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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008RNFPriceThe Twenty-first Annual Research Network Forum If you haven’t discovered the RNF, listen up! This day-long sharing and advisory service for researchers is designed to aid dissertating graduate students and junior level faculty members. But any researcher looking for thoughtful, knowledgeable feedback on a work-in-progress is welcome. And if you’re looking for a publisher, this is definitely a hot hooking up place. The 2008 RNF began with three plenary speakers, one of whom was Peter Elbow, who reminded us that “nobody’s mother tongue is standard written English.” After a quick break, the work for the day began. During a morning session, participants joined five or six fellow researchers with similar interests to share abstracts of their projects and to review one another’s work. Each large round table also included one or more discussion leaders, usually scholars who had published in the same general area as the other table members. The mix of young researchers and established ones kept the discussions lively—but always supportive. Between the morning and the afternoon sessions, editors of various comp/rhet journals joined the RNF group and spoke individually with researchers about their respective journals. Some of the publications represented in NOLA were Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, Journal of Basic Writing, Issues in Writing, Journal of Teaching Writing, Open Words, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Lore, Community Literacy Journal, Across the Disciplines, and, of course, Kairos. For the afternoon sessions, researchers were re-grouped and assigned to new roundtables and discussion leaders. Then more sharing and reviewing went on. So, by the end of the day, it was possible for RNF participants to have feedback from a dozen or more people working on projects related to their own scholarship. What an opportunity! The RNF is always scheduled on the day before the opening session of CCCC. I’m already planning to make it part of CCCC in San Francisco 2009. |