<p> Traditionally, the field of rhetoric and composition has valued long-form essay writing, which requires students to engage patiently and at length with revision. In contrast, students today spend much time outside of school producing fast-paced and short posts for social media. This dissertation argues that students&rsquo; social media interactions provide them nuanced, dialogic, and complex rhetorical understandings about writing&mdash;but that students need help developing discursive processes to support transfer of their social media knowledge to other writing contexts, including long-form academic writing. Drawing from two semesters of in-class study, I construct for first-year composition classrooms a pedagogy that embraces and cultivates the rhetorical knowledge students gain from social media; I demonstrate how students can analyze, reflect on, and transfer this knowledge to academic contexts. Citing students&rsquo; social media and academic writing, I draw from students&rsquo; intuitive understandings of the rhetorical concepts medium, context, audience, <i>ethos</i>, and purpose to illustrate how these concepts can productively shift and expand in FYC instruction. To situate this pedagogy within contemporary practices, I analyze leading FYC textbooks and highlight how textbook pedagogies can acknowledge and foreground students&rsquo; expanded rhetorical understandings of social media for richer composing processes in all media and for all contexts, digital and non-digital.</p><p>