In just about half of a colleague's teaching evaluations (twelve of twenty-six evaluations) from two first-year composition and introduction to literature sections, she read objections to her feminist stance, especially her discussions of feminism and pedagogy. Most of the objections came from students who insisted that the classroom ought to be an ideologically neutral space free from the instructor's interests and concerns. The following samples, copied verbatim, suggest the drift of the students' complaints:

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In the new world of writing across the curriculum, English departments are still trying to find their role. They have been in charge of writing instruction for so long that they often feel that they should institute, or at least lead, writingacross-the-curriculum programs. But I want to argue that the English department should have no special role in writing across the curriculum-no unique leadership role and no exclusive classes to teach-not even freshman composition. Instead, a writing-across-the-curriculum program should be designed, administered, and taught equally by all departments. True writing across the curriculum should be based on dialogue among all the departments, and, in this dialogue, the English department should be only one of the voices.

Most Freshman English programs conceive of themselves as providing some form of introduction to university level discourse. The expectation is that students will leave English I (or whatever its designation) with the requisite reading and writing skills to enter a new discourse community, the world of the academy. Just what that means, however, is invariably in contention. Even within our own discipline, the acts of reading and writing have become the subject of much controversy. A recent review in College English gives some indication of one of the current divisions within the profession about exactly what we teach people when we teach them to read: Despite the recent wrangle and heated debates among the various camps of literary criticism, there are quite a few of us-most,

The theory that reading is composing-an open-ended, investigative, and active process-is hardly new. Over the past few years, writing teachers have turned their attention to reading and extended the useful term to describe not only the recursive movement among the pre-writing, drafting, and revising stages of writing, but also the construction of meaning through reading. The theories they have drawn on range from the work of reading researchers like Harry Singer, Frank Smith, and Charles Cooper and Anthony Petrosky to critical theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt and Roland Barthes.' While it is difficult to generalize about such wide-ranging work, a quick review of the literature of constructive reading shows agreement on one point: the power of conventions, or schemata, to shape our understanding of a text. But the language for naming this phenomenon is divergent. Reading researchers describe the process of composing meaning in apparently neutral terms-comprehending, reading for meaning, learning from text-and some separate a literal from an interpretive level of reading,2 using Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy (89-90), influential since the 1950s. Critical theorists, on the other hand, show that all composed meanings are interpretations; this is the view we want to illustrate as we describe, theoretically and practically, a sequence of writing assignments used to encourage interpretation in our introductory composition classes. In our view, the same questions asked by critical theory-what is reading, what is the status of a text, how do we clarify approaches to interpretation-are questions to be asked by composition teachers, whose job is to teach students how to compose readings of texts, literary and non-literary, written and nonwritten. With this aim in mind, we agreed to define interpretation as a process of both reading and writing. We discarded conventional injunctions to look at the words, as if simply gazing at words on the page would force them into meaning. We insisted instead that good readers must understand the assumptions that determine what they see, that good writers do not wait for meaning to take

James Sledd, Sally Reagan, Reginald D. Clarke, A Comment on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge" and "A Polemical History of Freshman Composition in Our Time", College English, Vol. 49, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 585-593

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The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

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I am coming on my twentieth year of teaching composition to college freshmen, and my fifteenth administering a composition program. These anniversaries incite me to think about the circles we who teach writing have perambulated in that time-to count the ways we have, for worse and better, changed how we shape composition programs, how we manage those programs, and how we teach the courses in them. From the fifties through my days as a student and then as a new teacher, rhetoric-meaning the analysis and presentation of arguments-dominated college composition programs. But at many colleges then, the English requirement included a literature survey, and composition programs often and awkwardly stirred rhetoric and literature in one pot. For example, research papers were on literary topics, an approach that encouraged publishers to produce hundreds of excellent casebooks, all recycled long ago. The rhetorical lion and literary lamb did not get on amicably, however. They tussled. The lamb often turned wolfish. The experiential programs of the early seventies-with their emphasis on narration and description, on journal writing, on films and visual arts as aids to invention-were a victory for the literateurs, and their last hour. For then came graduate programs in composition, and the gospel of process was heard in the land. Rhetoric-now meaning heuristic strategies-ascended. Literature became, and has remained, a negligible part of most composition programs. And today, as the slogan Writing Across the Curriculum is blazoned on textbook covers and eagerly mouthed by deans who see a way to save a buck, literaturemeaning the study of fiction, drama, and perhaps even (though that's radical) poetry for their own sweet sakes-dwindles to a thin shade in freshman writing

Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,

Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).

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BECAUSE THE FRESHMAN COMPOSITION CLASS is usually the students' first introduction to college, what better place to challenge sexist reading, writing, and thinking? What better place to help students understand the relationship between language and thought? Instead of grammar-book rules that instruct students to avoid the masculine pronoun when gender is unclear, classroom activities can encourage students actively to explore their sexist values and draw their own conclusions. These activities should attack sexism at its roots by examining the cultural conditioning which both encourages faulty thinking and limits options for women and men. At the same time, through an examination of sexism, teachers can get at some of the students' persistent writing difficulties, such as generating essay topics, supporting topic sentences with sufficient proof, and selecting appropriate words and tone. Even though students have read and written for the better part of their lives, they seem unaware of the power of language to condition minds. They do not recognize that the assumption that males hold all prestigious positions lies behind the business correspondence salutation of Dear Sir. Nor can they identify the cultural bias toward single women reinforced by the titles Mr., Mrs., and Miss. If confronted directly with this sexism, many students acquiesce by using Ms. and by revising all he pronouns to read he/she. Nonetheless, they view such practices as arbitrary, senseless, and bothersome. A study of the causes and effects of sexist language can be integrated with and grow naturally from existing course structures and objectives. The three activities which follow are designed to explore the implications of sexism while building reading and writing skills. The first comprises word lists that develop awareness of sexist language used in literature and in students' own writings, while the second explores fairy tales that, like other literature, transmit sex role stereotypes and biases. The third considers research topics related to the two preceding activities. These three activities can be arranged in several sequences to develop writing objectives. For example, a teacher who views writing as a discovery process might use the following sequence: (1) students look at the data in the Hemingway passage from differing viewpoints, manipulate the data, and form tentative hypotheses; (2) students, in a

PICK UP ANY RECENT PUBLICATION on composition and you will almost surely find some reference to the problem of evaluating writing. Teachers and researchers alike acknowledge that pronouncing judgment on a piece of writing is both important and difficult. Important because teaching students to write, sorting students for placement or admission, and research in composition all depend upon ability to discriminate levels of quality in writing. Difficult because the theoretical basis of evaluation remains unarticulated. In contrast, composition instruction has begun developing a coherent set of assumptions. For example, theorists may disagree on the relative merits of classical, tagmemic, dramatistic, and prewriting forms of invention, but they agree on the principle that invention is part of the writing process. Evaluation of writing proceeds without a similar set of principles. Yet evaluation does proceed. The need for deciding who shall attend which college, designating those competent to graduate from high school, identifying growth in writing, or determining our nation's educational progress have spawned various systems for evaluating writing. Holistic scoring, quantification of syntactic features, analytic scales, and primary trait scoring illustrate the range of existing methodologies for evaluating writing. Rather than evolving from commonly held assumptions about evaluation, each method rests upon its own set of assumptions. Statistical computations of reader responses provide the rationale for holistic scoring and analytical scales; developmental stages of language acquisition account for quantification of syntactic features; a triangular model of discourse underlies primary trait scoring. Each of these systems and the assumptions underlying it represent careful and intelligent thought, and my purpose here is not to denigrate any of them. I cite them simply as illustrations of my point. Driven by the necessity to evaluate writing, theorists have avoided examination of the nature of evaluation itself and have moved directly to devising means (and rationales for these means) for accomplishing this difficult task. In this article I wish to propose a more general theory of evaluation and to suggest how it might be worked out in practical terms. This theory grows out of a philosophical and linguistic debate on the question of meaning. The debate, best summarized by P. F. Strawson's distinction between

MY PURPOSE IN THIS PAPER IS THREEFOLD-hiStoriCal, descriptive, and also, alas, nowadays contentious. After a brief historical excursus on the changed relation between composition and literature teaching, I want to describe what is, for the 1980s, a rather unusual kind of freshman writing program, one that combines intensive work in composition with an old-fashioned literary survey. Through this description I shall argue that modern, professionalized writing specialists have become unnecessarily suspicious of traditional literary reading assignments; that the educational functions of reading assignments have often been misunderstood; and that those functions can, at least for some students, better be fulfilled by traditional, substantive literary texts, than by the more commonly used collections of modern controversial, expressive, and affective prose. Finally, I hope to suggest, from our experience at the University of South Carolina with a special traditionally-oriented freshman program, that the ideas of freshman rhetoric can help in designing useful reading and writing assignments in other undergraduate literature courses. When the first-ever professorship of English was established, by the patronage of

WHERE DO ENGLISH TEACHERS GET THE AUTHORITY to teach writing to students from other departments? We know-and our non-English colleagues know-that the English major is basically an English and American literature major and that graduate programs in English are more of the same, only intensified. How then are we equipped to teach students whose present and future writing tasks are very far from the literature we study? At times in my career as an English teacher I've felt myself beset by people from other departments who understandably want an answer to that question. Now that I teach technical writing rather than Freshman English in my department's composition program, I feel myself more frequently under siege. Maybe Freshman English, the question goes, but technical writing? How dare I presume to teach chemical engineers, or astrophysicists, or biochemists how to write? Technical writing taught by English teachers is the acid test of our authority; in spirit as well as subject it seems to be at the farthest remove from nearly everyone's idea of literature. Three members of the Department of Humanities, College of Engineering, at the University of Michigan have launched an especially pointed attack on English departments' teaching technical writing. J. C. Mathes, Dwight W. Stevenson, and Peter Klaver list three reasons for their doubts about letting someone from the English department teach technical writing. The first and second reasons appear to me indistinguishable, but come down to these two passages:

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LAST SPRING I VOLUNTEERED to teach an English graduate course entitled Teaching of Writing to Speakers of Dialect. Of course everyone speaks a dialect, but the graduate students were no fools. They knew that this verbose title was a euphemism for teaching students in remedial courses to write. After consenting to do the course, I panicked. I am and therefore thought by my department to know something about dialect problems. Of course I felt just about as much in the dark (forgive the racist imagery) on this matter as most of my colleagues, though I regularly taught the remedial, freshman English course which enrolls mostly and Spanish-speaking students. Now I was going to be unmasked as being as unenlightened and unexotic as my white colleagues. Heaven forbid! I scurried around to the graduate students who might take such a course and made them promise that they would not pre-register, hoping that the course would fold for lack of enrollment. But, alas, it didn't. So on the first day of class, I went to the assigned room, met my ten white English graduate students, confessed my ignorance, and began to teach what proved to be a fairly useful course, i.e., I learned a lot by teaching it. We began the course as all good graduate courses begin and end, with the students doing most of the work. We tried to make a complete annotated bibliography from 1964-77 on black dialect and from four journals which publish in this area: English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Florida Foreign Language Reporter. We dittoed our bibliographical finds each week and also starred and commented on the most interesting articles. The students murmured about the amount of time our comments took each week, but I found the practical ideas for teaching writing which came from these articles and the students' comments most helpful. The articles were also helpful, especially when compared with the readings in our three texts,' in eradicating the naivete with which some of the students began the course: they wanted me as a teacher of remedial composition to tell them how to teach dialect writers in twenty-five words or less, and if not in so few

IN A RECENT ARTICLE IN College and Communication, a graduate student just through a doctoral examination in History and Theories in describes his need keep myself in one theoretical piece. . ., to get my future in composition straight, get it to take on some shape or direction (Stephen North, Composition Now: Standing on One's Head, 29 [1978], 178). One of his examiners called his synthesis of history, theory, pedagogy a mishmash; he is now laboring to find sensible relations between theory and the teaching of freshman composition. In spite of a dutifully upbeat conclusion, the article conveys frustration and insecurity-a nagging fear that the whole enterprise has been in some fashion hollow and suspect: it's rather like lying on your back in the backyard on a clear summer night and calling that astronomy (180). The anxiety described and dramatized here strikes me as largely justified and likely to become common as graduate programs in the theory and teaching of composition proliferate. What composition studies now offer is a potpourri of theory, research, speculation, some of it close to pedagogy, some far removed, some of it speculative and contemplative, some scientifically and experimentally oriented, some of it jargon-ridden and pretentious, enough of it so provoking and stimulating that the pervading sense of excitement and challenge seems justified. What composition research does not offer is a shapely coherence that makes it definable as a discipline. On the contrary, the spirit of the moment calls for ranging across multiple

IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise:

Composition in the schools has long been under a curse, and not without reason. It has lacked substance, vitality, enrichment. The stream has been so shallow that, in Ben Jonson's words, one could probe it with one's middle finger. There has been in composition teaching too much correcting of morbid English, too much metaphor mongering, too much vaporing about style, to permit it to rise to the dignity of a first-rate discipline. But now composition seems to be coming into its rights. The old superstition which made the composition teacher the Pariah of the public school system is surely passing. The time is at hand when the opportunities for scholarship and general culture in this branch of instruction will be generally recognized.

MY RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH STUDENTS-as well as everything responsible I have seen in print-confirms the steep decline in what, for want of a more discriminating term, is called language skills, particularly as manifest in cogent expository writing on the broad standard level of usage. Reading comprehension of sophisticated texts-a subtler, more complicated, if related matter-aside, college writing is the issue of our greatest concern. Competent writing is the most tangible mark of functional literacy, a nebulous term that I define simply as the verbal capability assuring academic and professional success. As the findings of my capsule experiment indicate, student writing may be substandard on grounds more basic than grammatical sufficiency or rhetorical effectiveness. Further, they show that the fundamental problem not only is collegiate, but is shared by professionals in educated society at large. There has been no end of speculation as to the imputed causes of writing deficiency these days. Most of it is inflamed polemic, squint-eyed and hobby-ridden. The general question has roused a furor during the past ten years. Critics, poets, novelists, editorialists, pedagogues, philologists, linguists, and historians keep firing off their partial-often contradictory-answers. There is seldom hard evidence in these broadsides, written indignantly, as Dorothy Parker said of a book, fear and without research. However, the accelerated decay of language, apparent in school and beyond, is more widely deplored than slum rot. Bureaucratic gobbledygook, journalese (Newspeak), law jargon, education school and social science Choctaw, the bafflegab lingo of criticism in the various arts-as well as every form of what Mary Renault called withitry-are insistently, incessantly denounced. To what effect? Actually, little. It seems to me, however, that so far as diction is concerned-and that is the topic I have fixed on-the most glaring aberrations do not involve jargoneering, whether derived from these or related sources. After all, cant terms, nonce words, and jargon (are they distinguishable?) are merely vacuous, pretentious, or dreary ephemera. They have always smogged the air we breathe. But though they impede, they do not utterly rupture communication. Lifestyle, establishment, identity crisis, vis-a-vis, stance, ghetto, paranoia, on-going, interface, low profile, meaningful, hermeneutic, into (for

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IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, a small group of persons in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan began to meet to discuss some tentative approaches to long-range planning. impetus for these meetings came not from a single and isolated matter but rather from a complex of events and experiences, some of them shared by everyone involved in the Department's work (some, indeed, shared by everyone in the profession) and some of them growing out of individual experiences. Falling enrollments in the humanities, new courses and new approaches to teaching within a discipline that at one time seemed comfortably defined as historical and literary (and English), the changing job market for graduates in the humanities: these were some of the factors to which we were all responding. Individually, some members of the group had been responsible for innovative programs that had already shaped changes in a particular way. Tim Davies and Jay Robinson had been deeply committed to the Doctor of Arts in English program at Michigan. Hubert English had served as chairman of both Freshman English course and graduate program. He knew various constituencies and could chart the alterations in their needs and expectations perhaps better than anyone else in the Department. My interest grew out of experience in the University Long-Range Planning Committee and out of a personal conviction that we needed to look ahead for ourselves to see if, in Curt Gowdy's memorable phrase, our future was still ahead of us. If we did not, it seemed altogether possible that others would look for us and make decisions based on criteria that we might find unacceptable. After a good deal of debate about the methods we might use and the purposes any sort of planning might serve, we settled on the creation of a descriptor questionnaire of a type that had been used by Claude Eggertsen of the Education School at Michigan in an attempt to define The Future Environment of the University of Michigan.' Our aims, of course, were far more modest than his. We simply wanted to know how members of the Department of English Language and Literature saw their discipline and their efforts within that discipline,

THE CURRENT back to the basics hue and cry reminds me of the story in Honey in the Horn where an oldtimer, working at the local sawmill, cut his own pay from $1.50 to $1.00 a day. When asked why he would do such a fool thing, the old man replied, Fractions make my head hurt. The profession's reaction to the public outrage that students can't write reminds me of that old-timer. We, too, seem to be attempting to avoid complication by reverting to a simpler number. To illustrate what I mean: In 1974 the Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching gave the Modern Language Association a modest grant to finance a study of the state of the English undergraduate curriculum. Primarily, the officers of the foundation wished to know the answer to this question: How is the English profession responding to the students who are now going to college? One of the activities in the study was a national survey of the teaching of freshman composition. Four hundred thirty-six college and university teachers, directors of writing, and department chairmen from forty-nine states and Puerto Rico responded to MLA's inquiry and answered such questions as, What do you consider the main purpose of the course you teach? What is the average size of your freshman composition classes? How are the texts selected for the course?2 Quotations from this survey illustrate the divergent opinions and philosophies held about the college freshman English course.

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THOSE OF US WHO FOLLOW a write-from-your-own-experience philosophy in teaching Freshman Composition consistently run into one problem: a batch of trivial narrative papers to read each week. Following the lead of Ken Macrorie, Donald M. Murray, and, more recently, Joseph Comprone, we take this approach to keep our students out of the depths of the library, where they would spend hours researching a boring subject to an artificial and boring paper, and at their desks engaged in the process of writing, where they belong. Freshman writers, we believe, are apprentices in a skilled trade-writing-and like carpenters' apprentices need material to practice their trade on. But novice carpenters are not sent to the lumber mill to pick up their own materials each day. They keep hammering and sawing and all the material they need is kept at their fingertips. Freshmen have all the material they need for writing at their fingertips, too: their own experiences. Too often, however, they fashion those experiences into a dull, firstperson narrative of What I Did. The genuine significance of what they did lies undiscovered and undeveloped. The challenge for writing teachers is to help the beginners examine their experiences critically and turn the corner from simple narration to wider meanings and truth in their writing. In my freshman English courses I shy away from relevant or significant assigned paper topics. In fact I make no assignments at all other than that writing teacher's cliche, write about what you know. When I do get a paper entitled Pollution or Inflation I ask the writer how much substantial information he has to pass along to his readers. Does he really know the ins and outs of economic theory, for example? The answer is invariably no. A budding John Maynard Keynes is rare these days. Then I have two options. I can send him to the library to research inflation, in short to pick up a quick course in economics. Then he can a research paper, that exercise in footnotes and boredom. Or I can tell him, Write about something you know more about, something you've had some experience with. the next week it's My First Day in College. After three weeks of revision it's a well-honed My First Day in College. Full of hard-hitting specific detail and crisp dialogue, it still makes me yawn. I find myself repeatedly asking, So what? Simple narration, I reasoned, is the mode for best presenting unique experiences

Your assignment for next week [furious scribble, shuffling of papers, semiaudible groans] is to write an essay of 1500 words on one of the following topics: (instructor lists three or four options). One week later, to the hour, the trembling hands of the acolyte usher forth pages of not so purple prose to the high priest of ENGLISH COMPOSITION, who bears them off to his lonely monastic cell. For all the average student knows, what is next performed is as mysterious as alchemy, as indecipherable as Celtic runes-the student never witnesses the isolated acts of the most holy of holies-,the grading of the essay.1 This is done as the priest moves to each essay, in turn, changing its often hoped-for gold into dross, making strange almost hieroglyphic-like markings in the margins-symbols like awk, / /, and dele., and finally consigning each to Heaven (A), or Hell (E), or Purgatory (any grade between). There is, usually, no appeal to the hierophant-his mark is low, his decision final. The last paragraph is only partially exaggerated; most students instantly recognize the process. Freshmen tend to take his-the evaluator's prescriptions a bit more seriously than world-weary seniors who, by dexterous sleight of hand, have managed to put off their composition requirements until the last possible moment. In both instances, however, the process of mystery remains-one hands in a paper, and at some later date, receives it back.2 If the student agrees with the grade, she tends to file the paper away with minimal attention. If she disagrees with the grade, our by now angry writer scrutinizes the evaluated paper intensely, looking not so much for her own mistakes, but for those, if any, of her instructor hoping against hope that she'll find one, (or at the very least, an ambiguity) which will help raise her grade-every little bit helps.3 Not the

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A REPORT in the New York Times of Thursday, November 7, 1974 (p. 43) that college textbooks are being simplified to meet the needs of poor readers; and the answers to some of the questions on the ADE Survey of Freshman English (ADE Bulletin, No. 43, November 1974, pp. 13-19) highlight the need for a careful investigation into the mysteries of college text selection. For those who teach in composition programs the quality of a textbook is an especially burning issue: one would think that whoever stresses the value of lucidity, of clear voice, of awareness of language and audience, would also exercise care in the choice of composition texts. But the news in that quarter is bleak, at least to my mind. The ADE Survey (sponsored in part by the Carnegie Commission) presents some shocking news about what is happening with freshman English texts, especially (but not exclusively) in community colleges. I should like here to look first at some specific composition textbooks with wide college audiences. I shall then try to move toward a general definition of effective classroom materials merely by suggesting questions we are forgetting to ask ourselves, but must ask if the textbook is not to vanish like the buffalo (it may already be too late-both the Survey and a letter to the Times of Monday, November 18, 1974 [p. 32] by teachers in CCNY's English department report that many college English instructors are abandoning textbooks altogether). The ADE Survey collected replies to a three-page questionnaire from 436 institutions in 49 states. Responding to a question on text choices for freshman composition, instructors most often indicated the Hodges and Whitten Harbrace College Handbook or the McCrimmon Writing with a Purpose as the basic book in the course. More than 100 institutions use the former; about 65, the latter. Among two-year units picking Harbrace were 21.6% of community colleges, 23.1% of public junior colleges, and 25% of private junior colleges. Selecting the McCrimmon text were 15.9% of community colleges and 30.8% of public junior colleges (percentages for four-year institutions are high for the two texts as well). Although I do not have many doubts as tothe effectiveness of these books for competent writers (I've used Harbrace with advanced students), both texts are ill-suited for open a..missions men and women. Aside from the high level of

SOMiE OF THE PRINCIPLES of Eric Bemrne's theory of Transactional Analysis proven extremely useful to me in teaching English 101. The approach, which I call going backward to move forward, concentrates on three phases: writing for oneself, writing for the live audience of one's colleagues in class, and ultimately, writing for the real world through publication. The course begins with my asking students to close their eyes and to recall all the things former English teachers asked them to remember or to do when writing. Then they are asked to jot down as many of these directives as they can. Next each person is asked to write several of these on the blackboard, which was recently filled with the following: big words, think before you write, each paragraph with your main idea, follow outline forms, dot your 'i's,' don't use overworked metaphors, don't use 'when' or 'how' to start a sentence, never start a sentence with 'and,' never use 'in conclusion,' never end a sentence with a preposition, never use a double negative, never use 'never,' have an interest grabbing first sentence, never start a sentence with because, don't use the verb 'to be,' be more specific,

IN THE FALL OF 1973 I took a nationwide survey of four-year colleges and universities to uncover (1) what, if anything, had happened to the composition requirement and Freshman English during the last several years, (2) some facts about the extent and nature of the spread of exemptions from the requirement, and (3) related information about teaching staffs and loads in composition programs. The survey questionnaire, a 36-item instrument designed to yield data from item responses as well as information through cross-analysis of those responses, was sent to a random sample of 700 schools in all states and the District of Columbia. 491 completed questionnaires, 288 of them from private and 203 from state schools, were used in arriving at the final results. The results of most importance, at least to those in the profession who teach composition, can be generalized as follows: compared with 1967, fewer schools

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