ABSTRACT
The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is the primary professional organization of postsecondary writing instructors in the United States. The main activity at a CCCC convention is the presentation of scholarly papers. In general, our pilot study suggests that successful 1988 CCCC abstracts tended to be scholarly and tended to embrace a social view of writing. In this respect, one can say that the genre was shaped significantly by the interests of the program chair. The chapter listed the topics of all Excellents and all Weaks from the 1990 by differentiating high-rated abstracts from low-rated ones. Many of the high-rated abstracts in the corpus are based on such problematization, particularly those taking a more hermeneutical approach. The chapter discusses three features of CCCC abstracts: topic selection, problem definition, and novelty together constitute the vague notion of "interestingness". They do not always carry equal weight; in a particular case, one dimension may sometimes override the other two.
