In this case study, an accomplished academic writer struggles to produce very brief game summaries for a local newspaper as part of the service requirements to his son's community football team. An analysis of his experience demonstrates the universal challenge of transfer regardless of prior knowledge or meta-awareness of rhetorical strategies…

Drawing on findings from three qualitative studies, this article explores the distinct professional identities of two-year college English faculty. We examine full-time faculty patterns of engagement with professional organizations, their assertion of professional authority in institutional decision making, and the role of organizational…

While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers' compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic…

In this article, the author shares his notes toward a shared future for National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). He discusses how activism has been at the heart of both organizations, how language activism in particular has separated NCTE and CCCC--and brought them together, and…

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…

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their…

Critical writing is intertwined with performances of professional identity, voice, and persona--performances that can be studied and practiced. To that end, the author proposes that one intuitive place to locate such study and practice is in English graduate curricula. This essay calls for an explicit commitment to graduate-level writing…

This article, which is coauthored by former and current SIG (special interest group) leaders, describes the SIG's history, its member profile, and the scholarly and teacherly endeavors that have grown from their work together. The article also describes the significance of this successful partnership beyond the immediate work of the SIG, including…

This essay argues that a trend in histories of literary and writing studies is to bifurcate the origins of the fields and so engage in those modernist narrative fallacies described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Such works limit our understanding of past practices and the longstanding connections between disciplinarity and labor. (Contains 2 notes.)

In the new century, calls to promote "college readiness" among high school students have accelerated to a degree that would have astonished even the privileged and powerful colleges of the past. The most conspicuous evidence for such acceleration is the increasing popularity among schools, students, and colleges alike of dual-credit programs,…

Reporting on a year-and-a-half-long study of Latina/Latino multilingual students transitioning from high school to a community college or university on the US-Mexico border, this article explores how writing instruction was shaped across the three institutional locations by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing…

This essay describes Louisiana State University's search for an alternative to available placement protocols. Under the leadership of Les Perelman at MIT, LSU collaborated with four universities to develop iMOAT, a program for administering online assessments of student writing. This essay focuses on LSU's On-line Challenge, which developed from…

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for "high-risk" minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary…

Discusses the "dramatistic" pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) as a structure for the analysis of both literary texts and human relations. (DD)

Applies Burke's dramatistic pentad to the stages of the writing process. (DD)