Composition Studies

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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.

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

A walk through Ireland with a donkey might seem an unlikely place to begin a conversation about writing classrooms.For A...
09/22/2026

A walk through Ireland with a donkey might seem an unlikely place to begin a conversation about writing classrooms.

For Albert C. DeCiccio, Kevin O’Hara’s journey with Missie offers a way to think about the company writers need. In his FEN Blog essay, he connects parallel working and body doubling to the care students practice in his writing-center practicum: checking on absent classmates, responding to drafts, and supporting one another as tutors.

Those everyday practices lead to a larger question about education organized around individual achievement and accumulating grades. Drawing on Tara Yosso’s community cultural wealth, DeCiccio considers how students’ knowledge, relationships, and aspirations can sustain a community—and how that care can extend to other writers.

What forms of care help writers keep going?

Read “Donkeys, Parallel Working, and Body Doubles,” freely available on the FEN Blog.

Link: https://bit.ly/FEN-Blog-01

Q***r composition, Violet Livingston writes, has grown “like a mycelial network, branching in all directions.”For Living...
09/08/2026

Q***r composition, Violet Livingston writes, has grown “like a mycelial network, branching in all directions.”

For Livingston, figuring out where that network might go starts with knowing where we are. At Landmark College, she teaches neurodivergent students in a small first-year writing class where the same five-paragraph essay can feel limiting to one student and reassuring to another. “We are gentle here.”

That classroom is also where she reads Octavia Butler. Butler looked at the problems people were already neglecting and gave them thirty years to grow. Yet she called the work of looking ahead—of discerning possibilities and offering warnings—an act of hope.

Livingston carries that hope into q***r composition: “How much of our q***r brilliance has been spent arguing for our right to exist?” Critique stays. Her question is what else becomes possible once argument and critique are no longer the field’s primary modes.

Her answer begins with the shape of the field itself. A mycelial network has no single trunk or tidy genealogy. It grows through connections: elders and younger scholars, q***r-of-color critique, citational justice, divergent viewpoints. And when the field branches, its writing can branch too.

Livingston describes her own writing as “a scrapbook of thoughts half-glued onto the page.” When that writing is “purposely misunderstood or deemed illegible,” she says, she has the most empathy for the neurodivergent students she teaches.

Her closing ask is aimed squarely at journals: keep making room for textuality, speculation, lyricism, and poetics. These are, she writes, “resources we will need to keep hanging on.”

What forms should our field make more room for?

Read the full response: https://bit.ly/54-1_14
***rComposition

When Erin Green asks what q***r composition is willing to do, she isn’t asking hypothetically.She begins at the Universi...
09/02/2026

When Erin Green asks what q***r composition is willing to do, she isn’t asking hypothetically.

She begins at the University of Oklahoma, where a controversy over an anti-trans student essay ended with one graduate instructor fired and another removed from the classroom. Green reads the episode through Eric Darnell Pritchard’s idea of literacy normativity: writing and rhetoric used to mark people as other and do harm.

Green is also tired of being told to wait. Drawing on Fannie Lou Hamer, Brittney Cooper, and Martin Luther King Jr., she places that impatience in a longer history of marginalized people being told justice will come eventually, if only they wait. “My life is on the line, so my patience is wearing thin.”

What she wants from q***r composition is theory that can leave the page: organizing, advocacy, mutual aid, and work alongside q***r and trans activist movements. “Our q***r scholarship is only possible because of these activists and organizers,” she writes.

That demand reaches the classroom. Green told us, “We must resist pedagogical approaches that encourage us to be apolitical.” Drawing on Laura Greenfield, she warns that ethically neutral writing instruction can sharpen hateful persuasion: “this is no longer a ‘could.’” For Green, a “better writer” must learn to recognize and critique systems of oppression, then act on that understanding.

Green asks what q***r composition has done to show trans scholars that the field will “not just include us but fight with us.” That solidarity may carry risk. Protecting trans people now, she argues, is “worth the risk.”

What would moving from inclusion to solidarity look like in your classroom or program?

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/54-1_13

***rComposition

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