Contact the Editor
EMAIL: Bump Halbritter, Editor, CCC Online, ccconlineeditor@gmail.com
MAIL: Bump Halbritter, Editor, CCC Online,
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures,
298 Ernst Bessey Hall, Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI 48824-1033
CCC Online Submission Guidelines
The editorial staff of College Composition and Communication Online (CCC Online) invites the submission of stand-alone webtexts comprised of digitally-mediated research and scholarship in composition studies that supports college teachers in reflecting on and improving their practices in teaching writing. The field of composition studies draws on research and theories from a broad range of humanistic disciplines— English studies, linguistics, literacy studies, rhetoric, cultural studies, gay studies, gender studies, critical theory, education, technology studies, race studies, communication, philosophy of language, anthropology, sociology, and others—and within composition studies, a number of subfields have also developed, such as technical communication, computers and composition, writing across the curriculum, research practices, history of composition, assessment, and writing center work.
Webtexts for CCC Online may come out of the discussions within and among any of these fields, as long as the argument presented is clearly relevant to the work of college writing teachers and responsive to recent scholarship in composition studies. The usefulness of articles to writing teachers should be apparent in the discussion, but webtexts need not contain explicit sections detailing applications to teaching practices.
In writing for CCC Online, you should consider a diverse readership for your article, a readership that includes at least all teachers of college-level writing at diverse institutions and literacy centers, and may include administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, legislators, corporate employers, parents, and alumni. To address such an audience, you need not avoid difficult theories or complex discussions of research and issues or detailed discussions of pedagogy; rather you should consider the interests and perspectives of the variety of readers who are affected by your theories, pedagogies, and policies.
Genre, Format, Length, Documentation. You are encouraged to submit finished, stand-alone webtexts in whatever genre and format best fits your purposes, and to use alternate genres and formats if they best express your meanings; similarly, the use of endnotes and subheadings should align with your purposes and meanings. CCC Online’s audio-visual webtexts do not have typical word counts or page lengths. Your webtexts should be guided by your purposes; however, we recommend that you aim for the depth and rigor of CCC articles (generally around 7,000 words). All webtexts should be documented according to the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2nd ed.). NCTE’s Guidelines for Gender-Fair Use of Language can be found here. Finally, please allow padding of no fewer than 25 pixels at the top of each page of your webtext to accommodate the CCC Online watermark that will be used to link your text to the issue in which it will appear.
Copyright and Fair Use. Our ability to publish your webtexts in a timely manner will be determined, in part, by the speed with which we can make fair use determinations and/or obtain copyright clearances for the various media assets in your work. Please consult the U.S. Copyright Office’s site on Fair Use and/or the site for Copyright and Fair Use available from Stanford University Libraries to make fair use determinations for your work prior to submitting it to CCC Online. Please, do not rely on fair use as a rule for your work. We highly recommend that your seek and obtain express permission to use all media assets that appear in your webtext prior to submitting your work to CCC Online.
Research Practices and Citing Unpublished Work. If your webtext reports the results of empirical or observational research, you need to be attentive to the ethics as well as the validity of your research methods. In any webtext, if you quote or otherwise reproduce unpublished writing by students or teachers or others, you need to get permission from the writers to do so, even if you use their writing anonymously. Permission forms for citing unpublished work are available from the CCC Online editor.
Submission and Review of Webtexts. Please contact the editor to set up a dropbox for submitting your complete webtext and all associated files. We understand that many audio-visual texts have assets that identify the author, the author’s institution, the author’s collaborators, and/or the subjects of the author’s study. Webtexts will not be read blind by outside reviewers. However, when possible, please make every effort to not identify yourself, your institution, or your collaborators in the text or in the list of works cited. Please include your address, phone number, and email address with all submissions.
CCC. Articles that are composed in a format that could be mediated on paper should be submitted for publication in CCC. Please contact the CCC editor for submission requirements.
About half of the submissions to CCC Online are sent to outside readers after the first stage of review by the editorial staff. You should receive prompt acknowledgment of receipt of your piece by either postcard or email, followed by a report on its status from the editor within 16 weeks. The time between acceptance and publication is usually less than a year. Please feel free to write or call the editor if you have any questions about submitting work to CCC.
Hannah J. Rule is an assistant professor of English in rhetoric and composition at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching focus on writing pedagogies, writing process theories and history, and embodiment. Her scholarship, focused on pedagogical questions related to freewriting, multimodality, voice, writing environments, and rhetorical grammar, also appears in venues including Composition Forum, CEA Critic, and Composition Studies.
Jim Webber is assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches academic, professional, and public writing. He is the author of An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public (forthcoming from Utah State UP).
Deborah Mutnick is professor of English and codirector of LIU Brooklyn Learning Communities. She is author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (1996). Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Rhetoric Review, Journal of Basic Writing, Community Literacy Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a project about the enduring relevance of Richard Wright’s life and work.
Kelly Ritter is associate dean for curricula and academic policy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and professor of English and writing studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2000 to 2017 she served as a writing program administrator across three university campuses, including UIUC. Her ongoing research on archival histories of writing programs began with her first book, Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 (2009). Her latest book is Reframing the Subject: Postwar Instructional Film and Class-Conscious Literacies (2015). From 2012 to 2017 she was editor of College English.
Chris Mays is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches writing and rhetoric. His current research explores the overlaps and interconnections among posthumanisms, systems theory, rhetoric, and writing studies. Previously, his work has appeared in enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture; JAC: A Journal of Cultural Theory; and Rhetoric Review.
