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…

Responding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of plagiarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism; second,…

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton's multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the…

In this article we provide a "portrait" of an exemplary writing teacher and the social construction of authority he established with students in two courses. The portrait demonstrates that teacher authority is most essentially a form of professional authority granted by students who affirm the teacher's expertise, self-confidence, and belief in…

A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives--Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary," Richard Rodriguez's "Hunger of Memory," Victor Villanueva's "Bootstraps," and Keith Gilyard's "Voices of the Self"--shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these…

As English spreads as an international language, it evolves through diverse users' writing and speaking. However, traditional views of ESL users focus on their distance from fairly static notions of English-language competence. This research uses a grounded theory approach to describe a range of competencies that emerge in ESL users' interactions…

Reflecting the digital turn in composition studies, multimedia writing courses have become commonplace in many writing programs. Yet these technology-rich courses take on new significance when located within a rhetorically based writing major, especially as a core course. This article explores a developing writing and rhetoric major through…

Based on a study of observable changes author-users made to three Wikipedia articles, this article contends that Wikipedia supports notions of revision, collaboration, and authority that writing studies purports to value, while also extending our understanding of the production of knowledge in public spaces. It argues that Wikipedia asks us to…

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public…

Recent appeal to the concept of design in composition studies benefits teaching writing in digital media. Yet the concept of design has not been developed enough to fully benefit composition instruction. This article develops an understanding of design as a matter of resolving wicked problems and makes a case for the advantages of this…

When the author became a professor with interests in literature, composition, technical communication, speech, and rhetoric, he little anticipated the extent to which book collecting could affect research and teaching, but his finds increasingly enlightened him. As he gravitated toward composition, technical communication, speech, and rhetoric in…

In this essay, the author explains how teaching assistant (TA) unions work to the benefit not only of the graduate students who are their members but also of the writing programs that employ them. While university administrations understand unions to be bothersome at best and forces of evil at their worst, unions are essential to the maintenance…

Academic institutions mediate online literacy practices in meaningful and significant ways. This essay explores the nature of that mediational process, using a visual-spatial method to map out and conceptualize dynamics and structures that have a bearing on the work of composition. A key argument is that composition teachers are intellectually…

This article explores the literacy narratives of two "gamers" to demonstrate the kinds of literacy skills that many students actively involved in computer and video gaming are developing during their play. This analysis becomes part of a larger claim about the necessity of re-visioning the place of gaming in composition curricula. Ultimately, the…

Based on an ethnographic study of a writing course taught by a talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy approaches, I argue that many students actively engage with the concerns of critical pedagogy when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency--their ownership of their developing ideas and texts. (Contains 10…