Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Opening And Closing Remarks From The 2024 Watson Conference On Rhetoric And Composition, Andrea Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This document contains the opening and closing remarks of the Watson Director, Andrea Olinger, which she delivered during the 2024 Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, “Create, Connect, Reflect: Launching Collaborations and (Re)building Community in Our Fields.” It also contains the 2024 Watson Conference Commitments.

Watson Conference 2021: Racial Equity And Inclusion At The Conference, Andrea Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This report analyzes lessons learned from the 2021 Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in regard to racial equity and inclusion. It is written for (1) past and future Watson Conference attendees, who may be interested in how we have approached and the extent to which we have met our commitments; (2) future Watson Conference directors, for whom this report can serve as a benchmark; and (3) organizers of other academic conferences, who could use this report as a resource for ideas about antiracist and inclusive conference practices.

“Do You Think This Is Not Happening?”: Rhetorical Laundering And The Federal Hearings Over Planned Parenthood, Calvin R. Coker

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay offers a rhetorical reading of Congressional hearings investigating the Center for Medical Progress’s (CMP’s) videos falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue. Despite the suspect nature of the allegation at the time it was levied, and subsequent investigations rejecting the CMP’s claims, the notion that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of fetal tissue has persisted alongside accelerated antiabortion jurisprudence and vitriolic rhetoric. This acceleration and persistence may be the result of what I term “rhetorical laundering” wherein suspect evidence is justified as worthy of study in a credible public forum, only to have its treatment in …

Writing Centers, Enclaves, And Creating Spaces Of Change Within Universities, Bronwyn T. Williams

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Writing center scholarship often high-lights the ways in which their distinctive, less directive, nongraded, and individualized instruction can make them distinctive social and pedagogical spaces. There is a simultaneous argument, however, that writing centers are often institutionally vulnerable and may be unable to engage in or promote such differences within the larger college or university. Yet, despite their size and possible vulnerability, the daily practices and institutional positioning of writing centers can help change conversations and work toward a different vision, political approach, and institutional presence. Drawing on Victor Friedman’s concept of “enclaves of different practice” and Brian Massumi’s theories …

A Woman’S Optics: Margaret Cavendish, Sensory Mimesis, And Early Modern Rhetorics Of Science, Megan Poole

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Accounts of the rhetorical tradition in early modern England often focus on the Royal Society of London and the scientific epistemologies and visual pedagogies surrounding technologies like the microscope. One critic of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish, theorized her own optics to counter the increasing exclusivity of the scientific community. An analysis of this woman’s optics reveals how the rhetorical concept of mimesis brought a theory of embodied, material sight to a historical moment in which objectivity was emerging. This critically imaginative analysis thus brings forth an early rhetorics of science in which alternative epistemologies may critique mechanical, experimental processes …

Opening And Closing Remarks From The 2021 Watson Conference On Rhetoric And Composition, Andrea Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This document contains the opening and closing remarks of the Watson Director, Andrea Olinger, which she delivered during the 2021 Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, “Toward the Antiracist Conference: Reckoning with the Past, Reimagining the Present.” It also contains the 2021 Watson Conference Commitments and the statement on Watson and Anti-Black Racism.

Self-Contradiction In Faculty's Talk About Writing: Making And Unmaking Autonomous Models Of Literacy, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines and Academic Literacies, researchers have produced compelling evidence of the disjunction between faculty members’ assertions that good writing is universal—i.e., the autonomous model of literacy—and faculty’s own tacit practice of discipline-specific conventions. In studies of race and language in education, scholars have identified disconnections between what teachers profess to value—e.g., students’ right to their own language—and how they actually grade. Contradictions are a natural part of any ideology, and these are commonly understood to demonstrate the resilience of the autonomous model. In this article, however, I introduce a set of theoretical tools …

Chapter 13: Preparing Graduate Students And Contingent Faculty For Online Writing Instruction: A Responsive And Strategic Approach To Designing Professional Development Opportunities, N. Claire Jackson, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This chapter describes a responsive and strategic approach to the development of an asynchronous online mini-course in online writing instruction (OWI) for both graduate TAs and contingent faculty in the University of Louisville’s Composition Program. Demonstrating the importance of responding to local contexts, the authors reflect on the conditions shaping their own course design and, based on their experience, provide suggestions for WPAs who are in similar positions. This reflection is organized around seven key questions for WPAs to consider as they design their own professional development in OWI.

“It Doesn’T Feel Like A Conversation”: Digital Field Experiences And Preservice Teachers’ Conceptions Of Writing Response, Alison Heron-Hruby, James S. Chisholm, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Research shows that preservice English teachers (PSETs) lack opportunities to respond to student writing and that they may view student writing through a deficit lens. To address this need, the authors developed the Writing Mentors (WM) program, a digital field placement that gave PSETs experience providing feedback to high school writers. In this analysis, we examine how PSETs’ views of response were shaped by their digital interactions with high school writers. The challenges of interacting asynchronously created opportunities for PSETs to identify limitations in the mode of communication, propose approaches to providing feedback, and reflect on how teacher feedback can …

Orientation: Seeing And Sensing Rhetorically, Megan Poole

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Many visual terms exist in Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical schema, yet the optical implications of such terms remain largely unconsidered by rhetorical scholars. This study presents Burke’s orientation as both a method of seeing and a way of uncovering rhetoric’s relationship to sensation. Burkean orientation—deriving from ophthalmology and Gestalt psychology—brings into focus three practices of studying the senses in rhetoric: attending to lived experience, considering sensation as elemental to rhetorical work, and practicing rhetorical criticism attuned to the entrenchments and slips of the senses. Engaging the biology of vision reveals sensation as connective tissue between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action.

Introduction: On Connection, Diversity, And Resilience In Writing Across The Curriculum, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Sandra L. Tarabochia, Andrea R. Olinger, Margaret J. Marshall

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Developed from presentations at the 2018 International Writing Across the Curriculum conference, this collection documents a key moment in the history of WAC, foregrounding connection and diversity as keys to the sustainability of the WAC movement in the face of new and long-standing challenges. Contributors reflect on the history and ongoing evolution of WAC, honoring grassroots efforts while establishing a more unified structure of collaborative leadership and mentorship. The chapters in this collection offer a rich variety of practices, pedagogies, mindsets, and methodologies for readers who are invested in using writing in a wide range of institutional and disciplinary contexts. …

Defining Translinguality, Bruce Horner, Sara P. Alvarez

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article reviews the history of conflicting meanings for translinguality in composition studies, locating that history in the context of other competing terms for language difference with which translinguality is sometimes affiliated and competes, and conflicting definitions of these, and in the context of perceived changes to global communication technologies and migration patterns. It argues for approaching translinguality and the confusion surrounding it as evidence of an epistemological break and explains confusions as a response to the challenges such a break poses. It demonstrates the residual operation of monolingualist notions of language in arguments for “code-meshing,” “plurilinguality,” and “translanguaging” and …

Kenneth Burke At The Moma: A Viewer’S Theory, Debra Hawhee, Megan Poole

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition – important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of “extended vision” helps us to present Burke’s then-developing …

“I Didn’T Want To Make Them Feel Wrong In Any Way”: Preservice Teachers Craft Digital Feedback On Sociopolitical Perspectives In Student Texts, James S. Chisholm, Alison Heron-Hruby, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This qualitative multicase analysis investigated the role of “educational niceness” and “neutrality” (e.g., Baptiste, 2008; Bissonnette, 2016) in preservice English teacher feedback on sociopolitical issues in student writing. As part of the field experiences for several ELA methods courses at two universities, one urban and one rural, the teacher-researchers used Google Docs and other technologies (e.g., screencasts and Google Community) to connect preservice teachers (PSTs) with high school writers at a geographical distance so that urban-situated PSTs could mentor rural-situated writers and vice versa. Five methods courses over two semesters served as cases, and 12 PSTs from those courses participated …

Delivery, Facilitas, And Copia : Job Market Preparation And The Revival Of The Fifth Canon., Joseph Turner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay argues that English Studies departments should implement training programs in oral delivery strategies for graduate students seeking tenure track employment. A sample a 13-week training program, modeled on elements of classical rhetorical pedagogy, can help students develop and refine stills in oral delivery necessary for academic job interviews.

Afterword., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Translinguality And Disciplinary Reinvention, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Dominant narratives of disciplinarity that WAC/WID confronts conflate disciplines with departments and material institutional structures, such as departments and professional organizations—what is here called “departmentality.” The relative autonomy of disciplinarity from departmentality means that challenges to foundational concepts of disciplines are in fact normal to disciplinary work and do not threaten the material institutional structures associated with those disciplines, as illustrated by the history of challenges to foundational disciplinary concepts of basic writing and second language acquisition carried out in disciplinary writing. The relative autonomy of disciplinarity enables us to accept the legitimacy of the challenges translingual theory poses to …

Having A Feel For What Works: Polymedia, Emotion, And Literacy Practices With Mobile Technologies, Bronwyn T. Williams

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Writing Language : Composition, The Academy, And Work., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper argues that while college composition courses are commonly charged with remediating students by providing them with the literacy skills they lack, they may instead be redefined as providing the occasion for rewriting language and knowledge. By bringing to the fore the dependence of language and knowledge on the labor of writing, a pedagogy of recursion, mediation, and translation of knowledge through writing and revision counters neoliberalism’s commodification of knowledge and language, and offers an alternative justification for continuing education as the occasion for students to remediate language and knowledge through writing.

Popular Culture Is Killing Writing, Bronwyn T. Williams

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and in part by Inside Higher Ed.

Rhetoric And Performing Anger : Proserpina's Gift And Chaucer's Merchant's Tale., Joseph Turner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer's poetics, Proserpina's angry speech in the Merchant's Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina's angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer's depiction of women's persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer's deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380's. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, And Literary Modernism By Christina Walter, Megan Poole

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Translation As (Global) Writing, Bruce Horner, Laura Tetreault

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article explores translation as a useful point of departure and frame- work for taking a translingual approach to writing engaging globalization. Globalization and the knowledge economy are putting renewed emphasis on translation as a key site of contest between a dominant language ideology of monolingualism aligned with fast capitalist neoliberalism and an emerging language ideology variously identified as translingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging, and transcultural literacy. We first distinguish between theories of translation aligned with neoliberalism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a critical approach to translation focused on the difference that a translingual approach insists translation makes …

Introduction : Translingual Work., Min-Zhan Lu, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This issue both reflects and builds on the efforts prompted by the 2011 College English essay “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach,” by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. Contributions to this symposium contextualize the emergence of a translingual approach, explore the tension and interconnections between a translingual approach and a variety of fields, and explore the viability of a translingual approach in light of existing academic structures.

Rewriting Composition : Moving Beyond A Discourse Of Need., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay argues that calls to end, move beyond, or expand composition participate in a discourse of need that accepts and reinforces the legitimacy of dominant, and restricted, definitions of not only composition but also alternatives to it: what we are led to believe is “new,” “different,” and therefore “better” than composition as conventionally defined. I analyze the operation of this discourse in David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies, Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition, and calls to make up for composition’s ostensible lacks by supplementing it with rhetoric or multimodal composition or by renaming it “writing studies.” Drawing on …

Translinguality, Transmodality, And Difference : Exploring Dispositions And Change In Language And Learning., Bruce Horner, Cynthia Selfe, Tim Lockridge

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This collaborative piece explores the potential synergy arising from the confluence of two growing areas of research, teaching, and practice in composition (broadly defined): multi- (or trans-)modality, and trans- (or multi-) linguality.

On The Instability Of Disciplinary Style: Common And Conflicting Metaphors And Practices In Text, Talk, And Gesture, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing style. To accomplish this, it draws on theoretical approaches to style from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as analyses of drafts of coauthored texts and video-recorded literacy history and discourse-based interviews. This study finds that metaphor and embodied actions such as gestures are valuable sites for comparing writers’ stylistic understandings and practices. The three writers expressed broad agreement when describing the qualities of good scientific writing, using similar verbal and gestural metaphors, such as Communication as Journey and entailments of the Conduit Metaphor. Yet in …

Teaching Grammar-In-Context In College Writing Instruction: An Update On The Research Literature, Zak Lancaster, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Does grammar instruction help to improve students’ writing? Should writing instructors focus on grammar in first-year composition or other university-level writing courses? These questions persist among writing professionals despite a long tradition of research-based conclusions that explicit grammar instruction has no effect or even a harmful effect on students’ writing development (e.g., Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer, 1963; Harris, 1962; Hillocks, 1986; McQuade, 1980; Wyse, 2001).

These conclusions, of course, have had considerable influence on writing scholars’ views of grammar instruction. Some writing scholars, furthermore, have found theoretical backing for the case against grammar instruction in the linguist Stephen Krashen’s argument …

Translingual Literacy, Language Difference, And Matters Of Agency., Min-Zhan Lu, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We argue that composition scholarship’s defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology’s spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages, literacy practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent, ongoing products of iterations, and thus manifestations of writer agency. Using the “White Shoes” essay from David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” we show how such a framework addresses the writer’s agency iterating the “same,” and how it resolves concerns to meet students’ need and right to learn …

Ideologies Of Literacy, "Academic Literacies," And Composition Studies., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the call of this journal in its mission statement for “new interactions between Literacy and Composition Studies.” From the framework of competing ideologies of literacy, I explore points of intersection as well as divergence between strands of what’s known as “composition studies” and what has come to be identified as the “academic literacies” approach to academic literacy. My focus on “academic literacies” rather than the broader area of literacy studies signals at least three of my biases: first, I wish to counter the tendency to allow the cultural norm for academic …