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…

This article summarizes various applications of oral history interviews at local sites to represent the writing of underrepresented groups. The coauthors (a rhetorician and an archivist) discuss the important disciplinary implications for tending to the local, especially at sites where formal archives are hard to come by, offering three principles…

This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategically in an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization and to strengthen the…

The concept of the contact zone has been around for some time and deserves reconsideration. As a gesture toward this reevaluation and as an exploration of indigenous rhetoric, the author takes up Felipe Guaman Poma's "El primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno" (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), the text that Mary Louise Pratt credits as…

This essay suggests a companion term to "literacy sponsors" that better mirrors the practice and protection of traditional literacies evident in the cases of two Dakelh elders. "Literacy steward" introduces a theoretical means to describe community members whose rhetorical decisions depend on traditions that are alternative to dominant literacies.…

Malea Powell's description of composition and rhetoric's scholarship on American Indian texts echoes assertions made by Scott Richard Lyons, who writes that while the literature of the past decade demonstrates the discipline's efforts at including Native ways of knowing in scholarly discussions and classroom curricula, representations of Native…

Through an eighty-one-year-old woman's literacy narrative, I argue that literacy researchers should pay greater attention to elder writers, readers, and learners. Particularly as notions of literacy shift in digital times, the perspective of a lifespan can reveal otherwise hidden complexities of literacy, including the motivational impact of…

In the technical communication classroom, the received wisdom is that good instructions should "stay out of the way" of the users' engagement with technological systems. This article draws on Burke's concept of perspective by incongruity and on examples of instructions produced during the Women's Health Movement to demonstrate that sometimes…

Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and…

The 2003 annual meeting of Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) opened in New York concurrently with the US invasion of Iraq on March 18, and many conference participants discussed the relation between rhetoric, the teaching of writing, and the war. This article presents some of the more memorable reflections on rhetoric and…