Put Rhetoric and Composition to Productive Work

How are those of us in "rhetoric and composition" addressing our tendency to equate "writing" with writing "in" English Our inscription as the margin of a transnational English-only business It is a fact that "rhetoric and composition" as such is almost entirely a U.S., English monolingual phenomenon without parallel elsewhere, a field that anyone attempting to explain its work to those outside the United States must needs explicate.16 Thus, while those in rhetoric and Thomas Sabo Jewellery composition have produced a wealth of studies on new and old communication media technologies, they have largely treated English as the unquestioned linguistic medium (Horner and Trimbur). However, the contradictory simultaneous pulls of the "globalization" of English as a "standard" and its fracturing into a variety of fluctuating "world Englishes" is forcing the question of what even "writing in English" might mean and involve, as is the sheer fact that the majority of those now using English do not qualify as "native" English speakers. Rhetoric and composition can respond to this question in two ways. First, it can examine the ways in which its work might support, or counter, the promotion of standardized uses of English that restrict who is deemed to have a legitimate right to be heard and what they might say, and that support a tacit policy of "English-only" serving the interests of racial and ethnic prejudice and global capital (see Lu, "Essay"). Second, it can investigate the rhetorics of particular uses of English, and uses of other languages, in light of the current shifting constitution and status of these languages and varieties of them, and how students might participate in these investigations to pursue more equitable social relations for all, locally and globally. Pursuing these lines of inquiry will almost inevitably lead not only to rethinking the relationship of rhetoric and Thomas Sabo Bracelets composition to work in education and applied linguistics as well as to other work in "rhetoric," but also to confronting the forces shaping current work in rhetoric and composition and the effects of its work in return, globally and locally. The question of language difference, for example, arises both at the "global" level of international media, institutional "articulation" agreements and cooperative ventures, and the exchange of knowledge, students, and texts, and at the local level—in the heterogeneous language resources and desires of our students, and our own efforts to respond to these as well as the efforts of our colleagues and communities. The tensions between rhetoric and composition within rhetoric and composition attest to the power of these forces to shape our habits. By implication, however, recognizing the source of those tensions in these forces may enable us to turn those forces to our collective advantage, and the advantage of our students, in the tactics we develop in response, and, thereby, to put rhetoric and composition to productive work.