This article situates the "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing" in current educational policy and in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. It argues the Framework positions the discipline to address gaps in American education by reinvigorating historical and traditional frames for writing instruction--ancient rhetoric and the…

In this Symposium focused on MOOCs, this journal carries forward a tradition of attending to the technologies associated with composing and the teaching of composing. In the May 1983 issue of "College Composition and Communication," for example, most of the articles focus on composing and include a mix of inquiries, from Jack Selzer's on the…

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…

This article argues for and models an approach to writing program assessment that relies on study of the writing practices of program graduates as a way to inform revisions in curriculum and teaching practices. The article also examines how conducting such assessments can help nondisciplinary publics understand the nature of composition …

This article defines research centers as associative enterprises for solving scholarly and societal problems that cannot be adequately addressed by individuals. The authors identify more than fifty research centers in rhetoric and writing, past and present, and argue that they function as change agents by emphasizing collaboration and conducting…

This article presents the address given by Valenino at the sixty-first convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) held in Louisville on March 18, 2010. In her address, the author discusses the fourth "C" and how the last part of the title was inherited. As a teacher of composition and oral communication, the…

This article compares essays written in response to the ACT Essay prompt and a locally developed prompt used for placement. The two writing situations differ by time and genre: the ACT Essay is timed and argumentative; the locally developed is untimed and explanatory. The article analyzes the differences in student performance and predictive…

This article argues that tracing multimodal-multilingual literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces is key to moving composition into the twenty-first century. Key to this remixing of the field is a situated framework that locates multimodal-multilingual activities in wider genre, cultural, national, and global ecologies. (Contains 3…

While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different in their…

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities…

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of "race" through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in "College Composition and Communication" and "College English" since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what "race" is…

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory--"intersectionality," "copresence," and "disidentification"--are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk…

This article defines applied rhetorical work as integral to the intellectual work of writing program administration and asks our professional organizations to classify it as such within our position statements. With a specific case, it offers a generative framework for representing and assessing the work's scholarly commons for professional…

This historical exploration tracks changes in rules concerning figurative language in nineteenth-century composition-rhetoric textbooks. The century's lessening of millennium-long restriction of the poetic allowed not only creative writing into academia but composition as well, as composition at its beginning was intertwined with creative writing.…

While writing pedagogy instructors assign their students a range of writing tasks, often as central or repeated features of the course, a crucial question has not yet been addressed: does it matter what new teachers write? If pedagogy students are being assigned writing in part to further develop their attitudes and practices related to teaching…