From Cow Paths to Conversation: Rethinking the Argumentative Essay

Laura Aull is associate professor of English and linguistics at Wake Forest University and will begin as the director of the English Department Writing Program at the University of Michigan in 2020. Her most recent work focuses on linguistic analysis of civility and concision in academic writing, and her research can be found in journals focused on composition, applied linguistics, writing analytics, and writing assessment. She is the author of First-Year University Writing (2015) and the forthcoming book How Students Write: A Linguistic Analysis, for which she received a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Education.

Valerie Ross is founding director of the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Established in 2003, this discipline-based independent program recently received the Writing Program Certificate of Excellence from CCCC/NCTE. Her current research interests focus on program-wide approaches to writing assessment, writing disabilities, knowledge transfer, and writing in the disciplines, including a current cross-institutional multidisciplinary research project on writing and peer review in STEM fields, funded by the National Science Foundation.