Writing about writing (WAW) is an increasingly popular approach to teaching writing that, while often discussed as a single pedagogy, has always referenced a wide variety of curricula, pedagogies, courses, and assignments. While this diversity has been acknowledged, scholars have yet to fully explore the sources, nature, and implications of this…

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the "language" of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal…

This program profile narrates how the Department of English at Brigham Young University (BYU) reviewed and revised the disciplinary writing requirements in the English BA program between 2006 and 2015. The story begins in 2006 with the dual problems of recognizing the lack of development in student writing in the major and of responding to…

This article asks us to consider what the process of healing and composition pedagogy have to learn from each other. More specifically, it identifies how the therapeutic potential of writing, which has been largely neglected in the academy in recent years, can influence the ways we teach transferable writing skills. The article considers how…

The Virtual Workplace Ethnography is a first-year composition assignment that positions students as knowledge makers by requiring them to apply a theoretical lens ("Working Knowledge") to a video representation of a workplace. The lens provides multiple terms for analysis of workplace behaviors in context, providing a scaffolding for…

Writing studies' "recent enthusiasm" (Roderick "CF 25") for complexity theory has morphed into higher education's rabid embrace of reform. New curricula claim commitment to an "advanced," "networked," and "global" culture by erasing introductory composition, thereby dismissing the…

In this article, the author compares the arguments of Susan Swartzlander, Diana Pace, and Virginia Lee Stamler (1993) who note the contradiction between the "shockingly unprofessional" practice of asking students to write about their personal traumas in writing courses and the common occurrence of such assignments with Jeffrey Berman…

In this essay, the author suggests that recent developments in English studies and popular culture create an opportune moment for writing teachers to welcome such literature in composition curricula. The author describes how studying stories by John Edgar Wideman enabled first-year composition students to engage political and interpersonal issues…

In this author's research, the question of whether it makes sense to think of writing primarily as a generic skill acquired increasing urgency as she gathered qualitative data for a study of the relationship between instructors' expectations in the design of writing assignments and the students' thinking as evidenced both in their essay responses…