Composition Studies

The question running through Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer is one most writing teachers have asked in some version: when students compose in a new medium, what do they bring with them?

In a review for 53.2, Abigail Robinson walks through the collection's ten chapters, edited by Alexander, Davis, Mina, and Shepherd. She reads the book's structure as an expanding lens: the first section stays inside first-year writing, the second follows students across curricula, and the third tracks composing knowledge across careers and lifetimes.

Robinson also notes that the research methods widen along with the scope. VanKooten uses editing software itself to study transfer across audio-visual formats. Wilson and Portz follow a student in East Kazakhstan using translation as a transfer method. Roozen traces one writer's drawing practice across decades.

Robinson flags a finding from Shepherd that underlies much of the collection: students' awareness of multimodal transfer actually declines over time, fading as they move further from their early writing courses. She reads the collection as treating that as a design problem, one that revised program outcomes, expanded writing center services, and reflective assignments can begin to address.

Read the full review: https://bit.ly/53-2_19 .

What happens when writing gets physical? Danielle Koupf's essay on "scrap writing" sends students hunting for anonymous, discarded handwriting in the wild. Two pieces from the Composition Studies archive share its attention to the physical, material side of composing.

Koupf asked students to hunt for anonymous, discarded handwriting. They found tutor notes covered in doodled snails, genre-bending scraps in grocery stores, and notes they'd once have called trash. Each find looked like luck. Koupf traces how every discovery grew out of who the student already was. (53.2, Fall 2025)

Cydney Alexis interviewed three writers about their relationships with the Moleskine notebook. One bought purses with Moleskine-sized pockets. Another fetishized the notebook as a college freshman reading Camus, then felt angst that his own writing—to-do lists, not fiction—wasn't worthy of it. Alexis argues that the objects we write with are tangled up in who we think we are as writers. (45.2, Fall 2017)

Hannah J. Rule couldn't explain "flow" to a student in office hours until she started miming the sentences—gesturing, sweeping her hand to show how far the second sentence had traveled from the first. Her students named the approach the "grammera." Rule argues that writing can't be severed from the act of composing with our senses. (45.1, Spring 2017)

Save this pathway. All three are available at the link in our bio.

Danielle Koupf has been picking up other people's discarded handwriting since 2009. A sidewalk in Wichita. A hotel outside Kansas City. A shopping cart in Winston-Salem. She calls these fragments "scrap writing" — anonymous, handwritten, decontextualized bits of text that have drifted loose from whatever they once belonged to.

In a new article in our Fall 2025 issue, Koupf describes what happened when she brought scrap writing into her handcrafted rhetorics classroom and asked students to hunt for their own. One student collected tutor notes from the Writing Center — scraps covered in doodled snails and decontextualized phrases like "European colonial meddling." Another set out to find scraps in specific locations, came back empty-handed, and shifted to something more open: "I just kind of went about my usual day and kept an eye out for scraps rather than going out to find them." A third found her worldview changing: "Before taking on this project, I only considered other people's notes as trash that had very little significance to me."

Each project looked, on the surface, like it was driven by luck. But Koupf traces how every discovery grew out of each student's existing interests, coursework, and daily life. Juliana's familiarity with the Writing Center led her there. Charity's concurrent genre studies course shaped how she categorized her finds. Amarah's existing love of handwriting and doodling made scrap writing feel like an extension of her own practice.

Koupf's contribution is a concrete, classroom-tested picture of what invention looks like when it's distributed across people, environments, and happenstance rather than contained inside a single mind.

Read the full article at the link in our bio.