Gloria Anzaldúa, "Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink"

Anzaldúa discusses her tribal culture in comparison with Western cultures. She argues for the importance of making writing more than just a thing or system, but instead an enactment of all of yourself and your spirit/body.

 

Kristin Arola, "Indigenous Interfaces"

Beginning with the question "what would Facebook look like if it were designed by and for American Indians?", Arola discusses issues at the intersection of race and digital spaces. She conducts a small study which illustrates the inherent whiteness of major media platforms such as Facebook, which she suggests deny opportunities of self-identification to users of these platforms.

 

Bruce Ballenger and Kelly Myers, "The Emotional Work of Revision"

Ballenger and Myers explore the emotional component of the revision process and how that impacts how students approach revising their writing projects. They focus on the "dissonance" their students experience, that is the tension between the student's intentions when writing and the execution of those intentions. Topics they cover include: How does the emotional process during revision shape a writer, self-reflection during writing, cultivating your own writerly voice, and how grappling with the emotional part of revision can transfer forward to future writing tasks.

 

Charles Bazerman, "A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model"

Charles Bazerman argues that composition places students of writing in conversation with writing that has come before, both extending the discourse beyond where it was and also generally occurring within contexts of preexisting writing. He outlines stages for successful and responsive writing, which functions in relation not only to what was written, but what was read beforehand, thus theorizing a "conversational model."

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Mike Bunn, "How to Read Like a Writer"

Bunn offers students a new way to read – a way that focuses on how to help us become better writers (as opposed to reading tactics that help us become better readers). Bunn models how to do this work and offers insights into the value of doing it.

 

Lisa Delpit, "The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse"

Lisa Delpit explores issues of literacy and discourse acquisition theorized by James Gee as they pertain to economically disadvantaged students and students of color. After discussing obstacles to acquiring Dominant Discourse, Delpit suggests some solutions that students and teachers might use to navigate and transform societal and academic issues related to use of specific discourses.

 

 

Danielle Koupf, "Scrap Writing in the Digital Age"

Koupf explores what they refer to as "scrap writing" which includes the everyday writing we view as disposable (like grocery lists) and how the internet allows individuals to gather this writing and explore it within "found writing" communities online. Some topics this piece covers are: digital writing, invention and reinvention in writing, giving rhetorical purpose to found texts, the nuances between invention, creation, and discovery in writing, creative and researched writing, social media communities related to writing, and every day writing as a subject of study.

 

Timothy Laquintano and Annette Vee, "How Automated Writing Systems Affect the Circulation of Political Information Online"

Laquintano and Vee explore how automation (bots) have impacted digital writing and new spread online with a focus on the way bots help spread misinformation in order to achieve political goals (though they do not offer analysis of their motivations as much as the ways in which these bots work). Some topics they cover are: fake news, online news ecosystems, how reading and writing systems have been automated, how social media algorithms change what writing is circulated, anxiety surrounding the content of writing over the years, and the exigence of false news reporting.

 

Kate Maddalena, "I need you to say 'I':  Why First Person Is Important in College Writing"

Maddalena talks about the importance of the pronoun "I" to indicate first person in college writing. She discusses why the use of "I," such as in scientific studies, have become significant.

 

Calley Marotta, "Who Has the Right to Write? Custodian Writing and White Property in the University"

Marotta explores, as the title suggests, who has the right to write and how that is perceived within a university setting. They study a group of male, Latino custodians in a predominantly white, Midwestern public university. Marotta's article covers the right to literacy and how writing is off limit to certain groups even in a university powered by writing production, analyzes the way writing serves to uphold notions of social class, institutional racism and whiteness, regulation and surveillance of writing in the workplace, how writing gives agencies to the authors of words, and how an inability to speak and communicate in English can undermine how educated you might otherwise be.

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Jacqueline Jones Royster, "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own"

Jacqueline Jones Royster argues for the importance of cross-boundary discourse in this text. Ultimately, Royster calls for a paradigm shift in which everyone involved is included in the larger conversation, rather than information about some being constructed and circulated without their involvement. This comes in tandem with her emphasis on the importance of acknowledging positionality of the subject.

 

Maureen Seaton, "The Queerosphere: Musings on Queer Studies and Creative Writing Classrooms"

Seaton discusses her time visiting and speaking with a queer focused creative writing class and her struggles with her identity when presenting information to students whether her own or others. She touches on how identity bleeds into who a person is as a writer, poetry writing, and how identity shapes and is shaped by a genre you are writing in.

 

Quentin Vieregge, "Exigency: What Makes My Message Indispensable to My Reader"

Vieregge defines the word exigency and explains its value as a way of gaining and holding a reader's interest. Exigency is defined as not simply explaining why a topic matters generally, but why it should matter specifically at this time and place and for one's intended readership.