This book is a major breakthrough for developers of writing assessment programs who must certify the writing competency of undergraduate students. Legislators and accreditation boards across the nation have called for and implemented large scale projects to measure educational outcomes. This single source provides comprehensive information on the history, underlying concepts, and process of conducting a large scale writing assessment program at a specific institution of higher education. The handbook opens with an analysis of the rationale for the assessment of writing during the junior year of the undergraduate curriculum. The authors then turn to a case study of the success of their own institutional wide assessment program. A history is provided of 20th century writing assessment practices; as well, attention is given to defining levels of literacy. After describing an assessment process model, discussion turns to the design of questions, the administration of the assessment, the rating of papers, and the statistical analysis of data. Attention is also given to the design of a course for those who are unsuccessful on the assessment. The study closes with directions for further research and over 200 references in the bibliography.

When it was first published in 1989, Susan Miller s Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric the Writer established a landmark pedagogical approach to composition based the importance of the writer the act of writing in the history of rhetoric. Widely used as an introduction to rhetoric composition theory for graduate students, the volume was the first winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award from JAC and is still one of the most frequently cited books in the field.This first paperback edition includes a new introductory chapter in which Miller addresses changes in the field since the first edition, outlines new research, surveys positions she no longer supports. A new foreword by Thomas P. Miller assesses the proven impact of Rescuing the Subject on the field of rhetoric composition.Situating modern composition theory in the historical context of rhetoric, Miller notes that throughout the eighteenth century, rhetoric referred to oral, not written, discourse. By contrast, her history of rhetoric contends oral written discourse were related from the beginning. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, she shows how actual acts of writing comment both rhetoric composition. Miller also asserts that contemporary composition study is the necessary cultural outcome of changing conditions for producing discourse, describing the history of rhetoric as the gradual unstable relocation of discourse in conventions that only written language can create. She maintains teachers historians of rhetoric must recognize that the contemporary writing they analyze teach demands their attention to a textual rhetoric that allows theorizing the writer as always symbolically a student of situated meanings.

time, encouragement, and craft of two master teachers and writers-are attitudes and skills that extend beyond poetry and fiction writing. To value self-investment, to avoid premature closure, to see revision as discovery, to go beyond the predictable, to risk experimentation, and, above all, to trust your own creative power are necessary for all good writing, whether it is a freshman theme, a poem, a term paper, or a 4 C's paper. Yet in academic writing, except perhaps for the dissertation, these are not integral to the pedagogy. Few of us reward risk-taking that fails with a better grade than polished but pedestrian texts. We are more product-oriented, judging assignments as independent of one another rather than as part of a collective and ongoing body of work. No wonder that students interpret our message as Be careful, not creative!

The last twenty years have seen a great expansion, as well as considerable shift of emphasis and focus, in publication about English composition. On even a cursory count, there are now over two dozen journals regularly publishing material in the field, not to mention books, course texts, research reports, or ERIC documents. However, as active composition researchers well know, there is no single bibliographic resource giving both full and focussed annual coverage of this output, nor any very certain means of identifying and retrieving the items previously published on a given composition topic.' There are available, of course, many orientatory bibliographies and research guides to composition, and these have real usefulness, but one needs to make a clear conceptual distinction between the selective or interpretive bibliographical guidance such guides offer and the more basic bibliographical control we increasingly need-on-going, systematic, non-judgmental coverage of activity in the field. Part of the problem with orientatory guides is their rapid obsolescence: as Edward Corbett has noted, Nothing-not even last year's hemline-dates as quickly as a published bibliography.2 But in addition to being dated, discursive and orientatory guides pose other problems: nearly all the existing guides are avowedly selective in their coverage, most of them are silent about the kinds of searching from which they were compiled, they are often biased one way or another in their selection of material, and, most fundamental of all, there are disturbing gaps in the chronological coverage they provide. The research consequences of current problems in composition bibliography have not been widely understood, and in this paper I want to explore four special features of the composition field that have made bibliographic control difficult. It is only when researchers, teachers, graduate students, librarians, and bibliographers recognize the special nature of composition re-

Several months ago, a colleague and I presented a proposal to the Ph.D. graduate committee at Arizona State University for a new concentration on the Ph.D. level in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. Our proposal seemed reasonable enough. What we were proposing was that graduate students be given a series of options on the Ph.D. level, so that those whose primary interest was belles lettres could choose from among the traditional areas of English and American literature. However, those whose primary interest was language, or a broader conception of letters as exemplified by the bonae litterae of the Renaissance, could do half of their work in the traditional areas of literature and half of their work in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. We argued that students seeking degrees in order to teach and to do research face a job market very different from the one that students encountered as recently as eight or nine years ago, and drastically different from what most teachers encountered when they began. We reminded the committee of the results of the MLA Job Information List, published in the February 1978 ADE Bulletin, which showed a preponderance of job opportunities for people in the areas of rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. For example, of the 405 jobs advertised in '76-'77 for people with Ph.D.'s in English, 56 of those jobs were in rhetoric and composition, 53 in linguistics, and 29 in creative writing. Then in descending order, there were 18 openings in American Literature, 18 in Black Studies, 17 for generalists, 15 each in Old and Middle English Literature, 19th Century British Literature, and American Studies, 13 in Renaissance Studies, 8 in 19th Century American Literature, 7 in Colonial Literature, and so forth. We emphasized that the opportunity for serious research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition has never been better. The professional membership in the Conference on College Composition and Communication has increased dramatically over the past few years. The MLA has recognized the

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I did my graduate work, composition was taught almost exclusively by slaves. With the exception of a few wives of important faculty and a small number of supervisory personnel, graduate teaching assistants instructed the 200odd sections of freshman composition offered each year. Southern Illinois University has thus opted for one of the two common solutions to the problem of college composition. It utilizes vaguely supervised graduate teaching assistants to instruct the staggering number of students who, each year, enroll in the freshman composition sequence. It goes almost without saying that the freshman composition sequence has virtually no repute within the English department. The Director of Composition is judged effective and the graduate teaching assistants are regarded as a good crop on the basis of the decibel level of student

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