Postpostmodern Compositionist

This piece is a developed version of ideas I forwarded in previous blog posts about composition's ethic of service and its new iteration with the emergence of AI . Enjoy!  *** In their contribution to the edited collection Bad Ideas about AI and Writing , Xiao Tan and Paul K. Matsuda (2026) deconstruct a widespread assumption among writing instructors that student usage of AI writing technologies detracts from or erases student voices. Tan and Matsuda argue that instructor expectations surrounding voice do not consider student intention, as students may deliberately use the Standard Academic English (SAE) dialect characteristic of AI writing technologies to satisfy perceived academic genre conventions. The authors also contend that while concerns about voice often center around “cases where the student mindlessly substitutes their writing with machine generated texts,” this focus causes instructors to overlook or dismiss appropriate ways that student writers might collaborate...

In my last post, I announced I was going to be moving the blog to Substack. After some thinking, I decided that I actually prefer Blogspot, so I am going to be keeping the blog here for now. Blogspot feels more lowkey, which I think is a better vibe for a blog like this one. If the blog gets a larger readership, perhaps I may consider moving it again.  I will still be keeping my twelfth post up on Substack, which can be read here . For today's post, I want to discuss a 1993 edited collection that I discovered  during the Winter 2026 quarter,  when I was working on my seminar paper about the New Abolitionists.  I briefly mention this text,  titled  Theory & Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline ,   in an earlier blog post . I was drawn to this book initially because it contains an article about the conflict between general skills writing instruction and discipline-specific writing instruction. For those not familiar with thi...