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I. A. Richards has said that we begin reading any text with an implicit faith in its coherence, an assumption that its author intended to convey some meaning and made the choices most likely to convey the meaning effectively.' As readers, therefore, we tolerate the writer's manipulation of the way we see the subject that is being addressed. Our tolerance derives from a tacit acceptance of the writer's to make the statements we are reading.2 When reading a textbook, for instance, we assume that its writer knows at least as much about the book's subject as we do, and ideally even more. When we read a newspaper article, we take for granted that the writer has collected all the relevant facts and presented them honestly. In either case, derives partly from what we know about the writer (for instance, professional credentials or public recognition) and partly from what we see in the writer's discourse (the probity of its reasoning, the skill of its construction, its use of references that we may recognize). The sources of writers' authority may be quite various. But whatever the reason for our granting authority, what we are conceding is the author's right to make statements in exactly the way they are made in order to say exactly what the writer wishes to say. The more we know about a writer's skill, the more we have read of that individual's work or heard of his or her reputation, the greater the claim to authority. This claim can be so powerful that we will tolerate writing from that author which appears to be unusually difficult, even obscure or downright confusing. For instance, our having read Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill with pleasure may lead us to work harder at reading Altarwise by Owlight, although we may not understand it readily and may not derive the same pleasure from reading it. As readers, we see this harder material as a problem of interpretation, not a shortcoming of the composer. Writers may, of course, compromise their authority through evident or repeated lapses, but, in general, Lil Brannon is an assistant professor at New York University, co-director of the Expository Writing Program, and coordinator of the Writing Center. She is completing a text entitled Writers Writing. C. H. Knoblauch, also an assistant professor at New York University, is co-director of the Expository Writing Program. He is a co-author of Functional Writing and has just completed a book on eighteenth-century theories of the composing process.

We command our students to write for others, but writers report they write for themselves. write for me, says Edward Albee. audience of me. Teachers of composition make a serious mistake if they consider such statements a matter of artistic ego alone. The testimony of writers that they write for themselves opens a window on an important part of the writing process. If we look through that window we increase our understanding of the process become more effective teachers of writing. am my own first reader, says Isaac Bashevis Singer. Writers write for themselves not for their readers, declares Rebecca West, and that art has nothing to do with communication between person person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind. think the audience an artist imagines, states Vladimir Nabakov, he imagines that sort of thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask. Edmund Blunden adds, don't think I have ever written for anybody except the other in one's self. The act of writing might be described as a conversation between two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench. The self speaks, the other self listens responds. The self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates. The two selves collaborate: a problem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted. This process is described in that fine German novel, The German Lesson, by Siegfried Lenz (Hamburg, Germany: Hoffman Und Campe Verlag, 1968; New York: Hill Wang, 1971), when the narrator in the novel watches the painter Nansen at work. And, as always when he was at work, he was talking. He didn't talk to himself, he talked to someone by the name of Balthasar, who stood beside him, his Balthasar, who only he could see hear, with whom he chatted argued whom he sometimes jabbed with his elbow, so hard that even we, who couldn't see any Balthasar, would sud-

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Preface 1. THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING PERSPECTIVES Richard Fulkerson: Four Philosophies of Composition James Berlin: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class Edward P.J. Corbett: Rhetoric, the Enabling Discipline Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner: The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy TEACHERS Peter Elbow: Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process Donald M. Murray: The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference Lad Tobin: Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher's Role in the Writing Class Dan Morgan: Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing STUDENTS Mina P. Shaughnessy: Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing Vivian Zamel: Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum Todd Taylor: The Persistence of Difference in Networked Classrooms: Non-Negotiable Difference and the African American Student Body LOCATIONS Hephzibah Roskelly: The Risky Business of Group Work Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe: The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class Muriel Harris: Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors APPROACHES Min-Zhan Lu: Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence Mariolina Salvatori: Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition Gary Tate: A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition Carolyn Matalene: Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues 2. THE TEACHING OF WRITING ASSIGNING Mike Rose: Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal David Peck, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Mike Rose: A Comment and Response on Remedial Writing Courses Richard L. Larson: The Research Paper in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor: Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types Catherine E. Lamb: Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition RESPONDING AND ASSESSING Brooke K. Horvath: The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views David Bartholomae: The Study of Error Jerry Farber: Learning How to Teach: A Progress Report COMPOSING AND REVISING Nancy Sommers: Between the Drafts James A. Reither: Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process David Bleich: Collaboration and the Pedagogy of Disclosure AUDIENCES Douglas B. Park: The Meanings of Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy Peter Elbow: Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience STYLES Robert J. Connors: Static Abstractions and Composition Winston Weathers: Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy Elizabeth D. Rankin: Revitalizing Style: Toward a New Theory and Pedagogy Richard Ohmann: Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language

The professor, Dr. Glennie, was old and feeble. He had a young clergyman as his assistant, who did the work of six hours weekly; while he himself took the remaining nine. His mode of teaching was a survival from the old University system,-of which he was probably the last example. The morning hours, when the assistant officiated, were devoted to dictation, called by the old Scotch phrase, diting. It consisted in slowly dictating a summary of the course, in consecutive composition. The substance had long been fixed, so that the student had to take down, word for word, the notes already in the possession of former students for many years back. The remaining nine hours, during which the professor officiated, were for the larger part occupied with lecturing from a manuscript, which, in fact, constituted his course of lectures.... [Now] while there was much of the best material [here], it was a kind of material not suited to inspire students of [that] age .... What made matters still worse was the want of concurrence in the arrangement of the dictated notes with the read lectures. There was a certain remote parallelism in the run of the two lines; but it was not close enough to be followed by the class. Accordingly, the habit of the students was to take down the notes and pay little or no attention to the lectures; the time being occupied in any sort of trifling that could be hit upon. What aggravated the situation was that the examination questions kept neither to the one line nor to the other.'

Jack E. Tohtz, John L. Marsh, Student as Staff Writer, Instructor as Editor: A Situational Context for Teaching Writing, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 3, Instruction: Problems, Techniques, Programs (Oct., 1981), pp. 327-329

Neman's extensive revision of the first edition, (published by Merrill in 1980) takes into account the recent explosion of scholarly inquiry and research composition while remaining focused on the basic substance of pedagogy - the nurturing of the student mind. Her approach is student- centred , based on twenty-five years of classroom experience, and will both train its readers to teach writing and tactfully provide an opportunity for them to master writing skills themselves, Covers process, structure, grammar, documentation, narrative, poetry, and stylistic problems from nonstandard dialects.

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I want to start with some distinctions about the evaluations made of a remedial student's paper. (1) An experienced teacher probably has a hundred or more responses to a two-page remedial paper, silent responses made instantly to errors, ideas, shapes of sentences, handwriting, and so on. By mid-term he has double responses to each of those things, as he is aware, with each, of progress or lack of it. The silent evaluations as the teacher makes his way through the paper are like flashes of hundreds of little bulbs going off one after another, each with its own meaning, and of course most of those responses and the reasons for them remain locked in the teacher's mind. The student never hears about them. Curiously, I sometimes find myself thinking, as I watch a student re-read the paper I have just returned, he must be catching more than a glimpse of how I responded to everything I didn't mark, a hilarious illusion. And I may be wrong in assuming some other teachers share it occasionally. (2) The markings and comments a teacher does put on a paper, even the simplest, have complex meanings for the teacher, meanings which again remain locked in his head. A teacher who reads, in the middle of a paper, Things you do regularly, your personality should be the same and not fake to try impressing other, can quickly inscribe a question mark in the margin, or write Frag, or Is something off here? but it would take a long time to explain exactly, and completely, the thoughts-the systems of measuring, of judging-behind those notations. A teacher writes Awk, but the meaning, for the particular occasion, stays in his mind. (3) As a student evaluates his paper and my comments, what do my comments mean to him? My guess is that to the remedial student, any traditional comments mean so little as to render my having bothered to make them a farce. Suppose, as I read the sentence, We'll naturlly your'll act different in each place, but you can still be yourself in each Place, I decide to restrain

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make use of it and what aspects are outside its scope. Let us suppose that composition teachers were invited to present a program for the development of a theory and method of teaching writing. What might be included in such a program? Would linguists be willing and able to help toward its fulfillment? For various reasons, we are confronted with a student population which has very limited skills in writing. I would cite here only two factors. Since reading has become a rare pastime, many young people are not aware of how to arrange a text so that readers can readily follow it. Also, mass media entertainment, which has supplanted reading, instills very different perceptive habits, regardless of content. Camera perspective and sound track serve to sort out visual and auditory perception in advance, so that the viewer can remain entirely passive, performing only elementary intellectual tasks in response. I would conclude that a writing program is needed which compensates for

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