What is the hardest thing to teach in a composition course, and how do you teach that?

This is a difficult question to answer. I don't have very much experience teaching, so I'm also working with limited experiential knowledge. When I think of teaching writing, I primarily think of first year composition courses. Those courses aren't about teaching just writing, though. If that were the case, then the courses would primarily focus on teaching grammar and style, yet these issues, as important as they are, often take the backseat. Instead, we focus on teaching students the writing process, and we do that by guiding them through the writing process for different genres of essays. Ideally, students would see that the same process applies to any type of composing, even though they had to use different writing strategies to write for each purpose or audience. However, this doesn't seem to be the reality. My question is: why do students associate rhetoric with only formal, academic writing? Perhaps what I mean by "rhetoric" might more accurately be the logical process used to compose an essay.

I have already graded several dozen freshman essays this semester, and I have also practiced grading at my previous university as well. Even across different student populations, I have noticed that students usually just follow the formulaic, Ikea instructions for how to write that genre of essay, but very rarely do students question why the examples actually work. I recognize that there may still be some cognitive development or maturing going on at during that age range, but I'm not content to accept that as an adequate answer.

Of all the student essays that I've read (a comparatively infinitesimal number, to be sure), I have only read one in which a student discusses using the same rhetorical, process approach to some other medium besides writing. This student was doing some exploratory writing to fill up the word count for a personal history with writing essay, and she seemed genuinely astounded to discover that she used the same process to prepare a presentation that she used to compose an argumentative essay. There was almost a trace of excitement in her prose, but she seemed to be more shocked at making such an odd association than she was excited by the empowering possibilities. Either way, I left her an encouraging comment for that paragraph.

How do we fix this? I do have the beginnings of an answer, but it is problematic in a number of ways. I would propose that we take a multimodal approach to teaching composition, guiding students through the process of composing in a number of different mediums and rhetorical situations, such as visual posters, websites, workplace presentations, proposals, or addressing a workplace issue. However, multimodal composition has had several resurgent periods of popularity, but it seems to have never endured as a "feasible" solution.

For one, multimodal composition is predisposed to encourage interdisciplinarity, which is a major issue in our current academic structure. Also, it is difficult to standardize a multimodal curriculum because every instructor would have different areas of expertise. For instance, I am comfortable with teaching the basics of visual design and using hand-made sketches as drafting and brainstorming tools, but I am completely out of my element in composing with video or audio. Many compositionists question our qualifications for teaching in multimodal environments, and many other compositionists are staunchly opposed to composing in anything other than writing. These are all valid arguments, and I don't have the answers. But, at this point in my education and research, I don't know of any more straightforward way to show students the power and flexibility of a rhetorical approach to composing.