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supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the disciplines
supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the disciplines
By Nathan Shepley
Copyedited by Julia Smith. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
In Placing the History of College Writing, Nathan Shepley argues that pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing's physical, social, and discursive surroundings. Even if the immediate outcome of student writing is to generate academic credit, Shepley shows, the writing does more complex rhetorical work. It gives students chances to uphold or adjust institutional codes for student behavior, allows students and their literacy sponsors to respond to sociopolitical issues in a city or state, enables faculty and administrators to create strategic representations of institutional or program identities, and connects people across disciplines, occupations, and geographic locations. Shepley argues that even if many of today's composition scholars and instructors work at institutions that lack extensive historical records of the kind usually preferred by composition historians, those scholars and teachers can mine their institutional collections for signs of the various contexts with which student writing dealt.
Nathan Shepley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric and Composition. In addition to composition history, his specialization areas include composition pedagogy and ecological and neosophistic theories of writing. His articles have appeared in Composition Studies, Enculturation, Composition Forum, and Open Words: Access and English Studies.
Publication Information: Shepley, Nathan. (2015). Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive. Perspectives on Writing. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/shepley/
Online Publication Date: October 25, 2015.
Print Publication Date: March 21, 2016.
Contact Information:
Nathan Shepley: nshepley@Central.uh.edu
Open the entire book: In PDF Format 
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Chapter One: Placing History, Historicizing Place
Chapter Two: Customizing Composition: Students Broadening Behavioral Codes
Chapter Three: Tracking Lines of Communication: Student Writing as a Response to Civic Issues
Chapter Four: Composition on Display: Students Performing College Competence
Chapter Five: Rethinking Links Between Histories of Composition
Chapter Six: Composition as Literacy, Discourse, and Rhetoric
Perspectives on Writing
Series Editors: Susan H. McLeod, University of California, Santa Barbara; Rich Rice, Texas Tech University
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). It is also available in print at Parlor Press.