I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place…

Rhetoric and composition scholars' almost exclusive reliance on Brian Massumi's definition of affect has spurred a theoretical and practical divorce between "affect" and "emotion" in our field. This article returns to Lynn Worsham's "Going Postal" and argues that to fully scrutinize and respond to what she calls…

In the spaces where the teaching of first-year writing occurs in the North American university and community college, Composition Studies is still a relatively young discipline, and remains focused on process, thesis sentence, argument, and propositional, and linear logic as primary goals. The rhetorical practices that underlie the discipline of…