Standing Challenges in Writing

A standing challenge is a problem in writing that’s still standing: it keeps showing up, it matters, and nobody has solved it. Introducing a source gracefully. Ending without repeating everything. Whose English counts as “correct.” Whether to use em-dashes now that AI does.

This is the research project that closes Pathway A and Pathway B. I’ve built it two ways: Pathway A uses the conversation version, and Pathway B used the corpus version.

The conversation version (Fall 2026)

Students pick a challenge and write a paper that joins the conversation about it in Composition Studies. The challenge can come from their own writing, something the autoethnography showed them (stalling before starting, revising only at the word level, editing out their own voice). Or it can be about writing itself (why research papers feel fake, co-authoring, AI).

Evidence, all three kinds:

1. Their autoethnography data. Transcripts, codes, and drafts, quoted at specific moments.
2. Their group experience. The Digital Academic Narrative sheet told them to save group dynamics for the third project. This is it: how the group divided the work, made decisions, and handled clashing processes.
3. At least three sources, at least one from the course and at least one they find (Composition Forum, Young Scholars in Writing, Writing Spaces). Bizup’s BEAM helps them plan what each source does in the paper.

Strong papers will:

• name the challenge and show scholars are still talking about it
• summarize what two or three scholars say
• bring in specific moments from the student’s data and group work
• show where that evidence confirms, complicates, or extends the scholarship, which is the student’s contribution
• end with what Composition Studies should explore next (a good question beats a tidy fix)
• add a 100–200 word coda: did studying this challenge change how you wrote this paper?

The move the sheet asks for is from description to analysis: not “I do X,” but “I do X, like Sommers found, but in my group X also caused Y.” Students disclose any AI use.

In a 15-week course, the paper is at least 1,250 words, with the draft due in Week 14 and the revision by the final exam slot. In an 8-week session, it’s at least 1,000 words: a 500-word draft is due at the end of Week 7 and the final revision at the end of Week 8.

The corpus version (Spring 2026)

Based in part on Writing About Writing’s “Analysis of Solutions to Writing Challenges.” Students pick a challenge and a genre where it regularly shows up, then study how real writers handle it.

1. Choose a challenge and a genre that fit each other. To study introductions, you need a genre that has them: academic articles, not tweets. The sheet offers four areas to start from:
   • parts of a text (how writers start, end, or organize)
   • readability (transitions, addressing readers directly)
   • source use (introducing quotations, citing)
   • style (sentence length, using or avoiding I)
2. Build a corpus of 8–10 examples and code them, the way Perl codes her data: what do most writers do, what does almost no one do, does one strategy dominate?
3. Write the report (1,700+ words). It explains the challenge and the corpus, walks through the strategies with examples, names the patterns, says what the student will apply to their own writing, cites at least two sources in MLA, and ends with a coda like the one above.

The best reports move from “writers do X” to “writers tend to do X because the genre demands Y, and when they don’t, Z happens.” Digital components can take up some of the word count, but the paper should be mostly text. In a 15-week online course, the draft is due in Week 14 and the revision by the final exam slot.

I drafted this sheet with Claude from photos of my notes, and the sheet cites that in its works cited.

Which to use

If the multimodal project before it is a Digital Genre Analysis, use the conversation version. Both corpus projects collect samples, code them, and report patterns, so pairing them means students do the same method twice. The conversation version brings in scholarship and the students’ own data, which makes it a real step up. It also ties the course together: one paper draws on both earlier projects.