Acknowledging Writing Partners treats the genre of written acknowledgements as a lens for viewing writing as a practice of indebted partnerships. Like new media scholars who have argued that studying ubiquitous technologies such as the pencil reveals the mundane and profound ways in which writing is always mediated by tools, Laura R. Micciche argues that writing activities are frequently mediated by human and non-human others, advancing a view of composing that accounts for partners who emerge in acknowledgements: feelings, animals, and random material phenomena. Acknowledgements are micro economies of debt and praise; they reveal writing's connectedness, often repressed by the argument or set of propositions that follow. Micciche suggests new methods for studying and theorizing writing that take into account the whole surround of writing. In doing so, Micciche asks what difference this economy makes to dominant conceptions of writers and writing as well as to pedagogical principles that inform writing instruction—and what difference it make to writers.

Laura R. Micciche is the author of Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching (2007) and, with Dale Jacobs, co-editor of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (2003). Her articles on emotion, writing pedagogy, feminist theory and practice, and alternative forms of agency have appeared in College English, CCC, Computers & Composition Online, WPA, and elsewhere; recent chapters are included in the second edition of A Guide to Composition Pedagogies (2014) and Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (2010). At the University of Cincinnati, Laura teaches writing, rhetoric, and pedagogy courses. She has twice won her department's teaching award, and in 2012 won a university-wide award for teaching. Laura edits the journal Composition Studies.