This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for "high-risk" African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism within…

This article explores the emotioned dimensions of racist discourses at an all-white public high school. I argue that students' racist assertions do not always or even often originate in students' racist attitudes or belief. Instead, racist language functions metaphorically, connecting common racist ideas to nonracist feelings, values, beliefs, and…

This article presents four symposium papers on assessment. It includes: (1) "Closed Systems and Standardized Writing Tests" (Chris M. Anson); (2) "Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments" (Les Perelman); (3) "Genre, Testing, and the Constructed Realities of Student Achievement" (Mya Poe); and (4) "The Call of Research: A…

Like other seemingly ordinary materials (cookbooks, street art, scrapbooks, etc.) the subject of our investigation--holy cards or (in Italian) "immaginette"--often function as rich repositories of personal and cultural memory as well as indicators of popular literacy practices. But to relegate them to the category of ephemera, as is customary with…

In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are…

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have explored political issues of identity and language for some time; however, we have only begun to develop an understanding of why the identity politics of Native scholars are so different from other scholars of color and whites. Native scholars take considerable risks in composing identities--they can face…

Teaching rhetorical production in a digital age calls for us to rethink our discipline's current distaste for writing mechanics. Yet, the digital mechanics of writing are much broader than grammatical concerns. They include production tools that allow for the invention and circulation of audio, visual, and Multigenre writing. (Contains 3 figures…

This essay argues for the value of an ecological metaphor in conceptualizing, designing, and enacting research in writing studies. Such a metaphor conceives of activities, actors, situations, and phenomena as interdependent, diverse, and fused through feedback. This ecological orientation invites composition scholars to research rhetorically: to…

This article presents the text of the author's address at the fifty-ninth annual convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in March 2008. In her address, the author picks up strands of previous Chairs' addresses and weaves them through the fabric of her remarks. What she hopes will give sheen to the fabric is her…

In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important contributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can…

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as "vacuous" themes, this archival study examines women's compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms. By focusing…

This article is a rhetorical analysis of the anxious and outraged discourse employed in response to the "rising tide" of cheating and plagiarism. This discourse invites actions that are antithetical to the goals of education and the roles of educators, as exemplified by the proliferation of plagiarism-detection technologies. (Contains 15 notes.)

The study of writers and writing in digital environments raises distinct and complex ethical issues for researchers. Rhetoric theory and casuistic ethics, working in tandem, provide a theoretical framework for addressing such issues. A casuistic heuristic grounded in rhetorical principles can help digital writing researchers critically…

This article places responses received from an open-ended survey of graduate students and faculty in dialogue with published commentary on the scope of composition studies as a discipline to explore three interrelated disciplinary dilemmas: the "pedagogical imperative," the "theory-practice split," and the increasingly complicated relationship…

This essay reports on a study of first-year student writing. Based on a stratified national sample, the study attempts to replicate research conducted twenty-two years ago and to chart the changes that have taken place in student writing since then. The findings suggest that papers are longer, employ different genres, and contain new error…