This essay explores how students' misconceptions about writing might be transformed into accurate threshold concepts of writing through disciplinary writing experiences. Through an activity analysis of a geology major and students' writing in that program, I demonstrate that these students' conceptions of writing changed through their legitimate…

Undergraduate writing fellows play an important role in administering writing assignments in writing-intensive courses. At the University of Michigan, the MWrite program was designed to support the implementation of writing-to-learn (WTL) assignments in STEM courses. Within MWrite, writing fellows are a primary instructional resource for students…

This study reports on how a cohort of 16 especially accomplished undergraduate STEM majors narrate their literacy histories, experience learning to write in the sciences during their college years, and reflect on their priorities for writing more generally. These participants report largely positive early schooling experiences with writing;…

In this article, we explore how members of the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning's (AAEEBL) Digital Ethics Task Force used their third space discursive expertise to conceptualize Principles for Digital Ethics in ePortfolios and argue that the diversity of their roles is directly responsible for the successful…

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…

Research on written communication shows that rhetorical knowledge is a key domain of disciplinary writing expertise (Gere et. al. 2019). Much of the recent work in this area has focused on the social dimensions of learning this knowledge. This article builds on these conversations with a presentation of two "advanced academic writers"…

This research study of a WAC learning community focuses on instructors' behind-the-scenes decision making about assignment design. Specifically, we show how instructors use direct personal experience--as students, teachers and scholars--to approach writing assignment design, invoking these experiences to discuss the origin of their assignments and…

Students in the sciences learn to engage with primary research articles as a fundamental part of their discipline, essential to both writing and research. These sources are difficult to navigate, leading students to use (and misuse) these sources in a variety of complex ways. As instructors and researchers, we are aware of these challenges, but…

For most graduate writers, acclimating to doctoral-level inquiry is fraught with numerous tensions, whether regarding the development of scholarly identity (Gardner et al., 2014), navigating graduate school's newly decentralized sources for support (Simpson, 2012), or mastering the writing and research conventions that govern disciplinary…

In moves to fortify the discipline and articulate its value, does writing studies risk perpetuating narrow views of disciplinarity and academic writing? Drawing from an analysis of the intersections between WAC/WID [Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines] and transfer scholarship in popular rhetoric and composition journals, I…

This article shares results from a qualitative research project that examines the similarities and differences in how composition textbooks and science-writing textbooks address visual communication topics. This research has two goals. First, it seeks to better understand how visual communication is practiced and valued in the composition and…

This article draws upon Bergmann and Zepernick's (2007) metaphor of the box under the bed to investigate the relationship between students' epistemologies and their learning transfer in diverse contexts over undergraduate years. We present a systemic analysis of 13 students' interviews and writing samples over a five-year period, through which we…

Difference or facts of nonusage present a challenge to teacher-scholars of writing and rhetoric in WAC/WID and beyond. How can they appropriately engage different language and rhetorical practices in the classroom and relations of power asymmetry in discursive engagements? How can they effectively address issues of disciplinarity and challenge…

Writing transfer scholarship is more systematically investigating the influence of dispositions, which are internal qualities that influence how individuals react to learning contexts. In this article, we consider dispositions in science laboratories, which are important contexts for WAC/WID instruction, especially at institutions where these…

This study reports on learning outcomes of one-credit writing-intensive (W) courses in the disciplines at a large public university where three-credit W courses are the norm. An evaluation of 210 final papers from four departments--Allied Health, Animal Science, Economics, and Nutritional Sciences--revealed that writing outcomes, as defined and…