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…

The article describes and analyzes the exclusion of LGBT content in composition courses by reporting on a study of how queerness is (and is not) incorporated into first-year writing courses. The authors critically examine the presence or absence of LGBT issues in first-year composition readers; offer analyses of how some first-year readers handle…

Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they "see" in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals. (Contains 30 notes.)

This article examines the historiographic trajectory of rhetoric and composition studies by analyzing archival research practices, using Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad as our analytical tool. We rely on a Burkean framework of "scenes, acts, agents, agencies, purposes, and attitudes" to invigorate our understanding of historiographic methods…

The pharmaceutical industry's corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing…

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…

When examined rhetorically, Savannah River Site Community Preparedness Information calendars from 1994, 2004, and 2008 represent living rhetorical practices aimed at changing the public mind. My technical communication classroom at USC Aiken is uniquely situated for us to examine documents constantly generated by the site's Public Affairs…

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…

This article examines the rhetoric of resistance used by South African anti-apartheid journalists to expose the links between the apartheid government and death squads. By utilizing allusions, repetition, and a concept I refer to as "subversive enthymemes," these journalists managed to reveal publicly information about death squad activity in a…

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 antiracist…

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.…

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women's colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism,…