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19 books match the query 'Writing Studies'

cover of Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing: Editors in Writing Studies

Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing

Editors in Writing Studies

Greg Giberson

Utah State University Press, 2022

Until now there has been little consideration of the intellectual and historical impact editors have had on the young and ever-evolving field of writing studies. Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing provides new and seasoned scholars with behind-the-scenes explorations and expositions of the history of scholarly editing and the role of the scholarly editor from the perspectives of current and former editors from important publications within the field.
 
Each chapter in the collection examines the unique experiences and individual contributions of its authors during their time as editors, offering advice to scholars and potential editors on how to navigate the publication process and understand editorial roles. The contributors provide multiple perspectives on the growth, transformation, and, in some cases, founding of some of the most influential publishing venues in writing studies.
 
The personal and historical narratives, along with the unique perspectives and insightful analyses of the individual authors in Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing, offer needed transparency and context to what has historically been an opaque, yet inevitable and consequential, part of academic life. This volume will help researchers in the field understand the publishing process.
 
Contributors: Cheryl Ball, David Bartholomae, Charles Bazerman, Jean Ferguson Carr, Douglas Eyman, Muriel Harris, Byron Hawk, Alice Horning, Paul Kei Matsuda, Laura Micciche, Mike Palmquist, Michael Pemberton, Malea Powell, Kelly Ritter, Victor Villanueva, Victor Vitanza, Kathleen Blake Yancey
 
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cover of Case for Critical Literacy: A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Case for Critical Literacy

A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Alice S. Horning

Utah State University Press, 2024

The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias.
 
This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of critical reading in the teaching of writing with intentionality and imagination, while sharing glimpses of her own personal history with reading and writing. Horning provides the context for understanding what college faculty face in their classrooms and offers a history of critical literacy that explains why, to date, it has mostly neglected or ignored the diverse statuses of students’ reading challenges.
 
The Case for Critical Literacy explores actionable options to better meet students’ literacy needs. College and university faculty, especially writing instructors, will benefit from an understanding of what has happened in the field and what needs to change.
 
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cover of Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies: Revising Identities and Institutions

Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies

Revising Identities and Institutions

Laurie Grobman

Utah State University Press, 2025

Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies focuses on the largely unnoticed and unexplored tradition of faculty/undergraduate publication in writing studies. Coauthoring makes new authorial identities and relationships available to both faculty and students and demonstrates promise as a way to increase access to meaningful research experiences for undergraduates from communities that have been historically underserved in higher education, creating more inclusive learning environments.
 
In this book, faculty and undergraduates describe and theorize about their coauthoring experiences within a variety of institutional contexts including land-grant universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, religiously affiliated research universities, and regional campuses of statewide higher education systems. They explore the relationships between undergraduates and faculty that lead to coauthoring opportunities in a range of courses—first-year writing classes, general educational requirements in various disciplines, and upper-level offerings for English majors—as well as in other institutional spaces such as writing centers, community engagement initiatives, and assessment offices. The collection offers faculty and undergraduates models, ideas, and strategies for how to coauthor together while also preparing them for the challenges—pragmatic, intellectual, and ethical—that they may encounter.
 
Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies showcases why and how coauthorship between faculty and undergraduates is a vital site for scholarly engagement, professional development, and socially just education. It boldly enacts rhetoric and composition’s commitment to collaborative scholarship and is significant for graduate students and faculty in rhetoric and writing studies, especially in community-engaged writing, undergraduate education, collaborative writing, and mentorship, as well as those interested in WAC, WID, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
 
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cover of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies

Crafting Presence

The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies

Nicole B. Wallack

Utah State University Press, 2016

Essays are central to students’ and teachers’ development as thinkers in their fields. In Crafting Presence, Nicole B. Wallack develops an approach to teaching writing with the literary essay that holds promise for writing students, as well as for achieving a sense of common purpose currently lacking among professionals in composition, creative writing, and literature.
 
Wallack analyzes examples drawn primarily from volumes of The Best American Essays to illuminate the most important quality of the essay as a literary form: the writer’s “presence.” She demonstrates how accounting for presence provides a flexible and rigorous heuristic for reading the contexts, formal elements, and purposes of essays. Such readings can help students learn writing principles, practices, and skills for crafting myriad presences rather than a single voice.
 
Crafting Presence holds serious implications for writing pedagogy by providing new methods to help teachers and students become more insightful and confident readers and writers of essays. At a time when liberal arts education faces significant challenges, this important contribution to literary studies, composition, and creative writing shows how an essay-centered curriculum empowers students to show up in the world as public thinkers who must shape the “knowledge economy” of the twenty-first century.
 
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cover of Keywords in Writing Studies

Keywords in Writing Studies

Paul Heilker

Utah State University Press, 2015

Keywords in Writing Studies is an exploration of the principal ideas and ideals of an emerging academic field as they are constituted by its specialized vocabulary. A sequel to the 1996 work Keywords in Composition Studies, this new volume traces the evolution of the field’s lexicon, taking into account the wide variety of theoretical, educational, professional, and institutional developments that have redefined it over the past two decades.

Contributors address the development, transformation, and interconnections among thirty-six of the most critical terms that make up writing studies. Looking beyond basic definitions or explanations, they explore the multiple layers of meaning within the terms that writing scholars currently use, exchange, and question. Each term featured is a part of the general disciplinary parlance, and each is a highly contested focal point of significant debates about matters of power, identity, and values. Each essay begins with the assumption that its central term is important precisely because its meaning is open and multiplex.

Keywords in Writing Studies reveals how the key concepts in the field are used and even challenged, rather than advocating particular usages and the particular vision of the field that they imply. The volume will be of great interest to both graduate students and established scholars.


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cover of Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Learning from the Mess

Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Ashley J. Holmes

University Press of Colorado, 2024

The contributors to Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies argue that there’s much to be learned from the messiness of research contexts. In so doing, they highlight the value of revisiting and reflecting on research methods and methodologies with two primary goals in mind: to shed light on the processes commonly elided between research design and publication and to make explicit that the method/ologies we use in our research require praxis. Learning from the Mess features ten chapters that challenge readers to rethink and reflect on their own method/ological choices in the past and to envision new possibilities for future research designs. Each contributor connects their reflections to one or more paired reading(s) they had previously published.
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cover of Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition

Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

Linda Adler-Kassner

Utah State University Press, 2016

Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies, using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. This edition focuses on the working definitions of thirty-seven threshold concepts that run throughout the research, teaching, assessment, and public work in writing studies. Developed from the highly regarded original edition in response to grassroots demand from teachers in writing programs around the United States and written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, the classroom edition is clear and accessible for an audience of even first-year writing students.
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cover of Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

Naming What We Know

Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

Linda Adler-Kassner

Utah State University Press, 2015

Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual background of the field and the principles that run throughout practice, whether in research, teaching, assessment, or public work around writing. Chapters in the second part of the book describe the benefits and challenges of using threshold concepts in specific sites—first-year writing programs, WAC/WID programs, writing centers, writing majors—and for professional development to present this framework in action.

Naming What We Know opens a dialogue about the concepts that writing scholars and teachers agree are critical and about why those concepts should and do matter to people outside the field.

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cover of Politics of Writing Studies: Reinventing Our Universities from Below

Politics of Writing Studies

Reinventing Our Universities from Below

Robert Samuels

Utah State University Press, 2017

A friendly critique of the field, The Politics of Writing Studies examines a set of recent pivotal texts in composition to show how writing scholarship, in an effort to improve disciplinary prestige and garner institutional resources, inadvertently reproduces structures of inequality within American higher education. Not only does this enable the exploitation of contingent faculty, but it also puts writing studies—a field that inherently challenges many institutional hierarchies—in a debased institutional position and at odds with itself.

Instead of aligning with the dominant paradigm of research universities, where research is privileged over teaching, theory over practice, the sciences over the humanities, and graduate education over undergraduate, writing studies should conceive itself in terms more often associated with labor. By identifying more profoundly as workers, as a collective in solidarity with contingent faculty, writing professionals can achieve solutions to the material problems that the field, in its best moments, wants to address. Ultimately, the change compositionists want to see in the university will not come from high theory or the social science research agenda; it must come from below.

Offering new insight into a complex issue, The Politics of Writing Studies will be of great interest to writing studies professionals, university administrators, and anyone interested in the political economy of education and the reform of institutions of higher education in America.

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cover of Radical Transparency: Perspectives on Graduate Education in Writing Studies

Radical Transparency

Perspectives on Graduate Education in Writing Studies

Justin H. Cook

Utah State University Press, 2027

Radical Transparency brings together candid, powerful accounts of what it means to live, work, and labor as a graduate student in writing studies in today’s academy. At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, burnout, widening inequities, and political uncertainty, this collection names, without sanitizing, the emotional, embodied, and institutional realities that shape graduate education.

Blending scholarly analysis with personal narrative, the chapters document graduate student experiences across writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and related fields. Contributors take up issues often rendered invisible in official program materials and institutional discourse, including disability and access, queer and crip temporalities, financial and labor precarity, mentoring breakdowns, emotional labor, care work, grief, and the hidden curricula that govern graduate life. Together, these chapters reveal how graduate students navigate systems that demand resilience while frequently withholding transparency, support, and care. Organized around three intersecting threads—navigating precarity, building networks of care, and reimagining academic work—Radical Transparency also introduces an emotional-labor tagging system that allows readers to trace recurring forms of labor and affective demand as they surface in different institutional contexts.

Whether read cover to cover or approached nonlinearly, the text invites readers to see connections accumulate—and patterns emerge. Radical Transparency is for graduate students who suspect they’re not broken. It is for faculty and administrators willing to sit with discomfort, accountability, and complicity. And it is for anyone who believes that transparency without action is insufficient and that telling the truth, collectively and aloud, is a form of resistance.

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cover of Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies: Essays in Honor of Sharon Crowley

Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Essays in Honor of Sharon Crowley

Andrea Alden

Utah State University Press, 2019

Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies collects original scholarship that takes up and extends the practices of inventive theorizing that characterize Sharon Crowley’s body of work. Including sixteen chapters by established and emerging scholars and an interview with Crowley, the book shows that doing theory is a contingent and continual rhetorical process that is indispensable for understanding situations and their potential significance—and for discovering the available means of persuasion.
 
For Crowley, theory is a basic building block of rhetoric “produced by and within specific times and locations as a means of opening other ways of believing or acting.” Doing theory, in this sense, is the practice of surveying the common sense of the community (doxa) and discovering the available means of persuasion (invention). The ultimate goal of doing theory is not to prescribe certain actions but to ascertain what options exist for rhetors to see the world differently, to discover new possibilities for thought and action, and thereby to effect change in the world.
The scholarship collected in Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies takes Crowley’s notion of theory as an invitation to develop new avenues for believing and acting. By reinventing the understanding of theory and its role in the field, this collection makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetorical studies and writing studies. It will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in diverse theoretical directions in rhetoric and writing studies as well as in race, gender, and disability theories, religious rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric.
 
Publication supported in part by the Texas Tech University Humanities Center.

Contributors: Jason Barrett-Fox, Geoffrey Clegg, Kirsti Cole, Joshua Daniel-Wariya, Diane Davis, Rebecca Disrud, Bre Garrett, Catherine C. Gouge, Debra Hawhee, Matthew Heard, Joshua C. Hilst, David G. Holmes, Bruce Horner, William B. Lalicker, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, James C. McDonald, Timothy Oleksiak, Dawn Penich-Thacker, J. Blake Scott, Victor J. Vitanza, Susan Wyche
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cover of Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century: Historiography, Pedagogy, and Politics

Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century

Historiography, Pedagogy, and Politics

Edited by Cheryl Glenn and Roxanne Mountford

Southern Illinois University Press, 2017

This collection of essays investigates the historiography of rhetoric, global perspectives on rhetoric, and the teaching of writing and rhetoric, offering diverse viewpoints. Addressing four major areas of research in rhetoric and writing studies, contributors consider authorship and audience, discuss the context and material conditions in which students compose, cover the politics of the field and the value of a rhetorical education, and reflect on contemporary trends in canon diversification. Providing both retrospective and prospective assessments, Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century offers original research by important figures in the field.
 
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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.

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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.
 
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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
 
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cover of Talking Back: Senior Scholars and Their Colleagues Deliberate the Past, Present, and Future of Writing Studies

Talking Back

Senior Scholars and Their Colleagues Deliberate the Past, Present, and Future of Writing Studies

Norbert Elliot

Utah State University Press, 2020

In Talking Back, a veritable Who’s Who of writing studies scholars deliberate on intellectual traditions, current practices, and important directions for the future. In response, junior and mid-career scholars reflect on each chapter with thoughtful and measured moves forward into the contemporary environment of research, teaching, and service. Each of the prestigious chapter authors in the volume has three common traits: a sense of responsibility for advancing the profession, a passion for programs of research dedicated to advancing opportunities for others, and a reflective sense of their work accompanied by humility for their contributions. As a documentary, Talking Back is the first history of writing studies in autobiography.
 

Contributors: Jo Allen, Ann N. Amicucci, Akua Duku Anokye, Paige Davis Arrington, Doug Baldwin, John C. Brereton, Judy Buchanan, Hugh Burns, Leasa Burton, Ellen C. Carillo, William Condon, Dylan B. Dryer, Michelle F. Eble, Jennifer Enoch, Joan Feinberg, Patricia Friedrich, Cinthia Gannett, Eli Goldblatt, Shenika Hankerson, Janis Haswell, Richard Haswell, Eric Heltzel, Douglas Hesse, Bruce Horner, Alice S. Horning, Asao B. Inoue, Ruth Ray Karpen, Suzanne Lane, Min-Zhan Lu, Donald McQuade, Elisabeth L. Miller, Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, Sean Molloy, Les Perelman, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Stacey Pigg, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Jessica Restaino, J. Michael Rifenburg, Eliana Schonberg, Geneva Smitherman, Richard Sterling, Katherine E. Tirabassi, Devon Tomasulo, Martha A. Townsend, Mike Truong, Victor Villanueva, Edward M. White, Anne Elrod Whitney, Kathleen Blake Yancey

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cover of The Community of Inquiry Framework in Writing Studies: Designing for Learning with Peer Review

The Community of Inquiry Framework in Writing Studies

Designing for Learning with Peer Review

Jennifer M. Cunningham

University Press of Colorado, 2027

Applying the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework—a social constructivist model of online learning comprised of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence—to writing studies, this book investigates peer review in hybrid and online first-year writing courses. The authors draw on both theory and disciplinary practices to analyze multi-institutional case studies, interviews, and artifacts, offering scholarship that is both data-driven and pedagogically pragmatic. The results of their analysis present a pragmatic and pedagogically sound approach to navigating the complicated task of designing and facilitating courses that incorporate collaborative activities such as peer review.

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cover of The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development: Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing Studies

The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development

Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing Studies

Adrienne Jankens

Utah State University Press, 2026

The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development explores the role of writing programs—specifically practicum courses—in developing teachers and articulating programmatic values. Drawing on interviews, curricular analysis, program archives, and teacher research, Adrienne Jankens explores how implicit values shape decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and programmatic structures.
 
Through her multi-site analysis, Jankens examines the ways values are reflected in syllabi, committee meetings, and classroom practices. She demonstrates how values that are often unstated or assumed can be made explicit and linked to programmatic action, thus supporting development and aligning instructional goals with broader institutional objectives. Offering a nuanced framework on practicum courses, Jankens also highlights the importance of local contexts and distinguishes among tacit, implicit, explicit, emergent, and articulated values. This layered understanding helps reveal the often hidden mechanisms by which writing program values are enacted in day-to-day teaching practices.
 
Teacher development is a crucial site for enacting and understanding programmatic values, and making these values explicit can guide meaningful programmatic change. Providing an institutional ethnography of Jankens’s own writing program and situating those findings within broader conversations in writing studies, The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development adds to scholarship exploring the focus of the practicum course, the positionality and experience of graduate teaching assistants in writing programs, and the perennial work of the field to identify its core values and disciplinary identity.
 
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cover of Writing Studies in Latin America: Seminal Works

Writing Studies in Latin America

Seminal Works

Federico Navarro

University Press of Colorado, 2026

This edited collection arises from the belief that the field of writing studies, with its deep engagement in the power of language, is uniquely positioned to open new pathways for international scholarly dialogue in writing studies and beyond. Integrating diverse theoretical traditions—including discourse studies, language pedagogy, educational psychology, educational management, and critical sociolinguistics—the editors have brought together work from key Latin American scholars published over the past two decades. The result is a book that points to future directions for the increasingly global field of writing studies. The collection includes work by Natalia Ávila Reyes, Charles Bazerman, Paula Carlino, Valentina Fahler, Ivone Inés Jakob, Judith Kalman, Angela B. Kleiman, Vera Lúcia Lopes Cristovão, Anna Rachel Machado, Jonathan Marine, Juan David Martínez Hincapié, Paulina Meza, Violate Molina Natera, Désirée Motta-Roth, Estela I. Moyano, Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux, Lucía Natale, Federico Navarro, Giovanni Parodi, Luisa Pelizza, María Cecilia Pereira, Pablo Rosales, Daniela Paula Stagnaro, Alicia Vázquez, René Venegas, and Virginia Zavala.

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