteracy. Informed by translingual scholarship, genre studies, and history of the English language research, it first defines translation politically and historically, and as always involving negotiations of meaning-making across linguistic repertoires and genres. It then…

When we examine the state of writing instruction in many schools and classrooms, we find that few teachers are actually teaching students to become better writers in large part because they are relying on process models that do not accurately reflect the complex task of creating good writing and that are out of step with current research. Merely…

Teaching writing is complex, and a number of ideas circulating among schools and teachers often belie the difficulty of how to teach the techniques and processes of writing. I've come to believe that authorship is not a passive undertaking and does not originate in the struggle to put something onto the page. Rather it emerges by living with a…

"Writing Instruction" in Australia usually means one of two things: creative writing or TESOL, both having rich histories and traditions and usually offered as graduate courses in departments of Education or Linguistics. Academic writing, however, with few exceptions, is an all-but-invisible practice in undergraduate education. It draws…

This article is adapted from a keynote address at the July 2022 European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) conference, sponsored by the University of Graz in Austria, whose theme focused on writing centers as spaces of empowerment. Designed for peer tutors as well as writing center faculty, this talk first celebrates some examples of writing…

Looking back on the ways writing studies has developed as a discipline in the 25 years since he guest edited an issue of The Clearing House, Pemberton discusses how the "social constructionist" movement in writing research has evolved and expanded over time. He focuses on three aspects of that evolution: (1) understanding writing as a…

This program profile describes the development and implementation of The Black Ink Project at Morehouse College. The Black Ink Project is a curricular initiative intended to support the development of writing abilities among the Men of Morehouse and immerse them in the writing process in the tradition of articulating servant leadership for which…

This essay claims that contemplative classroom practices can cultivate "kairotic" composure, which is an attunement to the dual aspects of the rhetorical concept of "Kairos"--a sense of timelessness or deep presence, and a sense for saying or writing the right word in the right moment. While theorists of contemplative writing…

Writing programs and academic libraries are frequent collaborators based on shared concerns about writing and research. However, in these collaborative relationships librarians often share their expertise with writing program administrators and individual instructors without developing the information literacy expertise of the majority of writing…

This article describes a course design that offers an innovative approach to using client-based projects (CBPs) in technical and professional writing. It shows how teachers can incorporate CBPs in hybrid or fully virtual instruction, adapt it for a quarter or semester, and tailor it to meet students' needs. While there are standard writing…

This article applies the perspective of "boundary work," an approach originating in science studies, to relations between the disciplines of Second Language Writing (SLW) and rhetoric and composition (R&C), especially to controversies surrounding the concept of translingualism. Boundaries both separate and connect, a dual potential…

This article is a critique of current approaches to the teaching and assessment of writing in schools in the UK. Successive government initiatives, most particularly the latest (impoverished) version of the English curriculum, are seen as having led to a situation in which pupils are taught in a way that does not improve the quality of their…