The authors discuss the state of digital publication with the claim that, at this historical moment, nearly all composition is digital composition. But, as a field, composition studies has not yet made that shift completely explicit in the discussions of composing processes and writing pedagogies. A deeper engagement with this very rapid shift in…

The authors report that the last decade has been an exciting time for electronic scholarly publication, especially in composition and rhetoric, where digital media experimentation has coincided with a rapidly increasing engagement with multimedia and multimodal composition. However, the field's embrace of electronic publication has been…

This article examines Wayne C. Booth's legacy as a teacher and scholar through the concept of rhetoric as mutual inquiry that he develops from "Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent" (1974) through "The Rhetoric of Rhetoric" (2004). Booth's work connects the political and pedagogical in pragmatic and productive ways…

The author explains that Parlor Press is an independent publisher and distributor of scholarly and trade books in print and digital formats. It was founded in 2002 to address the need for an alternative scholarly, academic press attentive to emergent ideas and forms while maintaining the highest possible standards of quality, credibility, and…

This essay in counterstory suggests a method by which to incorporate critical race theory (CRT) in rhetoric and composition, as a contribution of other(ed) perspectives toward an ongoing conversation in the field about narrative, dominant ideology, and their intersecting influence on programmatic and curricular standards and practices. As a…

This article offers a survey of three reliability theories in writing assessment: positivist, hermeneutic, and rhetorical. Drawing on an interdisciplinary investigation of the notion of "witnessing," this survey emphasizes the kinds of readers and readings each theory of reliability produces and the epistemological grounds on which it…

Composition historians have recently worked to recover histories of composition in normal schools. This essay argues, however, that historians have inadvertently misconstrued the role of normal schools in American education by inaccurately comparing rhetorical education in normal schools to rhetorical education in colleges and universities.…

This essay builds upon prior attempts to foster linkages between the disciplines of Composition Studies and professional writing. I take up Jennifer Bay's suggestion that service learning is a site for connection and "hospitality" (in a Derridean sense) between these disciplines, advocating for and at the same time complicating Bay's proposal.…

This article explores historical debates over the relationship of composition to rhetoric, arguing that these debates resonate with contemporary arguments about first year writing and undergraduate and graduate programs in writing and rhetoric. Analyzing early scholars' articulations of the differing aims of undergraduate and graduate studies,…

The authors draw on two surveys conducted in 2009-10 with graduates from the BA in Professional Writing at Penn State Berks, a branch campus of Penn State University. The surveys led the authors to understand a set of common attributes among our alumni (what they call a "rhetoric of professionalism") while at the same time problematizing the…

Following a brief introduction to problem-based learning (PBL) as one type of highly-engaged pedagogy, this article examines how PBL activities in a first-year writing class and an upper-level professional writing and rhetoric class led students to develop rhetorical subjectivities. We conclude that highly engaged pedagogies, like PBL, that…

This article explores the relationship between teacher authority and flaming in asynchronous online communication. Teachers who rely on what I call stabilization and universal applicability--two concepts emerging from a liberal democratic theory--may actually be preventing a full and robust understanding of the complexities of 21st-century…

This article differentiates three primary ways scholars in Composition and Rhetoric talk about embodiment as it relates to knowledge production and writing in the academy: embodied language, embodied knowledge, and embodied rhetoric. While these categories overlap and inform each other, clarifying the definitions themselves is important as there…

WRT 302: Writing Culture is an upper-level elective in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island (URI). As part of a group of four 300-level courses, Writing 302 draws many junior and senior majors in Writing and Rhetoric, English, and other majors who are looking to add creativity and experience with design to their…

Walter Ong tells us that the noetic--the rhetorical characteristics of feeling, sensation, and intuition applied to a given communicative situation or act--stems from the oral tradition. The noetic contrasts with the print legacy of argument in which "teaching something is the same as 'proving' it'" ("Ramus" 156). Ong's sense of the noetic…