ABSTRACT
Writing this refl ection has been an exercise in uncertainty. When I was invited to write it, I felt both honored and nervous. The honor is clear: Being included in such a collection as a graduate student is unusually lucky. The nervousness is probably clear as well: Refl ecting on the works of the scholars in this section as a graduate student is an odd rhetorical situation, to put it mildly. Fortunately, odd rhetorical situations are our stock in trade in rhetoric and composition, a fi eld that, as Louise Wetherbee Phelps points out in another part of this volume, is defi ned as much by its eclecticism as by its commonalities. Fortunately, too, my role as assistant editor gave me access to the models I needed: the refl ections written for the other sections of this book.
