"What's Next for Writing Programs -- and WPAs?"
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Andrea Lunsford is one of the most venerated scholars in rhetoric and composition. With Lisa Ede, she co-wrote ground-breaking work on collaboration and the role of the audience. She has also published extensively on assessment, intellectual property, writing centers, basic writing, and rhetorical history and theory just to name a few. In fact, in many ways, her vast work reflects the rich variety of the field of composition itself, mirroring her plenary talk below on the nature of the discipline. For instance, she has authored the books Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, and Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the History of Rhetoric.

On Thursday, July 10, Andrea Lunsford opened her plenary speech "What's Next for Writing Programs -- and WPAs?" at the Writing Program Administration (WPA) conference in Denver by asking the question of what it is that compositionists study and teach. Is it writing studies? Is it rhetoric? Struck by John Guillroys comments in a talk given at Stanford, Lunsford said that writing skills are highly prized in the professional world, but composition is still despised or dismissed. She surmised that some of this dismissal from other disciplines is that composition lacks a center.

Yet, toward the end of her talk, she seemed to answer her own question about the fields center when she discussed the need for an undergraduate writing major. She lamented the fact that in reviewing writing majors across the country, none of them seemed to have a center. She thought that the new writing majors needed a rhetorical focus. So, of course, the study of writing with a rhetorical focus is what I see as the true center of composition as a field.

However, as long as there is a rhetorical center to the study of writing, I think the fact that the field of rhetoric and composition is so varied should be celebrated instead of a point of panic and perpetual existential crisis. Writing is complex, so the study of writing needs to be equally complex, which makes our field rich and varied. As a field we need to study literacy as broadly defined, as Karen Kopelson argues in the June 2008 issue of CCCs. We need to study further the intersections between rhetoric and ideology, writing and belief. We need to further investigate how the computer as a writing medium changes writing. We need to continue to broadly interrogate pedagogy. We need to study in much greater detail writing in the professions and academic disciplines, particularly science writing. We need to continue to investigate how and why writers compose, drawing upon research methods from a large number of disciplines. We need to continue to study learning, specifically transfer and metacognition of writing frameworks. We need to continue to study the history and philosophy of rhetoric and writing instruction. We need to do more work at examining how writing constructs both limits and develops disciplinary epistemologies. And the list goes on . . . But it should.

The fact that we are trying to get at what writing is from so many perspectives is only further proof that we are a field that has grown into a discipline. If we lacked so much diversity, there would be no need for our field to become a discipline. We would be stultified and eventually die. This is not the case, and as time goes on, this diversity of intellectual inquiry into writing and rhetoric only increases further proof that composition needs to continue to develop undergraduate writing majors and even more graduate programs centered around a rhetorically focused study of writing.

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