Composition, rhetoric, and writing studies (CRWS) as a field has historically recognized the importance of mentoring for graduate students, but there can be a disconnect between learning theory and how mentoring occurs in practice. In this article, we argue for a more systematic approach to graduate student mentoring that recognizes the benefits…

The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered.…

Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of…

Of the 40% of internet users who have faced harassment online, young adults, women, and racial minorities are especially vulnerable, experiencing more severe harassment and experiencing it more often. This article attempts to reconcile the increasingly urgent calls for students to compose in public spaces online with the reality of potential…

This piece examines the Writing Studies job market from a perspective not addressed in previous literature: accessibility. I draw on work in the field of disability studies to argue that accessibility does not only affect those people who identify as having a disability; rather, it is a concept that speaks to how well all candidates are able to…

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors' emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in…

This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power…

This essay explores Black male literacy practices as institutional critique at a large Midwestern land grant university. Through documenting a student's process of reinstatement at his university, I demonstrate how vernacular perspectives, language, and networking strategies are used for developing self-efficacy and critical literacies. Black…

Traditional Rhetorical Genre Study (RGS) methods are not well adapted to study exclusion because excluded information and people are typically absent from the genre, and some excluded information is simply unrelated to the genre because of genre conventions or social context. Within genre-based silences, how can scholars differentiate between an…

This article presents the case for using a critical literacy approach to enhance the freshman composition experience for second language writers. As our classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural with each passing semester, we need to move away from thinking of our ESL students as "outliers" and consider them as key…

Discusses the redistribution of power and authority invited by networked computers. Examines the changing roles of teachers and tutors as they set up and monitor occasions for writing to take advantage of the increased participation and involvement when students write with computers. Discusses how this valuable experience can be most effectively…

The issue of social class rarely injects itself into assignments in honors English composition courses. The students take few chances with structure, analysis, voice, or audience invocation. Clearly bright students, they seemed baffled when asked for complication in their thinking or to take a chance with an unconventional structure. It was time…

While sitting on a bench outside the university's museum grappling with his own emotional numbness and inability to comprehend the traumatic events of 9-11, John Wittman watched a group of 4 students circling one of the main buildings on campus with an American flag on the back of the roll bar of a truck. Having thought about the flag-waving…

Merry Perry teaches English courses (both writing and literature) where the majority of the students are white, middle class, and conservative. Perry begins the article by saying that in such an academic environment, her most challenging task is not teaching grammar, punctuation, or editing skills, but challenging these students to think about and…