We focus on the binational educational lives of Otros DREAMers students to address Keith Gilyard's insistence that if translingualism is to become an attractive alternative to scholars invested in combating pernicious language instruction, it must promote analyses that don't overlook or devalue the struggles of traditionally underrepresented…

This study shows how the rhetorical form of the jeremiad emerges in academic writing produced by one evangelical Christian student. Recognizing the jeremiad in student writing can help compositionists and literature instructors better understand the rhetorical choices of such students and help them leverage the jeremiad's resources for rhetorical…

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's writing textbook, "They Say / I Say," has triggered important debates among writing professionals. Not included within these debates, however, is the empirical question of whether the textbook's templates reflect patterns of language use in actual academic discourses. This article uses corpus-based…

The increasing diversity of US higher education has brought greater language diversity to institutions nationwide. While writing studies researchers have increasingly paid attention to the linguistic diversity of student writers, little attention has been paid to the growing numbers of writing teachers who speak English as a second language. This…

Positioning reading as a site of meaning negotiation, this article provides a detailed account of one multilingual, transnational student's literacy practices for personal, academic, and disciplinary purposes across spaces. Drawing on the notion of "disconnect," I examine the tensions and fissures that disrupt the flow of literacies…

This article discusses how a group of multilingual scholars in Jordan negotiate multiple linguistic and cultural affiliations. These writers' experiences demonstrate the varied ways English's global dominance affects individuals' lives. The scholars find both empowerment and disempowerment in English, viewing English as linked to Western hegemony…

Exploring language practices, beliefs, and management in a first-year writing program, this article considers the obstacles to and opportunities for transforming language policy and enacting a new multilingual norm in U.S. postsecondary writing instruction. It argues that the articulation of statements regarding language diversity, co-developed by…

As English spreads as an international language, it evolves through diverse users' writing and speaking. However, traditional views of ESL users focus on their distance from fairly static notions of English-language competence. This research uses a grounded theory approach to describe a range of competencies that emerge in ESL users' interactions…

For the past few decades, composition researchers have devoted critical attention to studying the ways that African American students employ Africanized linguistic and rhetorical patterns successfully in expository writing situations. More recently, research has focused on the use of African-based rhetorical patterns, since the use of African…

This study examines how changes in a key scientific genre supported anthropology's early twentieth-century bid for scientific status. Combining spatial theories of genre with inflections from the register of economics, I develop the concept of "rhetorical scarcity" to characterize this genre change not as evolution but as manipulation that…

In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw…

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.…

Reporting on a year-and-a-half-long study of Latina/Latino multilingual students transitioning from high school to a community college or university on the US-Mexico border, this article explores how writing instruction was shaped across the three institutional locations by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing…

An examination of 2,000 freshman themes, half written from 1950 to 1957 and half from 1973 to 1976, revealed that recent themes had many more deviations from standard usage, mechanics, and punctuation. (DD)

Examines the rule that indefinite pronouns (everyone, anybody, each, someone, nobody) take singular verbs and singular pronouns for agreement. Explores its past, proposes a revision of the rule, and suggests modifications in its application based on analysis of its actual use in English. (SR)