What are your colleagues teaching?

Download data from WAC Clearinghouse in February 2025 shows almost 37,000 downloads of RYW, either in whole (5,481, the largest single type of download) or one chapter at a time, that have been tracked since the book published at the end of May 2024. This doesn’t account what happens after the download: some visitors may just be checking a cross reference briefly, and some may be inputting the PDF to their LMS for ongoing usage. (And some of them may just have been my mother!)

The fact that such a high proportion of users are accessing individual chapters is a testament to a key value of OER course materials: rather than paying for hundreds of pages that will never be used, writers and instructors are finding the resources that most matter to them.

The most accessed chapters so far, in order, together account for 8239 downloads:

• Chapter 1, Reframing Your Story About Writing
• Chapter 4, Reflecting Throughout Your Writing Process
• Chapter 26, Exercises for Critical Thinking and Assumption Checking
• Chapter 12, Creating Your Writing Theory
• Chapter 2, Adopting Productive Writers’ Habits
• Chapter 7, Generating and Organizing an Early Draft
• Chapter 28, Exercises for Revising
• Chapter 13, Applying and Adapting Genres
• Chapter 6, Reading as a Writer
• Chapter 3, Responding to Readers’ Needs

I see these falling into three interesting clusters.

Teaching aligned with research

The high demand for Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 12 (4346) shows instructors and their students tuning into writing support that matches crucial research and conversations in the field right now about how writers learn. Chapter 1 introduces nine threshold concepts, and introduces the concept of threshold concepts with explanations of how writers can use them to discount myths and create realistic strategies about writing. The nine concepts here draw on those presented in Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s Naming What We Know. Chapter 2 introduces students to the research on how dispositions influence writers’ success, and explores writers’ habits of mind, focusing particularly on five habits—confidence, motivation, self-regulation, persistence, and openness—out of the many identified in the NCTE/WPA/NWP Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. Chapter 4 outlines how reflective practice can be integrated throughout a writing project (not just at the end) and uses a clear framework to model exactly how instructors and students can practice strategies that use metacognition to promote learning transfer. (You can catch up on some of the defining research in Anson & Moore’s 2016 collection Critical Transitions, and dig into metacognition with Gorzelsky et al.’s chapter therein on Cultivating Constructive Metacognition.)

Finally, Chapter 12 expands on the explicit teaching-for-transfer idea, documented in Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak’s Writing Across Contexts, of asking student writers to identify their own key principles and compose a theory of their own writing that they can use for guidance. It’s exciting to see how many of you are going beyond assigning writing tasks (“Give me a 1000 word argument using 3 sources”) to explore how we can help students become confident, reflective practitioners of complex rhetorical skills, in and beyond the current course of study.

Teaching core rhetorical principles and strategies

Demand for Chapters 3, 7, and 13 (1816) shows instructors and their students still committed to wrestling with the core challenges of composing writing while balancing the writer’s goals and the readers’ needs. Chapter 3 features our favorite friends, audience and purpose, and puts them into a metacognitive frame, where the sometimes static-feeling “rhetorical analysis” becomes the dynamic “reflect to predict” that foregrounds the liveliness of writers’ early and ongoing choices. Chapter 7 also takes some familiar conversations and recasts them. Here, brainstorming and outlining aren’t just first steps, but accessible strategies for writers at all stages of composing, embedded in larger rhetorical and reflective practices. And if you’re a fan of my Writing Spaces chapter “10 Ways to Think About Writing,” you’ll see some of my favorite metaphors given new energy here: the Pink House transition scenario, the paragraphs-as-laundry discussion, and the song-chorus-as-cohesion-device explanation.

Lastly, Chapter 13 explores the key concepts behind how genres balance dynamically between the stability that builds writers’ efficiency and the growth and adaptation that enable writers’ innovation. Chapters 3 and 13 also consider the possible harms that can come from “adapting to your audience,” through featured callout sections to “Focus on Equity.” After all, the same discourse communities that can enable connection and clarity are also frequently embedded in histories of racism and bigotry that can unfairly suppress or even punish writers and styles that are deemed unworthy. Rhetoricians need to both lean into productive traditions and push back against assumptions that can stifle our students’ voices.

Helping 21^st-century writers slow down and reconsider

The popularity of Chapters 6, 26, and 28 (2077) reflects my own experience that contemporary instructors are invested in resisting, and helping students resist, the “fast food” or “fast rhetoric” pressures of our day. Chapter 6 provides two dozen strategies to help students read actively and rhetorically, explaining how these approaches are not just effective but efficient for readers who are short on time and long on need-to-know. A key part of that slowing down is learning to build more complete arguments in our own writing and recommend those strategies to others. Chapter 26 contains some of the exercises I use most in my own classes, from Believing and Doubting (thank you for everything, Peter Elbow) and Counterargument Generator to Evil Genie and Gray-Area Finder.

And Chapter 28 provides exercises that help writers practice revising to meet their own goals, from more cut-and-dried advice on powerful sentences and smart proofreading to broader explorations like Conclusion Transplant and Letter to Kermit. With access to new generative AI tools increasing daily, it’s never been more important to help students develop confidence in their slow-rhetoric skills, so that they can make wise choices that empower them as readers, rhetors, and revisers.