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PROFESSOR ARNETT IS ADDRESSING taxonomists in entomology, no doubt a rather peripheral body of specialists, at least in the vision of most English teachers. But his point holds for any profession that makes and perpetuates formal classifications. What specialists forget is that classifications, built by specialists, should serve nonspecialists. Yet in all disciplines the formal classification often does little more than befuddle. Since my aim here is precisely to suggest a classification fit for the novice writer, I think it is essential first to ask what has gone wrong when this particular mode of knowledge-a more central one can hardly be conceived-proves difficult for laymen to assimilate. Such a preliminary inquiry, although perforce brief, at least will show faults I have tried to avoid in building a classification of discourse that beginning writers can both understand readily and use easily. It may help to remain for a moment with the biological taxonomy. Three centuries have so refined this classificatory procedure that the problem of which Professor Arnett speaks, this failure of communication between builder and user, stands out clearly. Consider those taxonomic keys that biologists construct for identification of specimens, for instance those in Julian A. Steyermark's Flora of Missouri or Melville Hatch's Beetles of the Pacific Northwest. Professor Arnett's point is that amateurs (and not a few professional biologists) find these keys impossible to use. The chief obstacle is not hard to find. Traditionally, these keys are constructed to follow evolutionary, genetic relationships as closely as possible. The result is an analytical description of a whole field, very much like a genealogical tree. The farmer, however, who rashly comes to these keys with specimen in hand, cares little

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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

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The field of drama or theater suffers perhaps more than any other from the pigeonholing of educational institutions. Drama or theater? The question itself defines the problem. Is a course to concern itself with dramatic literature, the study of text, or is it to deal with the process of staging, the means by which the text becomes performance? In the normal course of events the English or Language departments claim the one and the Theatre Arts departments claim the other, so that the student-who is unlikely to be attached to both departmentshas little chance of coordinating with any strength literary knowledge and practical ability. The problem is understandable: if a member of an English department feels he or she would like to extend with practical work a course in dramatic literature, the facilities-let alone a theater-are seldom available; if a member of a Theatre Arts department feels a need for deeper textual analysis and understanding, he or she is liable to forego this under the pressure of producing practical results and coordinating all the various elements that become a part of that process. And so the field continues to lie uneasy in any teaching schedule because, from either end, one feels one is never communicating the whole. Poetry and the novel are self-contained literary forms whose richness is contained conveniently within the covers of a single book. Not so the play: the book is one half, the stage process the other; the two halves should not be separated, and the need for practical knowledge and involvement presents quite separate teaching problems. Under the strain of this situation, I have been attempting, as a member of an English department, to develop means whereby the theoretical and practical aspects of drama/theater can be brought closer together. The result is an approach to practical work that can be made a part of any regular course offering in draLmatic literature. This approach tries to show first, what can be practically achieved without technical facilities readily available to Theatre Arts programs; second, that textual and practical work can be combined and related within a single course, thus lessening the gap between the literary and the theatrical; and third, that there is a kind of practical work open to all students whether they have had previous experience or not. The emphasis rests on maximum physical involvement and minimal technical complication. Given an empty floor space and a group of people of varied experience and interest, I have concerned myself with

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THE THEORY OF CHAUCER'S iambic pentameter, and by extension of the English pentameter tradition, proposed in Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser's article in College English for December 19661 is not one to be taken lightly. The article is intricately argued, in correct and toughly objective linguistic terms; it asks the right kind of questions about the nature of a meter, and in my opinion gives some very good answers to some of these questions. It is an interesting, a substantial, and even an important article; it demands a very close reading (such as I hope I have given it), and I must confess it commands my admiration. Nevertheless, I have some objections to urge-not so much on the score of inaccuracies in the argument, so far as the argument reaches, but on that of a certain inadequacy to the full idea of the English iambic pentameter. My aim is furthermore to conduct my conversation or debate with Halle and Keyser in such a way as to promote one perhaps paradoxical emphasis of my own concerning what for the moment I allude to, without explanation, as a notoften recognized co-presence or co-operation, in English iambic verse, of two controlling conceptions, both a rule and a norm (the latter of which is the center of the rule but not itself a rule). It will make at least for clarity in the direction of my discourse if I begin by somewhat abruptly challenging an assertion made in the introductory paragraphs of Halle and Keyser's article.

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