This study argues for the importance of analyzing individual students' responses to writing instruction in crafting histories of the field of rhetoric and composition. I engage in an archival study of student writing at the University of Kansas during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, specifically through a genre-based local…

Over the past three decades, researchers have studied doctoral research training programs using large scale surveys making visible trends in numbers of and kinds of research courses required, or using focused qualitative methods to gain rich, textured accounts of graduate school experiences. Both kinds of studies fail to capture the local,…