Key. Key. Key. This is a term that comes up quite often in the work of Kathleen Blake Yancey. While many books and articles include “key” in some way, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” (2004) includes the term in the title, and “Key Terms” are a critical part of Teaching for Transfer (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak, 2014), a pedagogy that Yancey helped get off the ground and popularize. Yancey has even called key terms “a signature of my work.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that the title of this collection dedicated to Yancey’s work includes the word “key.”

While key can mean many things, there are three important ways in which this term is central to Yancey’s work. In “Made Not Only in Words,” Yancey is making a musical allusion, something she’s referenced as important for choosing that term. In this sense, she’s looking specifically at a “key change,” in which a musician shifts up an octave while keeping the basic melody of the music the same. I’m going to call this “key” a change. There’s also the way key is used in the phrase “key terms,” to mean essential or critical, such as “key findings,” “key concepts,” and “key outcomes.” I’m going to call this “key” important. And finally, we have the most obvious version of key: the one you might have in your pocket right now. This definition doesn’t show up in Yancey’s work often, but it’s no less key. We use this kind of key to gain entry into spaces, and so I’ll call this kind of “key” an entryway.

In what ways is Yancey’s work key, key, and key? In what ways is it a change, important, and an entryway? While I could look at various works across a long and respected career, I’m going to instead focus on two works use the word “key” as a central concept: “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” and “Writing Across Contexts” with its contribution of key terms.

The musical connections in “Made Not Only in Words” are obvious. Yancey notes this connection when choosing the term, but also notes that the key change metaphor may even be a limitation in that it “privileges music at the expense of art.” But if we break this metaphor down to its base, we can see what it really means. A “key change” is when a piece of music moves its musical “base” or “home.” The change is often subtle, something that I as a non-musical person wouldn’t even notice. The melody stays the same, but there’s been a fundamental shift in how the song continues. “Made Not Only in Words” suggests such a shift in composition, but it also is such a shift.

“Made Not Only in Words” was a keynote for the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2004—and was later printed in the CCC journal. The piece reminds us that we’re in the middle of a “tectonic change” (p. 298) and breaks that change down into several fundamental pieces. It introduces us to the importance of out-of-school writing, something I’ve picked up in my own work (Shepherd, 2018); it reminds us that literacies are multiple and multimodal, something commonplace in the field today; it makes a call for writing studies as a field, something picked up by many scholars in the last two decades; it uses the term “transfer” before it was commonly used in the field; and it calls for a shared vocabulary for writing studies, something that becomes so important later not only in Teaching for Transfer but also in most modern composition pedagogy. In a sense, this piece both directs us to a change happening in the field, but it also is the change happening in the field. It is a key change, in fact. The basic melody of composition stays the same: rhetoric, writing processes, reflection, and revision are still at the heart of what we do, but we also shift up an octave as we include multimodality, transfer, and a shared vocabulary. The keynote both draws our attention to the key change taking place and helps move that change along, encouraging people to embrace a shift in the field at the same time as we hold on to important parts that have defined composition.

Key terms as a critical part of Teaching for Transfer pedagogy are first introduced in a Composition Forum article in 2012 (Robertson, Taczak, and Yancey, 2012), are expanded upon in Writing across Contexts (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak, 2014), and are returned to several times since (including Yancey, Davis, Robertson, Taczak, and Workman, 2018). This shift has changed the way that teachers approach their writing classes and is particularly important to transfer as a part of composition pedagogy. Like with “Composition in a New Key,” this change is not a reinvention. Instead, it’s much a key change: there is a shift while holding onto the basic melody. A vocabulary for discussing writing is not a new idea but placing it centrally within the pedagogical approach is a shift. The terms themselves are recognizable: audience, genre, rhetorical situation, and reflection, for example (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak, 2014, p. 57). In later iteration of the key terms, students create their own list of writing vocabulary and update them as the semester progresses, and they learn more about writing. They create their own key change in their learning, shifting the terms as they learn.

The change that happened with key terms has even contributed to larger shifts in the field, such as building key concepts of writing studies and the work on threshold concepts such as in Naming What We Know (2015), a collection that Yancey contributed to with an introduction and several chapters. Key concepts are again only shifting up an octave, but the change is key.

To say these two contributions are important—our second key—is an understatement. The CCC version of “Made Not Only in Words” has been cited nearly 800 times as I’m writing this, including 18 times so far in 2023, 19 years after its publication. Writing Across Contexts—only one publication focusing on “key terms”—has been cited 615 times, including 47 times in 2023, 9 years after its publication. These publications are important because they started multiple overlapping and discrete conversations. In 2004, Yancey helped to push the field toward the importance of multimodality, reinforced the importance of writing studies as a field and a major, and even introduced many scholars to the importance of writing transfer. All of these things have become central conversations in the literature of the field, which is a primary reason that this keynote continues to be cited nearly two decades later. In 2014, she and her coauthors doubled down on the importance of transfer and offered a path forward in rewriting the ways in which the field approaches pedagogy. Both texts offer turning points. I remember the impacts these texts had on me as a graduate student—I shifted my own study to focus on multimodality after reading “Made Not Only in Words,” and I changed my dissertation to include writing transfer after reading Writing Across Contexts. These texts were key in my own professionalization, as I imagine they were for many other scholars.

In fact, we could say that these texts were a “key” to me—they were an entryway. These pieces helped me to open up my understanding to a new direction for my own teaching and research. And I suspect that’s probably the case for other scholars as well. Much of Yancey’s work, but especially work like “Made Not Only in Words” and like Writing Across Contexts were entryways to other research down the line. After “Made Not Only in Words,” we see an explosion in research work on multimodality, for example. We see Shipka’s multimodal work emerge in the next few years culminating in A Composition Made Whole (2011), we see Palmeri’s work build up to Remixing Composition (2012), and we see Alexander and Rhodes’s work build up to On Multimodality (2014). Within a decade of “Made Not Only in Words,” multimodality became commonplace in composition scholarship. This key change has also been an entryway. “Transfer,” only mentioned briefly in “Made Not Only in Words,” builds in the same way: the term starts showing up in journals such as WPA around 2007, there’s a special issue of Composition Forum on writing and transfer in 2012—including work by Yancey—and there’s an explosion of learning transfer work in the decade that follows. Would these texts exist without “Made Not Only in Words”? Perhaps. But perhaps the calls in the keynote also helped spark ideas or encourage people to pursue ideas held in the backs of their minds. Perhaps the keynote was the key to help push scholars over that threshold.

Key terms offer a similar entryway but to a much larger audience. Of course, Writing Across Contexts is an entryway to TFT and writing transfer for many scholars. But probably more importantly is that key terms are an entryway to writing as a field of scholarly study for many composition students. The key terms from TFT (and remixes of those terms) may be the first time that first-year composition and other writing students think about writing in a critical and mindful way. It may be the first time that they’ve considered that writing itself is worthy of study, not just a means of communication of knowledge. Key terms end up being an entryway to metacognitive conversations about writing for countless composition students.

Key. Key. Key. A change, important, and an entryway. “Made Not Only in Words” and Writing Across Contexts served as all three for me and for many other scholars and students as well. But these are only two key works in a decades long history full of ideas that sparked the work of others. Yancey’s work has helped push composition studies to a new key in many ways and through many works. And this work will continue to be key, key, and key for many years.

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