Composition Studies

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Composition Studies

✍️Teaching-centered scholarship in composition & rhetoric.
📚Independent, peer-reviewed since 1972.
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https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

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.

05/23/2026

If you've been sitting on a piece about teaching writing, summer is a good time to write it. FEN Blog—a subset of Composition Studies, by writing teachers, for writing teachers—is open for submissions.

Editors Emily Brier and Daniel Libertz publish short articles (1,000–2,000 words, MLA format) on praxis and research in the writing classroom. They're open to any topic related to teaching composition, with particular interest in the areas listed in the slides. They especially encourage work from graduate students, non-tenure-track instructors, early career researchers, and historically marginalized writers.

Send full drafts or pitches to [email protected]. Browse recent FEN Blog posts at the link in our bio.

05/20/2026

Three books on AI and writing appeared between 2023 and 2024. Each was written from a different moment in the field's response. Each sees something the others couldn't.

Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen finished their book before ChatGPT launched. Their framework treats AI as one among a wider range of augmentation technologies and asks what happens ten years out, not ten months. Writing before the AI turn gave them room to define the questions later authors would inherit.

Sidney Dobrin published nine months after the launch, when instructors needed both a way to think about AI and something to do with it on Monday morning. He situates AI within the longer history of technological change—the printing press, word processors—to give a field in transition some historical footing.

Beth Buyserie and Travis Thurston's 2024 collection arrived with something the earlier books couldn't offer: a full year of classroom evidence. Contributors across disciplines can report what worked, what didn't, and why.

In a review essay in Issue 53.2, Jason Tham reads all three in sequence. His argument: the response grew more grounded over time, but none of the three questions whether integration itself should be the default. He proposes slow pedagogy as the counter-position.

Where do you see the field going from here? Read the full review essay: https://bit.ly/53-2_14.

05/18/2026

The composition studies field built itself on the idea that writing takes time. Process pedagogy. Recursive revision. The discipline's commitments have always, in some way, been arguments for slowing down.

In a review essay in Issue 53.2, Jason Tham reads three recent books on AI and writing as a chronological record of how the field responded to generative AI. Duin and Pedersen built ethical frameworks before ChatGPT launched, with room to think carefully about what technological adoption would mean. Dobrin published practical guidance nine months after, when instructors were rewriting syllabi mid-semester. Buyserie and Thurston's 2024 collection draws on a full year of classroom experimentation. Its contributors can report what they tried and what happened.

Each book gets more grounded in what actually happens when AI enters the classroom. Tham's argument is that all three accept the same premise: pedagogy should accommodate AI's capabilities. None asks whether the accommodation itself runs counter to what writing instruction was built to do. He calls this "acceleration culture" and proposes slow pedagogy as the counter-position: extended prewriting and revision that can't be compressed. Time with difficult ideas long enough for them to change shape.

His claim is specific: critical thinking depends on confusion, struggle, and gradual understanding. Those are the processes AI is designed to skip. And as the editor of Computers and Composition, he isn’t writing from the margins either. Tham is writing from the center of the technology-and-writing conversation.

Read the full review essay: https://bit.ly/53-2_14 .

05/16/2026

The question running through Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer is one most writing teachers have asked in some version: when students compose in a new medium, what do they bring with them?

In a review for 53.2, Abigail Robinson walks through the collection's ten chapters, edited by Alexander, Davis, Mina, and Shepherd. She reads the book's structure as an expanding lens: the first section stays inside first-year writing, the second follows students across curricula, and the third tracks composing knowledge across careers and lifetimes.

Robinson also notes that the research methods widen along with the scope. VanKooten uses editing software itself to study transfer across audio-visual formats. Wilson and Portz follow a student in East Kazakhstan using translation as a transfer method. Roozen traces one writer's drawing practice across decades.

Robinson flags a finding from Shepherd that underlies much of the collection: students' awareness of multimodal transfer actually declines over time, fading as they move further from their early writing courses. She reads the collection as treating that as a design problem, one that revised program outcomes, expanded writing center services, and reflective assignments can begin to address.

Read the full review: https://bit.ly/53-2_19 .

05/14/2026

What happens when writing gets physical? Danielle Koupf's essay on "scrap writing" sends students hunting for anonymous, discarded handwriting in the wild. Two pieces from the Composition Studies archive share its attention to the physical, material side of composing.

Koupf asked students to hunt for anonymous, discarded handwriting. They found tutor notes covered in doodled snails, genre-bending scraps in grocery stores, and notes they'd once have called trash. Each find looked like luck. Koupf traces how every discovery grew out of who the student already was. (53.2, Fall 2025)

Cydney Alexis interviewed three writers about their relationships with the Moleskine notebook. One bought purses with Moleskine-sized pockets. Another fetishized the notebook as a college freshman reading Camus, then felt angst that his own writing—to-do lists, not fiction—wasn't worthy of it. Alexis argues that the objects we write with are tangled up in who we think we are as writers. (45.2, Fall 2017)

Hannah J. Rule couldn't explain "flow" to a student in office hours until she started miming the sentences—gesturing, sweeping her hand to show how far the second sentence had traveled from the first. Her students named the approach the "grammera." Rule argues that writing can't be severed from the act of composing with our senses. (45.1, Spring 2017)

Save this pathway. All three are available at the link in our bio.

05/11/2026

Danielle Koupf has been picking up other people's discarded handwriting since 2009. A sidewalk in Wichita. A hotel outside Kansas City. A shopping cart in Winston-Salem. She calls these fragments "scrap writing" — anonymous, handwritten, decontextualized bits of text that have drifted loose from whatever they once belonged to.

In a new article in our Fall 2025 issue, Koupf describes what happened when she brought scrap writing into her handcrafted rhetorics classroom and asked students to hunt for their own. One student collected tutor notes from the Writing Center — scraps covered in doodled snails and decontextualized phrases like "European colonial meddling." Another set out to find scraps in specific locations, came back empty-handed, and shifted to something more open: "I just kind of went about my usual day and kept an eye out for scraps rather than going out to find them." A third found her worldview changing: "Before taking on this project, I only considered other people's notes as trash that had very little significance to me."

Each project looked, on the surface, like it was driven by luck. But Koupf traces how every discovery grew out of each student's existing interests, coursework, and daily life. Juliana's familiarity with the Writing Center led her there. Charity's concurrent genre studies course shaped how she categorized her finds. Amarah's existing love of handwriting and doodling made scrap writing feel like an extension of her own practice.

Koupf's contribution is a concrete, classroom-tested picture of what invention looks like when it's distributed across people, environments, and happenstance rather than contained inside a single mind.

Read the full article at the link in our bio.

05/09/2026

Shawna Shapiro's Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom starts from a question most grammar instruction sidesteps: whose language norms are we teaching, and what does enforcing them cost students who don't already speak them?

In a review for 53.2, Ananta Khanal walks through Shapiro's framework: a Critical Language Awareness pedagogy built around four pathways. The sociolinguistics pathway treats language variation as a lens for identity and injustice. The critical academic literacies pathway challenges deficit-based models of academic writing. A media and discourse analysis pathway asks students to become critical consumers and ethical producers of public language. And a communicating-across-difference pathway draws on psychology and conflict resolution to build more dialogic classrooms.

Each pathway comes with unit structures, essential questions, and assignments—"Media Show-and-Tell," "Linguistic Sleuthing," "News Media Autobiography"—for bringing abstract concepts into the classroom. Khanal notes that the book's feedback guidelines ask instructors to respond to rhetorical clarity and intentionality rather than correctness.

Read the full review: https://bit.ly/53-2_16.

05/06/2026

We asked our 53.2 authors what happened behind the article: what was hardest to cut, what the writing process cost them, what they wish they could have said but didn't.

Jainab Tabassum Banu Sonali told us that autoethnography gave her "the authority and agency to write my truth," but it also made her emotionally vulnerable. The writing was healing, she said, but the academic frame required holding some things back. Her metaphor for that tension: "I did not cut my throat, but at times I had to soften my voice."

When we asked what she hopes readers carry with them, she offered an invitation rather than a takeaway: "I invite readers to reflect on what becomes possible when we turn borders into bridges, when we bring our embodied, transnational selves into our classrooms and choose growth over withdrawal."

Read the full article at the link: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

05/04/2026

In a new article, Banu recounts her first day as an international GTA, when a student asked why she teaches English if it isn't her first language—then traces how she built a first-year writing course around World Englishes, code-switching, and the very questions her presence raised.

This is an autoethnography, where Banu is the subject and the scholar at once, writing about accent, race, gender, religion, and motherhood in a predominantly White Midwest classroom. She taught through all of it. She assigned multilingual authors who code-switch in their own writing, built assignments that invited students to do the same, and let her own linguistic identity become part of the pedagogy rather than something to work around.

What came back surprised her. A White student shared a childhood memory of her grandmother forbidding her from playing with a Black neighbor. A Muslim student from Kenya told Banu she was her first Muslim teacher in the U.S.—and for the first time, she could write in Arabic and Somali alongside English.

The article joins the long conversation about who gets to teach writing and what happens when that person doesn't match the assumptions built into the program. Banu's contribution is the view from inside.

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

04/29/2026

We tend to treat AI as a problem of permission: allow it or restrict it. Silvestro's article in CS 53.2 offers a way past that binary. Instead of asking what AI is allowed to do, he asks how it participates in a much older rhetorical practice: memory.

Seen this way, AI isn’t an interruption. It’s an extension—one that can be examined, situated, and compared.

Three moves drawn from his approach:

01 · Make memory visible. Before introducing AI, have students map the memory devices they already use. Post-its, notes apps, photos of the whiteboard. Once memory is a composing practice, AI becomes one device among several.

02 · Audit the corpus. Have students research what's actually inside a text generator's training data. Common Crawl, Reddit threads, books scraped without permission. The question shifts from "should we use it" to "what gets centered when we do."

03 · Compare the memories. Ask where students' own memories are stronger and where the database might help. The comparison itself is the move. It keeps the student at the center of the decision.

Silvestro's memory device metaphor doesn't resolve the AI question, but it does reframe it around the person writing, turning attention to their practices and their decisions.

Which move would you try first? Tell us below.

Link: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

04/27/2026

Cicero built memory palaces to store the parts of a speech. Medieval scholars kept commonplace books, copying out passages they’d need when it came time to write. We keep post-its, notes apps, photos of whiteboards.

In CS 53.2, John J. Silvestro adds one more device to that list: ChatGPT.

His argument is straightforward. Text generators work the way memory devices have long worked. They belong in a lineage that includes memory palaces, commonplace books, and the post-it note on your monitor. Each one stores information a writer expects to need later. Each one shapes what that writer can compose. The question, for Silvestro, isn't about whether to use the device. He's more interested in what's stored inside it, who put it there, and what got left out.

That shift changes the classroom conversation. When AI is framed as a “writing tool,” discussion settles into permission and prohibition. When it is treated as a memory device, a different set of questions comes into view: where are my own memories doing the work, and where might the database step in?

Read the full article, and if it stays with you, send it to someone teaching this fall.

Link: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

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