What is Rhetoric and Composition?

Rhetoric and Composition is an interdisciplinary field of study that emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the context of U.S. higher education. Its intellectual roots can be traced back to ancient rhetoric but what facilitated the institutionalization of the field was the creation of college composition courses in the late nineteenth century and the professionalization of composition around the 1960s. In recent years, the wave of globalization has led the field to participate in the larger international conversation about writing and the teaching of writing in cross-national and cross-linguistic contexts.