Writing Conference Proposals

Conferences provide valuable opportunities to learn more about your discipline while also connecting with other scholars--including graduate students and professors at other institutions. They remain irreplaceable components of professional development. You should try your best to attend at least one regional or national conference per year.

In Rhetoric & Composition, a healthy number of conferences welcome submissions from researchers at all levels. Here's a brief list:

Conference on College Composition and Communication
National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference
FemRhets
Computers & Composition
International Writing Centers Association
Thomas R. Watson Conference (Biannual)
Rhetoric Society of America Conference (Biannual)
Southern Regional Composition Conference (Annual)

Most of these conferences take place at different cities every year. Others, like the Watson Conference, remain at one institution and are hosted by a university.

Staying Aware of CFPs

To stay aware of upcoming deadlines and information, you should add the conference websites to your web browser's bookmarks tab. It also helps to mark the deadlines in a calendar. You can even use Google to create reminders and alerts for upcoming dates. Finally, subscribe to the WPA-L. It's the most active list-serv for writing teachers. (If you're worried about cluttering your inbox, then you can use Google's settings to create a folder label and instruct your mail server to send messages directly there instead of your main inbox.)

Generating Ideas

You have more ideas for interesting proposals than you probably think. The best ideas often come from your daily experiences as a writer, editor, or teacher. Start by reflecting on and brainstorming questions, challenges, or dilemmas you've faced recently. Possibilities could include an assignment you've used in the classroom, uncertainties you've faced regarding pedagogy and classroom management, or reactions you've felt to various articles you've read.

Current graduate students usually work on a range of projects for their coursework. It makes perfect sense to adapt these projects for conferences. If you're collaborating with other students, consider forming your own panel. Many conferences invite individual as well as group proposals.

Rhetoricians also often present papers on problems they've seen in public discourse, and they write about how certain theories or approaches in our field can help illuminate those issues. On the other hand, they can also use issues from pop culture and discourse to complicate our current understandings of how writing and communication work. For example, a rhetorician might explain how feminist rhetorical theory can help us understand and engage the recent surge in attention to sexual harassment. Or you could write a proposal articulating the implications of net neutrality laws to education and writing pedagogy.

Locating Sources

The next step lies in linking your ideas to current scholarship. You don't need to become an expert in a specific area of rhetoric or writing overnight. However, you should visit resources such as comppile as well as the major journals for articles that seem related to your topic. We keep a separate, comprehensive list of journals here.

Even if our library doesn't subscribe to a specific journal, you can search and browse the contents online. Then you'll use the publication information to request a scan of the article through ILLIAD. The library usually processes scans within 3-5 days. You'll receive a notice in your ILLIAD account when the PDF is ready. You can download the PDF and keep it for personal scholarly use. There is no due date for return.

Themes & Formatting

It's important to pay close attention to the CFP. Read the language carefully and decide if your work fits this venue. However, keep in mind that many conferences may change their theme annually. That means you have some flexibility in terms of content, and you don't need to explicitly address the theme in your proposal. In fact, trying to force your work into a theme may hurt your chances of acceptance. Use your best judgment.

For example: The FemRhets conference most likely wouldn't accept a conference proposal on Twitter and public discourse unless it considered some aspect of gender. Meanwhile, the Watson Conference would still consider this proposal, even if the annual theme didn't specifically address technology or public discourse. Tailoring the proposal to fit the theme would help in this case, but only if you could find natural and organic overlaps and connections.

Proposal length for conferences can very widely. Length requirements range from several thousand characters to a few hundred words. You should never assume that your proposal will be reviewed if you don't adhere to the guidelines. Even if your proposal comes in at "a few words" over the limit, you should do your absolute best to trim it down.

The proposal needs to begin with a clear statement about your topic and what you tend to argue in your presentation. You should do your best to "get to the point" in the first 2-3 sentences. After that, you can elaborate on your project's context and significance. Then you'll offer a few sentences explaining how your proposal engages with current scholarship--either by elaborating and furthering current approaches, or outlining a different approach.

You should be careful in articulating your differences with current research. Even if you offer a radically different method or perspective, try to treat other scholarship in a fair and civil way. There's a decent chance that someone you critique could wind up reviewing your proposal at some stage, or sitting in the audience when you deliver your presentation. Disagreement is fine, but always try to acknowledge the contributions of scholars you intend to dispute. This will improve your chances of acceptance.

People often wonder if they should include a works cited with their proposal. The answer often depends on the format and length requirements. If you have space, then do it. But if you feel a need to use all of your allotted space to explain your ideas, then at least provide indirect citations and identify key sources in the body of your proposal.

After Submission

You might wait anywhere from a few weeks to a  few months for a decision on your proposal. National conferences like CCCC often take several months, because their proposals undergo a rigorous 2-stage review process organized by dozens of conference planners and researchers. They are also reviewing thousands of proposals. Smaller conferences receive fewer, and they undergo a one-stage review process by a smaller committee.

If your proposal is rejected, don't take it personally. Everyone receives rejections. You probably won't receive specific feedback, as you would with a journal article. Upon rejection, revisit your proposal and consider having colleagues review it. You may have a good idea, but it needed a different framework or the intervention didn't come in clearly. You can still revise and submit that proposal to another conference, or even develop it into an article.

If you receive an acceptance, then read it carefully and follow their instructors. Many conferences ask you to officially accept their invitation. You may have additional instructions to follow to reserve your place.

The next step involves registration and travel planning. Before you pay any money yourself, notify your department chair and graduate program coordinator. They will guide you through the process of filling out travel paperwork. Universities often have complicated processes and require forms submitted in advance of travel. Every institution has its own policies and rules.

Travel cost varies, but national conferences tend to run higher than regional. You may need to pay for registration and airfare up front, and receive reimbursement later. Wait on booking your plane tickets and hotel until you hear from the department. Many institutions are required to use specific travel vendors, rather than services like Expedia. Follow their guidelines. Keep any and all documents and communication about your travel in a separate file. Some faculty even have a special "travel" folder for emails and correspondence. Also keep all of your receipts, electronic and otherwise. You'll probably be required to submit them. Even when you're ready to turn in all of the required paperwork, it's smart to make copies for your own records.

Faculty may offer to complete your paperwork for you. That can help, but you should try to look over the forms yourself and make sure the information provided is accurate. You should never feel timid or anxious about following up with administrators to make sure all paperwork is filed accurately and in a timely manner. It's very easy for forms to get lost in the shuffle.

Designing Effective Assignments

Many students arrive at college with little background or experience in writing. Although some do write extensively in high school, they still need clear and detailed assignments in order to perform well. Your assignments should reflect program outcomes, and also provide meaningful opportunities for students to explore and learn about new topics of interest to them. Also, your guidelines should explain your expectations clearly, while also providing the resources to ensure success.

Instructors follow a range of best practices when drafting and sharing their assignments. This post will explore those practices in detail. The composition director also maintains an evolving assignment gallery online, where instructors have uploaded materials. You can browse these assignments to get ideas for your own course, and to see how instructors illustrate the best practices described here. If you can't access this folder, send a request to the Composition Director.

Foundations of Effective Assignments

Inquiry should guide your assignment guidelines and expectations, especially ones requiring research. You should help students articulate questions and problems tied to their own observations and experiences, and then link these questions to conversations happening in public, workplace, or academic and scientific discourse communities. In other words, students need to conduct research into articles published on this topic in newspapers, magazines, and journals.

The most effective assignments offer students freedom to choose their own topics. You can decide on the genre and the other details such as length, number of sources. For example, some instructors may require students to write a literacy narrative, a food memoir, or a paper exploring an aspect of state or local history. These are great ideas, and they still give students room to decide what they'll write about. On the other hand, requiring students to write about a specific historical event takes away agency and stifle critical thinking. In short, it's never a good idea to mandate the assignment topic. Students must undergo the process of developing their own ideas and questions.

Consider a common assignment: the 5-page rhetorical analysis. True, this assignment does prescribe certain aspects of content by requiring students to engage in analysis using the rhetorical triangle, the appeals, the rhetorical situation, or Toulmin's method. But most rhetorical analysis assignments allow students to choose the essay or speech they plan to analyze, usually with teacher approval. A teacher might model rhetorical analysis by assigning readings that students discuss in class.

But imagine if a teacher required all of their students to submit a 5-page rhetorical analysis on Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" or MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. While these are exemplary models of rhetoric, forcing students to write 5 pages on one or the other removes agency. It creates a situation in which students are only performing empty motions of analysis to satisfy a teacher's preconceived notions about a text. Plus, the teacher now has to read 20 essays that make many of the same points. They may become frustrated and start grading unfairly, due to a sense of monotony and repetition that they brought on themselves.

A first-semester writing course usually does provide some restrictions on topic. For example, you can ask students to write about a particular theme: race, freedom of speech and censorship, or gender. These broad topics still allow a wide degree of agency. However, avoid prescribing the topic or subject of the papers. Too much restriction can lead to frustration and disengagement.

When you assign a paper, always indicate the genre you want students to write in and help them become familiar with it. You also need to scaffold the assignment with readings, short writing assignments, and peer review opportunities. Once you've assigned a paper, it's a good idea to spend several classes reading and critiquing published examples of the genre, as well as samples of student work. 

Common genres for first-year writing courses include literacy narratives, essays on prominent socio-political issues, rhetorical analysis, and research-based assignments. See the curricular guidelines post for a list of required assignments for each course.

Audiences & Contexts

It's important to establish context, purpose, and audience for each major writing project you assign to students. Discuss these issues in class, and provide some discussion about them in the official guidelines.

You should identify yourself as a primary reader of student essays. But discuss the role you plan to play. The most meaningful assignments situate the teacher as interlocutor and learner. As the instructor, you don't simply want students to write things they think you want to hear. They should take the opportunity to show you something you didn't know, or hadn't considered before. We may be experts in writing, but there are many things that students know that we don't. Furthermore, they can learn new things and share them with us through their research.

Classroom peers form the next most immediate audience. If you're creating an active community in which students learn from each other, then they can use these different backgrounds to help make rhetorical decisions. Any given classroom will see students of different economic class, gender, sexual identity, beliefs, and ethnicities. Students should learn to adapt their writing to these different audiences. In many ways, the classroom operates as a smaller, safer public space.

You should encourage students to think about how their writing could circulate beyond the classroom. Even if they are sharing particular drafts with you and their peers, the ultimate goal is to craft projects that they can continue developing and share in other contexts--undergraduate research conferences, internships, campus jobs, even family members.

Some students might even decide to turn research papers into videos, podcasts, or material for circulation through social media. For example, a student who works as an RA might begin research on sexual assault in your class, and then write a paper that she later turns into a PowerPoint or Prezi to share with other RAs in an effort to reduce risks on campus. Their engagement in these other contexts begins with preparation in your class.

Writing Your Assignments

Your assignment guidelines do more than offer a topic and due date. They convey your expectations and establish a path toward a concrete goal. Try to explain your expectations clearly, and don't leave room for ambiguity or misinterpretation. For example, a research paper assignment should briefly outline the basic organizational structure you want, and provide links to deeper explanations about thesis statements, source synthesis, citation, and other important components of research.

Avoid assumptions when it comes to your guidelines. Certain aspects of writing may seem like "no brainers" to you, but remember that many of your students may not know the importance of citation, or how to structure a thesis statements. Some students may not have even heard the term "thesis statement" until this year. That's why they're taking your class.

You need to explain in your guidelines what kinds of sources they should use, an estimate of how many citations they should provide, and how they should organize their papers. For example, ask yourself some of these questions when  you create your assignment:

• What do you want students to learn by completing this assignment?
• What are some published examples of what you want them to submit?
• Have you written a paper like this before yourself? (If not, you should.)
• What structure should the paper follow?
• How long should the paper be?
• Will students need to do outside research? What kind? Primary (interviews, observations, archives?) or secondary (articles from newspapers, magazines, journals)?
• What difficulties do you think your students will encounter? How can they overcome these obstacles?
• What processes could students follow to complete the paper? How many hours will it take them to complete?

Your assignment guidelines should state these expectations explicitly. Students come to college with a wide range of literacies and educational backgrounds. A few will have written 20-page papers. Others will have barely written a book report. Your guidelines should address these different backgrounds and anticipate the kinds of questions they'll have.

Formatting & Sharing Assignments

Remember that students are juggling work and expectations from at least four other instructors. You can help students by presenting your assignments in organized and eye-friendly documents, and by locating them in one central place. Your assignment should include the following information:

• Title of the Assignment
• Course & Semester
• Due dates for rough drafts, peer review, and revision
• One paragraph description of purpose
• Description of explicit expectations and criteria
• Outline of steps students should follow when research, outlining, drafting, or revising
• Brainstorming questions to help them select a topic
• A list of tips and suggestions
• Directions on where and how to submit drafts
• Links to other resources such as textbook chapters, websites, rubrics, and other materials related to the assignment

Beyond that, you should also embed your assignments in many different areas, like your course schedule. Give students different ways to access the same information.

You can distribute your assignments in a number of ways. Always make sure you make a digital copy available on your LMS (Blackboard or Google Classroom.) Some instructors still share paper copies of assignments. That's acceptable, but remember that paper can be lost. Also, you will likely need to alter or clarify your guidelines, or even extend due dates. Paper copies can lead to confusion if you need to make changes.

You should devote at least one class day to introducing a new major assignment. Provide a short explanation (5 minutes) and then give students a chance to read the guidelines in your presence. Also give them a chance to ask questions, and then have them complete some in-class work related to the assignment. Students may not think of questions immediately, but they will if you give them a task that prompts them to start thinking about the work in concrete ways.

You should avoid introducing major assignments at the end of class. This indirectly signals to students that the work is unimportant. It doesn't give anyone enough time to process the information. As a result, students may not put the amount of energy and attention to the work that you expect.

Assignments as Resources

Assignments also do more than outline expectations. They provide strategies and resources. You should also indicate to students what specific sources and databases they should use. Especially if you decide to give them a specific topic, such as state or local history, you'll need to meet with a librarian or information literacy specialist and give students names and links to databases, online archives, websites, or other materials you want them to consult.

For example: Imagine an instructor wants students to research the history of a food in the Arkansas region. Many students would not know where to begin to find this kind of information. Without effective infrastructure and guidance, students will likely grow frustrated and produce less than their best work.

Supporting Your Assignments with Classwork

Scaffold your assignments with readings and class discussions. Students tend to succeed when they have a wealth of examples to guide their rhetorical decisions. Although we don't want students to simply copy others' work, we do most of our basic learning through imitation. That's why many teachers try to provide at least 2-3 examples of student work for each assignment, as well as 3-4 readings from well-known or published writers.

These readings can serve as required assignments for the week following the introduction of a major paper. It's a good idea to make them the foundation of in-class discussion and group-work. You can even conduct practice peer review workshops on sample papers.

Sequencing Your Assignments

Be careful about requiring too many short papers. Short assignments need to inform and scaffold larger ones. For example, each major paper calls for shorter assignments such as free-writings, topic proposals, peer-critique memos, and miniature reflections. Other shorter assignments could involve short summaries of readings or mandatory discussion board posts.Some instructors have students keep a reading or reflection journal throughout the semester. A recurring project like this can be helpful, but you should resist the temptation to over-comment. Most experienced instructors simply monitor progress on these and tell students up front that they may only offer brief feedback on them. The primary benefit of journals is for students to have material for their reflection essays.


Decide carefully how you'll sequence your assignments. Students need at least 2 weeks to complete a draft, and 3 is ideal. That window gives everyone time to discuss readings and sample papers that familiarize them with the genre expectations, as well as ways in which they can deviate and innovate those conventions. The length of time also allows for brainstorming, topic proposals, and peer review workshops. It's best not to assign students a new paper until they've completely finished and submitted their current project. You might even want to wait on introducing new work until you've had time to read and provide feedback.

Conflicting Ideologies

Some of your students will hold very different political, cultural, or religious views from you. It's often difficult to know how far you can go when encouraging students to interrogate their own beliefs. Your approach will depend on the situation. But some general principles apply.

For example, imagine a student who seems convinced that vaccines cause autism. 

Reading in Composition

Writing teachers today have begun to recognize the importance of reading. Effective writers must know how to read and analyze longer, complex, and even difficult texts in different genres. Some students may arrive to your class having read very little. They may not practice skills you picked up in college, such as highlighting and writing marginal notes. You'll need to integrate some discussion about reading into your course.

It's important to convey to students that reading involves more than simply memorizing facts from a text. They may see it as a static, unidirectional transaction in which they absorb information and then repeat it. Unfortunately, testing culture in secondary school tends to encourage this view.

More progressive teachers in high school and college teach reading as a participatory, rhetorical process. Readers engage indirectly in conversation with authors. They form opinions and reactions based on what they read. Seldom do they remember every detail about a text after reading. Instead, readers make unconscious decisions about what to take with them based on what new things they learn, what they strongly agree or disagree with, and what intellectual and emotional connections form with the text.

Rhetorical reading involves an active process of working to determine an author's context and purpose, their motives, what they want to achieve through their words. Rhetorical readers identify claims and evaluate evidence, even when they're reading narrative or instructional texts.

Writing teachers should foreground this view of reading early in the semester. Assign them some moderately challenging readings, like a 10-15 page journal article. Before they read, spend a class period talking about their experiences with reading. You might have them complete a questionnaire and compare answers with each other. This activity could lead into a discussion of the characteristics of longer, more complex texts.

You should also address concrete reading strategies. Many of us have learned how to navigate longer texts using these methods:

• Anticipate having to read 2-3 times.
• Release the expectation of a full understanding.
• Preview an article by studying the title and abstract.
• Skim through with attention to section headings.
• Stop and take breaks.
• Highlight passages that seem important.
• Underline or circle words and phrases that don't make sense.
• Push through difficult or wordy passages rather than re-reading the same sentence or paragraph over and over.
• Think about the target audience and why they might find this useful.
• Think about secondary and tertiary audiences.

Teachers should help students develop strategies for close-reading. Ellen Carillo's open access textbook A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading serves as an excellent resource. Definitely consider assigning some chapters from her book to your students at the beginning of the semester. Although written for first-year students, teachers can glean many helpful ideas for lesson plans and materials.

Make reading a frequent and meaningful act in your class. Assign pieces that you think students will find interesting. During the first 4-5 weeks of the semester, aim to have students read at least one substantive piece per class. Try to stay in the neighborhood of 20-30 pages of reading per week. Once you begin more involved assignments like research papers, pull back on readings so that they have more time to gather and read their own sources.

Textbook reading should occupy an important but minimal role in your course. Textbook chapters present important information and key concepts, but ultimately you want students to focus their reading on genres that will apply to real-world contexts. Some scholars have critiqued textbook styles as overly wordy, and ultimately not representative of any actual genre students will encounter outside of college texts. In fact, this reasoning forms part of the foundation for our program's open-access textbook, the need for shorter, concise explanations of rhetorical concepts.

Avoid assigning pieces that simply effected you on a personal level. We all have articles and books that we want to share with our students, but those don't usually make the best choices.

Some instructors may feel the need to assign books or essays that they found personally illuminating in college. You can always recommend readings to students. But required readings should have a clear connection to course and program outcomes. Above all, make an earnest attempt to assign contemporary readings that will challenge students, but not overwhelm them.

A Composition I class should focus on helping students read and analyze articles and op-ed pieces in newspapers and substantive magazines. Students need exposure to overtly and indirectly persuasive texts that explore cultural and political issues from a variety of perspectives. For example, many instructors assign readings from publications like The Atlantic, New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, The Economist, and similar venues. Most articles from these sources run 4-5 pages and may take students an hour to read carefully. Our program reader draws on them frequently.

You might even design a first-week activity in which you give students a list of pre-approved publications, and have them nominate and vote on what to include.

A Composition II class should move students forward into academic journals. True, some academic journals are too challenging for first-year composition students. However, many address a semi-public readership. You'll see these journals in the composition program's open access reader. Feel free to explore these journal's on your own for topics and articles you think will engage students.