Neurodiversity
Ann Jurecic

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers’ responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies’ tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more recent constructivist theories.

Fraught Literacy: Competing Desires for Connection and Separation in the Writings of American Missionary Women in 19th Century Hawai’i
Daphne Desser

Letters and journals of American missionary women in early 19th century Hawai’i express conflicting desires. In some ways, the writers seek connection with the rest of the missionary community and with Native Hawaiians. In other ways, they try to separate themselves from these two groups.

Whatever Happened to the Paragraph?
Mike Duncan

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. Composition researchers should study the paragraph once again, this time forging connections with similar work in other disciplines.

Texts of Our Institutional Lives: From Transaction to Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in “Safe Spaces”
Catherine Fox

On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

Opinion: Consistently Inconsistent: Business and the Spellings Commission Report on Higher Education
Brian Huot

The author critiques the much-publicized and potentially influential 2006 report of the Spellings Commission Report. He emphasizes the report’s inconsistencies, seeing these as reflecting a business model of education that neglects not only the decline in government financial support of colleges, but also the presence in them of new student populations.

Review: Rethinking Style and Reversing Hierarchies
Joseph Janangelo

Reviewed is The Economics of {Attention}: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard A. Lanham.