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Composition Studies ✍️Teaching-centered scholarship in composition & rhetoric.
📚Independent, peer-reviewed since 1972.
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The oldest independent periodical in its field, Composition Studies is an academic journal dedicated to the range of professional practices associated with rhetoric and composition: teaching college writing; theorizing rhetoric and composing; administering writing related programs; preparing the field's future teacher-scholars. All perspectives and topics of general interest to the profession are welcome.

A writing assessment can give us a score. But how much can that number really tell us about a student?Consider everythin...
10/24/2026

A writing assessment can give us a score. But how much can that number really tell us about a student?

Consider everything that goes into a student's performance: what they've learned, certainly, but also their motivation, the timing of an assignment, their personal circumstances, and the particular conditions of the classroom. Some of those influences are easy to recognize. Others are much harder to measure.

In “Empirical Writing Assessment and the Identity Crisis in Science,” Michael J. Zerbe asks what happens when we bring that complexity into our understanding of assessment.

As Zerbe shared with us, the essay began with a question: Why wasn't empirical writing assessment more meaningfully engaging with contemporary debates about science, especially when so much of our assessment work relies on the scientific method?

Drawing on debates about complex networks, replicability, and Big Data, he considers what those conversations might teach us about the evidence we collect. More data can reveal patterns, but those patterns don't necessarily explain what caused them—or whether we'd find the same results in another classroom.

His argument isn't that empirical assessment has no value. Rather, he invites us to treat its findings with greater rhetorical scrutiny, consider the contexts that shape them, and place them in conversation with the expertise of the people doing the teaching.

When we asked what he hoped readers would take away, his advice was simple: “Approach empirical writing assessment methodologies and results with a healthy degree of skepticism.”

After all, the numbers don't interpret themselves.

What's one thing an assessment score might miss about your students?

Find Zerbe's article in Composition Studies 54.1. Check your campus library for access, or explore the issue and subscription options through the link in our bio.

We've collected the student work, evaluated the outcomes, and written the assessment report. Now comes the harder questi...
10/22/2026

We've collected the student work, evaluated the outcomes, and written the assessment report. Now comes the harder question: What do we actually do with what we've learned?

In Composition Studies 54.1, Kurt Schick, Danielle DeRise, Caroline Prendergast, Jay Varner, and Michael Hickman offer one answer.

Their three-year project began with a familiar frustration: assessment was producing plenty of information, but not always the kind instructors could use to improve their teaching. So they turned to something much closer to the classroom—a rhetorical reading handout that asked students not only to identify features like audience, purpose, and genre, but also to explain the textual clues behind their interpretations.

That small shift became the foundation for a much larger effort. Faculty adapted the handout into a shared assessment tool, used the findings to revise instruction, and assessed again to see whether those changes helped. Students who experienced the revised curriculum showed measurable improvements in rhetorical awareness.

The takeaway isn't simply that assessment can produce better numbers. It's that the information we collect can help us ask better questions, make more intentional teaching decisions, and keep revising what happens in our classrooms.

Maybe the report shouldn't be the finish line.

What's one thing you wish assessment could tell you about your students?

Find “Making Assessment Useful” in Composition Studies 54.1. Check whether your campus library subscribes, or explore the issue and subscription options through the link in our bio.

Trying something new in the classroom can be exciting. Reading what students thought about it afterward? Sometimes a lit...
10/19/2026

Trying something new in the classroom can be exciting. Reading what students thought about it afterward? Sometimes a little less so.

When Erika Luckert introduced labor-based contract grading, she hoped to give students more room to experiment, take risks, and find motivation beyond a letter grade. Some students welcomed the change. Others found it confusing, frustrating, or even discouraging.

And they weren't shy about saying so.

In “The Feedback That's Hardest to Hear,” Luckert revisits four years of student evaluations and her evolving approach to contract grading. Along the way, she considers how much students have come to rely on grades for reassurance, how institutional evaluations shape the risks instructors can take, and why changing an assessment system also means changing how we listen to students.

As Luckert shared with us, writing the essay also meant reconsidering what success looks like when we try something new in our teaching. If we're asking students to rethink how they measure their own success, perhaps we need to ask the same of ourselves.

Maybe the conversation matters as much as the contract.

How do you make space for students to question the way they're graded?

Read Erika Luckert's article: https://bit.ly/CS-54-01_05

An assignment can be clear about the topic, length, and deadline while leaving another question open: what kinds of clai...
10/14/2026

An assignment can be clear about the topic, length, and deadline while leaving another question open: what kinds of claims, evidence, and reasoning does it invite?

In “Writing Entailment: Aligning Assignments, Text Features, and Outcomes,” Christiane Donahue and Lynn Foster-Johnson examine more than 600 student papers at one university. They trace relationships between a paper’s purpose and the writing moves students make—and consider how those patterns align with intended learning outcomes.

Analyzing an object, arguing a viewpoint, and informing through research offered different occasions for students to practice particular moves. Choosing the task also meant choosing opportunities for practice, though those opportunities didn’t always align with the course goals.

The authors offer a manageable place to begin: informal notes while reading student work. What keeps appearing? What do you hope to see that rarely shows up? Those observations can give us a reason to return to the prompt.

What does your assignment invite students to do—and how does that match what you hope they’ll learn?

There’s more to explore in CS 54.1, where you’ll find “Writing Entailment.” Follow the link in our bio to get to know the journal and see what else is in the issue.

A student leaves religious language out of an argument that faith helped shape. A memoirist draws on a shared tradition ...
10/13/2026

A student leaves religious language out of an argument that faith helped shape. A memoirist draws on a shared tradition to challenge who gets to speak within it. Both are making choices about what an audience will hear.

In Composition Studies 54.1, Liz Thomae and Joseph Wilson review two books that bring those choices into focus.

Thomae’s review of Emily Murphy Cope’s Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary considers how Christian undergraduates navigate faith and academic writing—and how their writing complicates familiar assumptions about evangelical students.

Wilson’s review of Bethany Ober Mannon’s “I Grew Up in the Church” turns to women whose personal narratives negotiate religious belonging and authority. He also considers the limits of those stories: challenging authority does not necessarily change the structures that sustain it, and public visibility can complicate how we understand a writer’s influence.

Wilson explicitly recommends reading Thomae’s review alongside his. Together, they offer a way to think about how writers draw on religious traditions, respond to audiences, and make room for questions within communities they know well.

What helps you read a student’s perspective without assuming you already understand it?

Read Thomae's review: https://bit.ly/54-1_22

Read Wilson's review: https://bit.ly/54-1_23

You reach the end of a student’s narrative. The scene is vivid, the sequence is clear, and the reflection amounts to a s...
10/08/2026

You reach the end of a student’s narrative. The scene is vivid, the sequence is clear, and the reflection amounts to a sentence about learning a lot.

What would help that student go further—and when in the assignment could that help arrive?

In “Literacies and Reflective Rhetorical Moves in the Literacy Narrative Assignment,” Thir Budhathoki examines how students make meaning from their literacy experiences. When we asked what he most wanted instructors to bring into their classrooms, he emphasized intentional, scaffolded reflection across multiple stages of writing.

That invitation gives us a place to begin. Students might record an early interpretation before drafting, examine a broad statement while developing a scene, then revisit their first understanding during revision. Each return gives them something to work with: a detail to explain, an expectation to question, an idea to develop.

This carousel offers three sets of teaching prompts design to improve the reflection work of our students, inspired by Budhathoki’s article. They’re starting points you can adapt to a literacy narrative assignment you already teach.

Save these prompts for the next time you’re planning a writing assignment.

Find Budhathoki’s article in Composition Studies 54.1 at the link in bio.

A video game can give you a story to tell. Recognizing what you learned along the way takes another look.For Tai and Ama...
10/05/2026

A video game can give you a story to tell. Recognizing what you learned along the way takes another look.

For Tai and Amal, writing about learning to play video games becomes a way to reflect on confidence, communication, and relationships. Their experiences offer an entry into Thir Budhathoki's “Literacies and Reflective Rhetorical Moves in the Literacy Narrative Assignment.”

Across 30 student narratives, Budhathoki explores how writers’ understandings of literacy relate to the reflection they do. His analysis connects literacy to the particular activities, relationships, and settings in which students learn to communicate—and to the meaning they make of those experiences.

When we asked what he most wanted readers to bring into their classrooms, he emphasized intentional, scaffolded reflection across multiple stages of writing. Students need opportunities to return to an experience, examine their interpretation, and consider what they now understand differently.

Where in your assignment do students get to pause, look back, and rethink?

Find the article in Composition Studies 54.1 at the link in bio.

An assignment, a reading list, an editorial decision: the questions raised in this symposium reach into familiar parts o...
10/01/2026

An assignment, a reading list, an editorial decision: the questions raised in this symposium reach into familiar parts of our work.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve shared six perspectives on q***r composition from the Where We Are symposium in Composition Studies 54.1. Returning to these essays together brings their questions into conversation.

Joshua Barsczewski asks what our assignments reward when generative AI can readily reproduce familiar academic forms. Violet Livingston asks journals to make room for writing that takes other shapes. Their concerns meet at the expectations writers encounter in classrooms and in publication.

The conversation also reaches backward. Seth E. Davis returns to Miriam DeCosta-Williamson’s work through archives, campus events, and former students’ memories. Alongside Livingston’s account of relationships across generations, his essay invites us to consider how earlier scholarship remains available to those who come next.

Erin Green asks what support requires when q***r and trans people face threats to their teaching and livelihoods. She names organizing, advocacy, and mutual aid as concrete ways to act.

Timothy Oleksiak and Rachel Robinson-Zetzer consider what becomes possible when writers have room to experiment and discover. Oleksiak foregrounds the pleasure of composing q***rly; Robinson-Zetzer asks how teaching can hold open q***r futures.

The essays offer several places to begin—and different questions to keep asking.

Which question from the symposium will you carry into your work?

Read the full Where We Are symposium: https://bit.ly/54-1
***rComposition

On Rachel Robinson-Zetzer’s office door, a postcard reads, “Q***r Teachers are Living Proof of Q***r Futures.” She looks...
09/28/2026

On Rachel Robinson-Zetzer’s office door, a postcard reads, “Q***r Teachers are Living Proof of Q***r Futures.” She looks at it daily, wondering what that promise means for her students—and whether they feel it, too.

In “The Q***r Compositionist Has Questions: Beginnings, Imaginings, and Futures,” Robinson-Zetzer follows that uncertainty into her teaching. Her students’ openness about their q***rness gives her hope, even as she fears for them amid anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.

Those concerns enter the writing classroom. Returning to Harriet Malinowitz’s work, Robinson-Zetzer considers whose identities are privileged and how fear of rejection can shape what students feel able to express. The students and teachers have changed; many of the questions remain familiar.

She leaves those questions open, recognizing something she also asks of beginning writers: a willingness to work without knowing where their thinking will lead. “Sitting in the unknown allows space for surprise, for new voices to be heard, for joy.”

What room does your classroom leave for identities—and futures—still taking shape?

Read Rachel Robinson-Zetzer’s contribution now: https://bit.ly/54-1_16
***rPedagogy

“That was the most vulgar wedding I’ve ever been to!” A friend offers this verdict at Timothy Oleksiak’s wedding. Oleksi...
09/26/2026

“That was the most vulgar wedding I’ve ever been to!” A friend offers this verdict at Timothy Oleksiak’s wedding. Oleksiak is proud.

His WWA contribution, “On the Matter of Mattering,” begins with that celebration and distinguishes writing about q***r experience from composing q***rly. Pleasure, camp, and deliberate silliness can shape how writers invent and arrange, helping them discover ways of being that haven’t yet taken shape.

That freedom to experiment sits alongside a desire to belong and be understood. Oleksiak asks editors to seek out, develop, and publish q***r composition. When we asked what teachers might bring into their classrooms, he turned to the trust that makes such writing possible:

“Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not just about writing q***rtext. It’d be for writing teachers to develop conditions where student-writers trust that q***rtexts would be something they can see themselves doing.”

What would help students trust that q***r ways of composing have a place in your classroom?

Read “On the Matter of Mattering” now: https://bit.ly/54-1_15
***rRhetorics

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