This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls "procedural feminism," or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will…

This article reports on one university's experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed "MonsterComp," including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures,…

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet's "JAC" article ("Composition as a Management Science"), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field's key terms in…

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…

Writing educators have long sought to disrupt academic convention. However, we currently know little about students' affective experiences when they are asked to compose differently. This article explores the results of a research study to illuminate the feelings and attitudes students experience when convention is disrupted and offers pedagogical…

Through an examination of archival texts produced at sites of suppressed local rhetorics, this essay situates Oklahoma as a location of writing at the intersection of ecocomposition theory, critical regionalism, and composition pedagogy to establish the need for using local texts and transrhetorical analysis in writing classrooms.

This article draws on qualitative research conducted as a part of a writing program assessment to examine the relationship between assessment, valuation, and the economics of first-year writing. It argues that the terms of labor in first-year writing complicate practices of valuation and the processes of consensus building that have become common…

Through an analysis of student writing and interviews, this article examines hyperbole as a neglected rhetorical device. The authors trouble notions of hyperbole as error and argue for a--reconceptualization of hyperbole as potentially highly communicative and able to convey emotional tone, passion, and significance while maintaining brevity.

This essay revisits and expands on Gary A. Olson and Joseph M. Moxley's 1989 article "Directing Freshman Composition: The Limits of Authority" by looking at revised notions of writing program administrators' work and authority in 2012. Whereas the original essay surveyed only department chairs, our study includes data from both…

This article explores shared language development in secondary to postsecondary transitions. Based on survey findings of secondary students, the authors advocate using a shared language corpus to access and collect student and instructor language about writing to smooth secondary to postsecondary transitions and transitions beyond the FYC…

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…

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is "simplistic in method and impoverished in content" by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a…

Teaching reading in terms of its connections to writing can motivate students to read and increase the likelihood that they find success in both activities. It can lead students to value reading as an integral aspect of learning to write. It can help students develop their understanding of writerly strategies and techniques. Drawing on qualitative…

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…

I draw upon Eileen Schell's notions of "maternal pedagogy" and an "ethic of care" to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot "lay reader" programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay…