264 books match the query 'Composition' and 19 start with s

cover of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition

The Importance of Teaching for Transfer

Ellen C. Carillo

Utah State University Press, 2014

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond.

Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a “mindful reading” framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.


[more]
cover of Self+Culture+Writing: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies

Self+Culture+Writing

Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies

Rebecca Jackson

Utah State University Press, 2021

Literally translated as “self-culture-writing,” autoethnography—as both process and product—holds great promise for scholars and researchers in writings studies who endeavor to describe, understand, analyze, and critique the ways in which selves, cultures, writing, and representation intersect. Self+Culture+Writing foregrounds the possibility of autoethnography as a viable methodological approach and provides researchers and instructors with ways of understanding, crafting, and teaching autoethnography within writing studies.
 
Interest in autoethnography is growing among writing studies scholars, who see clear connections to well-known disciplinary conversations about personal narrative, as well as to the narrative turn in general and social justice efforts in particular. Contributions by authors from diverse backgrounds and institutional settings are organized into three parts: a section of writing studies autoethnographies, a section on how to teach autoethnography, and a section on how ideas about autoethnography in writing studies are evolving.
 
Self+Culture+Writing discusses the use of autoethnography in the writing classroom as both a research method and a legitimate way of knowing, providing examples of the genre and theoretical discussions that highlight the usefulness and limitations of these methods.
 
Contributors: Leslie Akst, Melissa Atienza, Ross Atkinson, Alison Cardinal, Sue Doe, Will Duffy, John Gagnon, Elena Garcia, Guadalupe Garcia, Caleb Gonzalez, Lilly Halboth, Rebecca Hallman Martini, Kirsten Higgins, Shereen Inayatulla, Aliyah Jones, Autumn Laws, Soyeon Lee, Louis M. Maraj, Kira Marshall-McKelvey, Jennifer Owen, Tiffany Rainey, Marcie Sims, Amanda Sladek, Trixie Smith, Anthony Warnke
 
 
 
[more]
cover of Semantic Tectonics: Writing Studies, Intersubjectivity, and the End of Solipsism

Semantic Tectonics

Writing Studies, Intersubjectivity, and the End of Solipsism

Dylan B. Dryer

Utah State University Press, 2026

Semantic Tectonics offers an engaging contribution to the ongoing conversation about the alliances of convenience and fissiparous relations among second--language writing, rhetoric, technical and professional communication, composition, and basic writing. From a theoretical perspective, the book brings together insights from a range of important scholars who have advanced relational alternatives to Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, self and other, thought and language. Naming these dualisms “solipsism,” the book extends these alternatives into empirical inquiries into the lexicogrammar of contemporary writing studies scholarship, using corpus analytics to bolster, and sometimes challenge, critical-discourse and content--analytic approaches.

With frequent pauses to explain and model corpus tools and applications, to pose questions for further inquiry, and to contemplate pedagogical or civic applications, Semantic Tectonics shows how the field’s social mission is constrained by tacit beliefs about critical concepts like language, self, context, genre, reflection, agency, and development. By foregrounding the empirical study of patterns in language itself, this book inspires readers to shift their perspective to the operational significance of word- and phrase-level discourse as sites for ideological and pedagogical intervention.

[more]
cover of Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers

Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers

Rita Malenczyk

Utah State University Press, 2023

In this collection writing program and writing center administrators from a range of academic institutions come together to explore their work through the lens of sensemaking. Sensemaking is an organizational theory concept that enables institutions, supervisors, teachers, tutors, and others to better understand the work they do by using narrative, metaphor, and other theoretical lenses.
 
The book is divided into two sections: Sensemaking with Tutors and Teachers, and Sensemaking and Institutional Structures. Chapter authors employ several theoretical approaches to sensemaking, ranging from individual experience to institutional history to document design, providing readers with ideas for how to administer and teach within their programs more effectively; how to advocate for their programs within larger university contexts; and how to positively influence the lives and careers of those they work with.
 
Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers theorizes daily experiences from working lives and suggests problem-solving strategies. Writing program administrators, writing department chairs, and writing center directors, tutors, and staff will find value in its pages.
[more]
cover of Sexual Harassment and Cultural Change in Writing Studies

Sexual Harassment and Cultural Change in Writing Studies

Patricia Freitag Ericsson

University Press of Colorado, 2020

This collective project provides vital groundwork for understanding sexual harassment as well as encouraging the difficult conversations that are steps to awareness, action, and prevention. The project mandates a heightened consciousness of sexual harassment in American culture and underscores the profound commitment to cultural change necessary to eradicate this toxic social issue. Focusing on writing studies but applicable to other areas of higher education, the authors provide history, definitional backgrounds, best-practice approaches to prevention, scenarios for anti-sexual harassment training, and an extensive bibliography. The contributors have created a dynamic resource for a wide variety of audiences, including those who are leading programs, training new faculty and graduate students, preparing peer tutors, designing workshops, and teaching both undergraduate and graduate classes. This book can be used to start conversations, construct training, and improve policy—all of these in the contexts of local situations and constraints.
 
[more]
cover of Sites of Writing: Essays in Honor of Anne Ruggles Gere

Sites of Writing

Essays in Honor of Anne Ruggles Gere

James Edward Beitler

University Press of Colorado, 2026

Sites of Writing builds upon the multiple contributions of Anne Ruggles Gere across a long and highly productive career. The chapters in this edited collection, written by leading scholars (including some of Gere’s former students) to track her major contributions to writing studies, situate those contributions within the broader landscape of field development, and draw on those findings to assess important trends and project productive pathways for the future. The contributors to the collection consider disciplinary history, language and literacy, writing across the curriculum, digital rhetoric, writing’s extracurriculum, assessment, and English education, among other areas. Connecting these multiple fields of activity, Sites of Writing affirms Gere’s view of writing as a powerful social and cultural activity and of literacy, broadly conceived, as enabling cultural transformations and, in the process, transforming writing studies and other fields.

[more]
cover of Situating Writing Processes: Physicality, Improvisation, and the Teaching of Writing

Situating Writing Processes

Physicality, Improvisation, and the Teaching of Writing

Hannah Rule

University Press of Colorado, 2020

What should it mean today to "teach writing as a process"? In Situating Writing Processes, Hannah J. Rule takes stock of this familiar commonplace in composition studies, arguing for a renewed understanding of process that emphasizes situatedness. To situate processes is to physically locate them: to observe the infinite ways they are shaped by particular bodies and affects, environments and spaces, others near and distant, and various tools or objects. When we call attention to the physical, material, and located dimensions of processes, we foreground the differences, contingencies, and lived experiences of composing. Doing so is critical, Rule argues, to finally letting go of discrete skills and instead teaching writing as experience in seeing and responding to ranging constraints immediate and distant, material and social. Situating processes ultimately emphasizes vulnerability: how all writing involves risk, uncertainty, and the possibility of failure, as processes are susceptible to the participation and control of forces on ranging scales and always in excess of the writer alone. Accounting for context, difference, and improvisation, Situating Writing Processes helps writing teachers and scholars freshly reimagine the histories and potential of an enduring concept.
[more]
cover of Sixteen Teachers Teaching: Two-Year College Perspectives

Sixteen Teachers Teaching

Two-Year College Perspectives

Patrick Sullivan

Utah State University Press, 2020

Sixteen Teachers Teaching is a warmly personal, full-access tour into the classrooms and teaching practices of sixteen distinguished two-year college English professors. Approximately half of all basic writing and first-year composition classes are now taught at two-year colleges, so the perspectives of English faculty who teach at these institutions are particularly valuable for our profession. This book shows us how a group of acclaimed teachers put together their classes, design reading and writing assignments, and theorize their work as writing instructors.
 
All of these teachers have spent their careers teaching multiple sections of writing classes each semester or term, so this book presents readers with an impressive—and perhaps unprecedented—abundance of pedagogical expertise, teaching knowledge, and classroom experience. Sixteen Teachers Teaching is a book filled with joyfulness, wisdom, and pragmatic advice. It has been designed to be a source of inspiration for high school and college English teachers as they go about their daily work in the classroom.

Contributors: Peter Adams, Jeff Andelora, Helane Adams Androne, Taiyon J. Coleman, Renee DeLong, Kathleen Sheerin DeVore, Jamey Gallagher, Shannon Gibney, Joanne Baird Giordano, Brett Griffiths, Holly Hassel, Darin Jensen, Jeff Klausman, Michael C. Kuhne, Hope Parisi, and Howard Tinberg
 
[more]
cover of Solving Problems in Technical Communication

Solving Problems in Technical Communication

Edited by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The field of technical communication is rapidly expanding in both the academic world and the private sector, yet a problematic divide remains between theory and practice. Here Stuart A. Selber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, both respected scholars and teachers of technical communication, effectively bridge that gap.

Solving Problems in Technical Communication collects the latest research and theory in the field and applies it to real-world problems faced by practitioners—problems involving ethics, intercultural communication, new media, and other areas that determine the boundaries of the discipline. The book is structured in four parts, offering an overview of the field, situating it historically and culturally, reviewing various theoretical approaches to technical communication, and examining how the field can be advanced by drawing on diverse perspectives. Timely, informed, and practical, Solving Problems in Technical Communication will be an essential tool for undergraduates and graduate students as they begin the transition from classroom to career.
[more]
cover of Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Writing Studies

Speaking Up, Speaking Out

Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Writing Studies

Jessica Edwards

Utah State University Press, 2020

Speaking Up, Speaking Out addresses the lived experiences of those working in the non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) trenches through storytelling and reflection. By connecting NTTF voices from various aspects of writing studies, the collection offers fresh perspectives and meaningful contributions, imagining the possibilities for contingent faculty to be valued and honored in educational systems that often do the opposite. Challenging traditional ways of seeing NTTF, the work contains multiple entry points to NTT life: those with and without “terminal degrees,” those with PhDs, and those who have held or currently hold tenured positions.
 
Each chapter suggests tangible ways that writing departments and supporters can be more thoughtful about their policies and practices as they work to create more equitable spaces for NTTF. Speaking Up, Speaking Out considers the rhetorical power of labeling and asserts why contingent faculty, for far too long, have been compared to and against TT faculty and often encouraged to reach the same or similar productivity with scholarship, teaching, and service that TT faculty produce. The myopic ideas about what is valued and whose position is deemed more important impacts contingent faculty in ways that, as contributors in this collection share, effect and affect faculty productivity, emotional health, and overall community involvement.
 
Contributors: Norah Ashe-McNalley, Sarah Austin, Rachel Azima, Megan Boeshart Burelle, Peter Brooks, Denise Comer, Jessica Cory, Liz Gumm, Brendan Hawkins, Heather Jordan, Nathalie Joseph, Julie Karaus, Christopher Lee, John McHone, Angie McKinnon Carter, Dauvan Mulally, Seth Myers, Liliana M. Naydan, Linda Shelton, Erica Stone, Elizabeth Vincelette, Lacey Wootton
 
[more]
cover of Standing at the Threshold: Working through Liminality in the Composition and Rhetoric TAship

Standing at the Threshold

Working through Liminality in the Composition and Rhetoric TAship

William J. Macauley

Utah State University Press, 2021

Standing at the Threshold articulates identity and role dissonances experienced by composition and rhetoric teaching assistants and reimagines the TAship within a larger professional development process. Current researchers and scholars have not fully explored the liminality of the profession’s traditional path to credentialing. This collection reconsiders these positions and their contributions to academic careers.
 
These authors enrich the TA experience by supporting agency and self-efficacy, encouraging TAs to take active roles in understanding their positions and making the most of that experience. Many chapters are written by current or former TAs who are writing as a means of preparing, informing, and guiding new rhet/comp TAs, encouraging them to make choices about how they want to think through and participate in their teaching work.
 
The first work on the market to delve deeply into the TAship itself and what it means for the larger discipline, Standing at the Threshold provides a rich new theorizing based in the real experiences and liminalities of teaching assistants in composition and rhetoric, approached from a productive array of perspectives.
 
Contributors: Lew Caccia, Lillian Campbell, Rachel Donegan, Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannady, Jennifer K. Johnson, Ronda Leathers Dively, Faith Matzker, Jessica Restaino, Elizabeth Saur, Megan Schoettler, Kylee Thacker Maurer
 
[more]
cover of Stick Houses: Stories

Stick Houses

Stories

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Michigan State University Press, 2025

As researchers tried to prompt his mother to say that her ancestors lived in wigwams or teepees, Matthew L. M. Fletcher’s mother insisted her ancestors lived in stick houses. From the opening lines of Fletcher’s story collection, he sets the scene to disrupt narrative stereotypes and expectations about how Indigenous people are perceived. He provides insight into the complex world in which Anishinaabe people live, stripped of the ownership of much of their homeland. In Stick Houses, Fletcher explores what this loss of place has meant to the Anishinaabe people of Michigan. It explores how they must leave and come back. There is dispossession and separation, but there is also reunion and restoration. 
These stories explore themes of home and belonging, and how Native people are not just one thing; they are both Native and non-Native blood. Some are deeply connected to their Anishinaabe heritage, while others have suffered a complete loss of their culture. Many Native people are conflicted about their background and suffer intergenerational trauma. These stories originate in dynamic environments and situations such as airports, college, Indian lawyering, and high school baseball games.
[more]
cover of Stories from First-Year Composition: FYC Pedagogies that Foster Student Writing Identity and Agency

Stories from First-Year Composition

FYC Pedagogies that Foster Student Writing Identity and Agency

Jo-Anne Kerr

University Press of Colorado, 2020

The central value of first-year composition is often questioned, typically accompanied by characterizations of FYC as a “service” course. This collection counters those perceptions, sharing with readers a new FYC story, one that demonstrates a new “service” that the course provides to first-year students, a service that accommodates the realities of writing—that it is never just writing and that the writing process entails much more than plugging in the “right” words (that mean the same to everyone) in predetermined forms. The collection offers insights into effective FYC pedagogies and opportunities for readers to consider and think about their own teaching and their identities as FYC instructors. It offers prompts for reflection, suggestions for further reading, and multimedia components that can deepen and enrich our understandings of teaching FYC and instill a sense of agency for teaching FYC effectively and advocating for its value and relevance.
 
[more]
cover of Stories of Becoming: Demystifying the Professoriate for Graduate Students in Composition and Rhetoric

Stories of Becoming

Demystifying the Professoriate for Graduate Students in Composition and Rhetoric

Claire Lutkewitte

Utah State University Press, 2021

Based on findings from a multiyear, nationwide study of new faculty in the field of rhetoric and composition, Stories of Becoming provides graduate students—and those who train them—with specific strategies for preparing for a career in the professoriate. Through the use of stories, the authors invite readers to experience their collaborative research processes for conducting a nationwide survey, qualitative interviews, and textual analysis of professional documents.
 
Using data from the study, the authors offer six specific strategies—including how to manage time, how to create a work/life balance, and how to collaborate with others—that readers can use to prepare for the composition and rhetoric job market and to begin their careers as full-time faculty members. Readers will learn about the possible responsibilities they may take on as new faculty, particularly those that go beyond teaching, research, service, and administration to include navigating the politics of higher education and negotiating professional identity construction. And they will also engage in activities and answer questions designed to deepen their understanding of the field and help them identify their own values and desired career trajectory.
 
Stories of Becoming demystifies the professoriate, compares what current new faculty have to say of their job expectations with the realities that students might face when on the job, and brings to light the invisible, behind-the-scenes work done by new faculty. It will be invaluable to graduate students, those who teach graduate students, new faculty, and hiring administrators in composition and rhetoric.
 
[more]
cover of Storying Writing Center Labor for Anti-Capitalist Futures

Storying Writing Center Labor for Anti-Capitalist Futures

Genie Nicole Giaimo

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Rooted in storying and testimony, Storying Writing Center Labor offers an inclusive, theoretically grounded, labor-oriented approach to writing center scholarship and praxis. While emotional labor and other wellness-related topics have long received attention in the field, issues of precarity, austerity, workism, and related concerns remain under-examined. Marrying ethnography and storying to uncover trends and circumstances related to writing center labor, this book offers insights into the lived working experiences of writing center professionals along with actionable items for creating just, sustainable, and intentional workspaces. Importantly, Storying Writing Center Labor tackles long-established labor issues in the field that have been and continue to be exacerbated by higher education’s austerity politics and reliance on disaster capitalism to inform decision making.
[more]
cover of Strangely Rhetorical: Composing Differently With Novelty Devices

Strangely Rhetorical

Composing Differently With Novelty Devices

by Jimmy Butts

Utah State University Press, 2022

Strangely Rhetorical establishes the groundwork for strangeness as a lens under the broader interdisciplinary umbrella of rhetoric and composition and shares a series of rhetorical devices for practically thinking about how compositions are made unique. Jimmy Butts explores how strange, novel, weird, and interesting texts work and offers insight into how and why these forms can be invented, created, and stylized to generate the effective delivery of rhetorical messages in fun, divergent ways.
 
Using a new theoretical framework—that strangeness is inherent within all rhetorical interactions and is potentially useful—Butts demonstrates how rhetoric is always already coming from an Other, offering an ethical context for how defamiliarized texts work with different audiences. Applying examples of seven figures for composing in and across written, aural, visual, electronic, and spatial texts (the WAVES of media), Butts shows how divergence is possible in all sorts of refigured multimodal ways.

Strangely Rhetorical rethinks what exactly rhetoric is and does, considering the ways that strange compositions help rhetors connect across a broad range of networks in a world haunted by distance. This is a book about strange rhetoric for makers and creatives, for students and teachers, and for composers of all sorts.
 
[more]
cover of Style and the Future of Composition Studies

Style and the Future of Composition Studies

Paul Butler

Utah State University Press, 2020

Style and the Future of CompositionStudies explores style’s potential for informing how students are taught to write well and its power as a tool for analyzing the language and discourse practices of writers and speakers in a range of contexts.
 
Many college writing teachers operate under the belief that style still refers primarily to the kinds of issues discussed in Strunk and White’s popular but outdated book The Elements of Style. This work not only challenges this view but also offers theories and pedagogies from diverse perspectives that help teachers and students develop strategic habits and mindsets to negotiate languages, genres, and discourse conventions. The chapters explore the ways in which style directly affects—and is affected by—multiple sources of shifting disciplinary inquiry, contributing new insights by drawing on research in cultural studies, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, translingualism, and writing across the curriculum, as well as new approaches to classical rhetorical theory.
 
The reemergence of stylistic inquiry can be used dynamically to produce new insights not only about emerging disciplinary interests but also about the study of style as a kind of language in and of itself. Style and the Future of Composition Studies demonstrates that style deserves to be a central focus of writing teaching. More than just the next style collection, the book advocates for style’s larger prominence in composition discussions generally. It will be of interest to a broad range of students and scholars of writing studies, as well as a wider set of readers in academe.
 
Contributors:
Cydney Alexis, Laura Aull, Anthony Box, Jimmy Butts, Mike Duncan, William FitzGerald, Melissa Goldthwaite, Eric House, TR Johnson, Almas Khan, Zak Lancaster, Eric Leake, Andrea Olinger, Thomas Pace, Jarron Slater, Jonathan Udelson
 
[more]
cover of Supporting International Writing Studies Research: Cultivating Capacity through International Exchanges

Supporting International Writing Studies Research

Cultivating Capacity through International Exchanges

Tiane Donahue

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Shedding light on international and transnational writing studies, this edited collection addresses the complexities of research and writing across global contexts. Based on the observation that knowledge-making transcends national borders and is contingent upon the interplay of local cultures and practices, the contributors to the volume contradict the notion that knowledge circulates freely in a “flat world.” Presenting diverse perspectives on writing research, they showcase the need for mutual understanding across borders and reflect the rich tapestry of writing research traditions worldwide, emphasizing interconnectedness and collective insight rather than hierarchical models of knowledge dissemination. Supporting International Writing Studies Research encourages readers and researchers to engage with and respect scholarship beyond English-language contexts, advocates for collaborative global dialogues in writing education, and underscores the importance of continued efforts to incorporate diverse scholarly voices and methodologies in the evolving landscape of writing studies.

[more]
cover of Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration

Systems Shift

Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration

Genesea M. Carter

University Press of Colorado, 2024

This collection extends the discourse on systems within the field of rhetoric and composition by drawing connections among the administrative work we do, the values we hold, and the systems that shape our work and our selves. The contributors to this collection consider how rhetoric and composition administrators’ change-making efforts address, among other activities, equitable labor and working conditions, student and/or faculty retention, curriculum development and redesign, program assessment, professional development support, and mental and/or physical well-being. They explore how these efforts are embodied acts that interact with and participate in systems and networks that often remain unacknowledged even as those within these systems and networks actively work against that oppression. Recognizing that systems and networks can at times supersede administrator, faculty, and student consensus for change, each chapter includes recommendations for addressing the complexities involved in working toward a more just workplace and profession.
[more]