Empirical research on composing processes is virtually absent in our field. What "do" contemporary writers actually do when they compose? I argue that we need a return to research on composing processes, as writers are every day weaving together the social and cognitive through writing. One writer's composing process think-aloud suggests…

Building on interest in writing's situatedness and materiality, this article stretches conceptions of writing processes with accounts of writers' unintentional, embodied, and emergent interactions within writing environments, as rendered through reflective multimodal methods combining talk, drawing, photographs, and video.

Around 1986, inventional researchers began to presuppose an externalist philosophy of mind, thereby ushering in the postprocess era. Ecological composition and posthumanism, now understood as postprocess inventional models, present direct pedagogical applications, allowing different objects (e.g., databases, search engines) to qualify as writing…

This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one hand, from the poststructural through the posthuman, our most vigorous theories challenge classical notions of selfhood and agency. On the other hand, from institutional assessment through writing about writing, composition's most vigorous practices…

This article offers a genealogy of the deliberative policymaking of the WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0 Revision Task Force. Interviews with Task Force members reveal that the revised statement presents "composing," "technology," and "genre" as "boundary objects," in order to preserve the document's…

This article analyzes how public policymakers responded to CCCC's 1988 National Language Policy. While many treated CCCC as a leading critic of English-only policies, others interpreted the organization to be more of a hesitant critic, or even an outright ally of the English-only movement. Rather than cede rhetorical ground to monolingual…

This article uses systems and complexity theory to illustrate key characteristics of writing as a complex system. This illustration reveals how writing works on multiple levels of scale, and adds to the body of theoretical knowledge that can be taught within the discipline of writing studies. In so doing, it shows how a complex systems writing…

This article offers a fuller account than we currently have of the complex, uneasy relationship between behaviorism and writing studies in order both to complicate our disciplinary historiography and to encourage writing scholars, teachers, and program administrators to articulate productive and unproductive understandings of writing behaviors.

This essay brings to light new evidence about the relationship between revision and reflective writing in the first-year writing classroom. Based on a robust study of student work, we illuminate a variety of complex relationships between the writing knowledge that students articulate in their reflections--including how they narrate their course…

Drawing from cultural studies and social justice education, this essay argues for the productive potential of racial inquiry in composition scholarship and pedagogy. Ethical imperatives facing rhetoric and composition are also pedagogical opportunities to rethink multiculturalism, politicize student affect, and develop student-centered writing…

Drawing from a large qualitative study, we examine how students experience writing in college, focusing on the conditions that allow students to develop their authorship and those that encourage students to experience writing as a process of following rules and regulations. We situate students' perceptions, and the assignments and practices that…

Through sharing results of an analysis of design language use in several writing studies journals, this article explores why we invoke design in published scholarship. After defining the approach to composing known as design thinking, it then moves to a comparison of design thinking and the writing process and looks at an example application of…

This article details the material, locational, and time-use dimensions of student writing processes in two networked social spaces. Drawing on case examples, the findings show how composing habits grounded in the materiality of places can build persistence for learning in a mobile culture. Public social spaces support these habits, enabling some…

The authors report on a study of writing transfer using a relatively novel method. Specifically, they use screencast videos to study the work of a dozen undergraduates who had taken first-year writing and were now enrolled in an interdisciplinary biology class. The authors argue that students were able to adapt to the writing requirements in the…

Adult students add nuance to the understanding of transfer. Overwhelmingly, research on writing transfer assumes students move from grammar to high school to college to work in one uninterrupted progression. Yet, 40 percent of college students are older than twenty-four, and younger students increasingly work while attending college. These…