Asao B. Inoue is an American rhetoric and composition scholar at Arizona State University whose work on writing assessment argues that conventional grading practices reproduce racial and linguistic inequity, and proposes labor-based alternatives.
Core ideas
- Antiracist writing assessment: Inoue argues that writing assessment based on a single standard of “quality” — typically white, middle-class, Standard American English — functions as a gate that disproportionately excludes writers from marginalized linguistic backgrounds. The standard itself is not neutral; it encodes specific racial and class formations [@inoue2015].
- Labor-based grading contracts: instead of evaluating writing against a quality standard, Inoue’s grading contracts assess students on the labor they perform — drafting, revising, giving feedback, reflecting. This separates the development of writing ability from the enforcement of dominant language conventions.
- Writing assessment as ecology: Inoue treats assessment not as a neutral measurement but as an ecology — a system of interconnected elements (standards, rubrics, student populations, institutional contexts) that produces outcomes. Changing one element changes the whole system.
Notable works
- Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (2015)
- Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (2019)
- “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do about White Language Supremacy?” (2019, CCCC Chair’s Address)
Related
- language and power — Inoue’s work makes explicit how writing conventions encode racial power
- discourse community — his work shows how discourse community norms can function as exclusionary standards
- audience — Inoue challenges whose language defines “clarity” and “correctness”