As colleges and universities have responded to the demand of businesses and industries for graduates who can write effectively, Composition Studies has gained significance. However, while new theories and approaches to the teaching of writing have been proposed and implemented, many composition courses do not satisfactorily educate their students. This volume includes essays by writing specialists who are concerned with their own failure to improve their students' writing skills. These contributors examine why entering college students still write poorly and why our various attempts to improve such poor writing skills have largely failed. They compare the promise of previously touted new methods, paradigm shifts, and curricular innovations with the reality of little change or improvement; they describe what their students can and cannot do in the writing classroom, even after 12 years of primary and secondary education; and they address what they see as needed reforms in the whole idea of college composition, especially for the first-year college student.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces. Professorships of rhetoric and belles lettres were established just as print was reaching a growing reading public and efforts were being made to standardize educated taste and usage. The provinces saw English studies as a means to upward social mobility through cultural assimilation. In the educational centers of England, however, the introduction of English represented a literacy crisis brought on by provincial institutions that had failed to maintain classical texts and learned languages.Today, as rhetoric and composition have become reestablished in the humanities in American colleges, English studies are being broadly transformed by cultural studies, community literacies, and political controversies. Once again, English departments that are primarily departments of literature see these basic writing courses as a sign of a literacy crisis that is undermining the classics of literature. The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.

In Writing and School Reform, Joanne Addison and Sharon James McGee respond to a testing and accountability movement that has imposed increasingly stronger measures of control over our classrooms, shifted teaching away from best practices, and eroded teacher and student agency. Drawing on historical and empirical research, Writing and School Reform details the origins of the accountability movement, explores its emerging effects on the teaching of writing, and charts a path forward that reasserts the agency of teachers and researchers in the field.

As colleges and universities have responded to the demand of businesses and industries for graduates who can write effectively, Composition Studies has gained significance. However, while new theories and approaches to the teaching of writing have been proposed and implemented, many composition courses do not satisfactorily educate their students. This volume includes essays by writing specialists who are concerned with their own failure to improve their students' writing skills. These contributors examine why entering college students still write poorly and why our various attempts to improve such poor writing skills have largely failed. They compare the promise of previously touted new methods, paradigm shifts, and curricular innovations with the reality of little change or improvement; they describe what their students can and cannot do in the writing classroom, even after 12 years of primary and secondary education; and they address what they see as needed reforms in the whole idea of college composition, especially for the first-year college student.

This text is a transformation of Writing for Success, a text adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work's original creator or licensee. Kathryn Crowther, Lauren Curtright, Nancy Gilbert, Barbara Hall, Tracienne Ravita, and Kirk Swenson adapted this text under a grant from Affordable Learning Georgia to Georgia Perimeter College (GPC, now part of Georgia State University) in 2015. Section 1.3 was authored by Rebecca Weaver. This text is a revision of a prior adaptation of Writing for Success led by Rosemary Cox in GPC's Department of English, titled Successful College Writing for GPC Students (2014, 2015).Georgia Northwestern Technical College adapted this textbook for English 1101.Georgia Northwestern Technical College is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and SchoolsCommission on Colleges to award associate degrees.You can see the latest version at https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/8/