What current theoretical frameworks inform academic and professional writing? What does research tell us about the effectiveness of academic and professional writing programs? What do we know about existing best practices? What are the current guidelines and procedures in evaluating a program’s effectiveness? What are the possibilities in regard to future research and changes to best practices in these programs in an age of accountability? Editors Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater bring together leading scholars in rhetoric and composition to consider the history, trends, and future of academic and professional writing in higher education through the lens of these five central questions.
 
The first two essays in the book provide a history of the academic and professional writing program at the University of Maryland. Subsequent essays explore successes and challenges in the establishment and development of writing programs at four other major institutions, identify the features of language that facilitate academic and professional communication, look at the ways digital practices in academic and professional writing have shaped how writers compose and respond to texts, and examine the role of assessment in curriculum and pedagogy. An afterword by distinguished rhetoric and composition scholars Jessica Enoch and Scott Wible offers perspectives on the future of academic and professional writing.
 
This collection takes stock of the historical, rhetorical, linguistic, digital, and evaluative aspects of the teaching of writing in higher education. Among the critical issues addressed are how university writing programs were first established and what early challenges they faced, where writing programs were housed and who administered them, how the language backgrounds of composition students inform the way writing is taught, the ways in which current writing technologies create new digital environments, and how student learning and programmatic outcomes should be assessed. 
 

Shirley Wilson Logan is a professor emerita of English at the University of Maryland and the author of We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women and Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America.
 
Wayne H. Slater is an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. His research articles have appeared in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Research in the Teaching of English, Reading and Writing Quarterly, and Reading Research Quarterly. 

“As researchers, scholars, and teachers of writing, we have all come a very long way since 1949 and the official creation of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. While one volume cannot possibly capture every single thing of note, this one goes quite far in helping us to see past, present, and perhaps most important, the pathways to the next phase of what remains, even in our digital age, significant and necessary work.”—Jacqueline Jones Royster, coauthor of Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies
“Probing the history and current troubles and challenges faced by college and university writing programs and providing strategies by which these might be and are being addressed, this collection will be a valuable resource for writing teachers, scholars, and program administrators.”—Bruce Horner, author of Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange