Information on context

This essay was published in College Composition and Communication in June 2008. According to the journal’s website, “College Composition and Communication publishes research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies that supports college teachers in reflecting on and improving their practices in teaching writing and that reflects the most current scholarship and theory in the field.” So the original audience was probably college writing teachers.

The essay begins with these words from poet and essayist Nikki Giovanni: “Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.” The introduction explains that the article will talk about a study of first-year college writing and compare it to “a similar study conducted over twenty years ago.”

About the author

Andrea A. Lunsford was an English professor and the director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University when this article appeared in 2008. She is also the author of the book we are using in our writing class. Karen J. Lunsford is an associate professor of writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

It was easy to find a lot of information on these authors on the Internet. According to Google Scholar, both have published many articles and conducted a lot of research on writing, so they have experience that relates to this article.

Subject of article

The authors will study writing from students across the country and see whether problems are increasing or whether mistakes are just “a fact of life.” I am the subject of this study without even knowing it! My high school teachers used to tell me to be careful not to include any “Internet lingo” in my writing. . . . I wonder if students really are losing the ability to write because of technology?

I see that the authors are replicating a study done by Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors in 1984, and they will give a detailed comparison between the two studies. This essay may say that making mistakes in writing may not be such a bad thing.

Other preview information

The title includes a quotation from the epigraph that opens the essay and that sets the theme for the whole article, indicating that the authors will focus on the mistakes that others point out in this generation of student writing.

The genre of this essay is a scholarly article published in a journal. This journal requires MLA documentation style for endnotes and for the list of works cited. The essay also uses headings to signal changes in topics within the essay. Eight tables provide data to back up what the authors are saying.