That a successful professional life in Rhetoric and Composition depends on a PhD, a tenure line, and an extensive publication record is complicated by the demands that family makes on a professional life. The notion of "making it" in Rhetoric and Composition can also complicate how the field judges the contributions of its participants and the…

Responding to Michelle Ballif, D. Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford's "Women's Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition," this article provides a more expansive definition of "making it," and argues that not only should we focus on women who are professionals in rhetoric and composition at institutions other than the Research I schools and…

English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

Every so often, a technology will saturate the market to the extent that the name of the product becomes a stand-in for the technology itself. While it belongs to the broader genre of slideware, Microsoft PowerPoint is perhaps the best example of software that has achieved that level of ubiquity. Despite Apple's Keynote, the Presentation Editor…

Much composition pedagogy begins writing instruction within familiar territory. As a result, composition educators often structure curriculum and courses so that students first write in familiar genres, like personal narratives, and examine and critique their own lives, experiences, and even beliefs through those genres before turning to…

In Mary Louise Pratt's oft-cited essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," she argues that her son Sam's extracurricular hobby as a baseball card collector taught him about economics, racism, and American history, constituting literate activity that enabled him to hold his own in conversations with adults. Sam was also playing baseball at the time in…

In this article, the author aims to propose an analytic method through which composition students and others might discover and understand the ecological complexities of prevailing environmental terminology that create "wicked problems." Through this method, students engage in "discursive ecology" by exploring the connections among discourse,…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…

English 109.02 is the second of a three-course basic writing track available to all students at The Ohio State University, Ohio's largest public university and flagship institution, which in total serves approximately 45,000 undergraduate students across all campuses. While the Columbus campus places students into the course based on a preliminary…

Using a survey of 138 writing programs, I argue that we must be more explicit about what we think students should get out of analysis to make it more likely that students will transfer their analytical skills to different settings. To ensure our students take analytical skills with them at the end of the semester, we must simplify the task we…

This essay attempts to forge connections between the fields of Composition Studies and professional writing. I argue that a stronger relationship would foster more sustainable ties in light of the corporate university and global capitalism. I point to three of what Dale Jacobs calls threshold spaces, sites where we can foster a culture of…

This essay reflects on the research methods the author employed to write three Chicana teachers into the history of rhetorical education. Her reflections ultimately push beyond her experience to explore how scholars can continue to research and investigate the pedagogies composed by and for marginalized populations at non-elite institutions. In…

This article points composition scholars toward two bodies of theory that are gaining attention in our discipline, performance studies and multimodal discourse theory. Each raises important questions about the ways we teach writing, the kinds of composition processes we value, and the means by which students construct authority in the university.…

While composition programs are frequently responsible for teaching basic research writing, it is still common practice to limit lessons in information literacy to "one-shot" library instruction sessions. This practice reinforces the perception that the research process is separate from (and simpler than) the writing process, that teaching students…

English 302: Writing about the Arts is a practicum course offered at the University of Windsor for upper-level English undergraduate students. The course asks students to write about a variety of art forms and requires engagement with multiple genres of writing as a way for students to effectively order their experiences, reconstruct meaning in…