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When I sat down to consider what I remember about the past of the National Council of Teachers of English, I came up with some admirable positions it advocated during the 1960s and 70s, and some admirable actions it took during that same period. I am, of course, using my own definition of admirable. Sometimes, it seemed to me, NCTE was influenced by and echoed the moods of the more general society, and sometimes it tried to influence those -noods. When newspapers, magazines, and television reported that literacy was at a low ebb, that the schools were doing a lousy job and something better be done about it quick, NCTE responded with resolutions opposing the worst of the so-called solutions and set up committees to demonstrate that the so-called crisis was greatly exaggerated. I remembered that NCTE has spoken out for the rights of racial minorities and made sure that they and their views were included in its own programs and committees. It has spoken out for the rights of women and-I can't say included them because we have always been a majority of NCTE's membership-but it has at least shown that it meant what it said by adopting a policy on sexism in language and by putting some muscle behind its support of ERA while that proposed amendment was still alive. It has spoken out for the rights of lesbians and gay men. It has spoken out against censoring books and against the abuses of testing. And I remembered that NCTE had acted admirably by forming three new sub-groups during those years. Through its related organization, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, NCTE formally recognized the importance of junior colleges in the educational system. Regional community college conferences were set up across the country and given financial assistance to help them along. As a result of that action large numbers of English teachers who had been existing in a kind of professional nobody's land became more professional. They met to talk about mutual problems, and more of them subscribed to and read professional journals. Eighteen years later two of those conferences are strong and vigorous, earning their own way. One, at least, is ailing and not

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The capacity to participate in verbally complex texts is not widely fostered in our educational system, and desirable habits of reflection, interpretation, and evaluation are not widespread. These are goals that should engender powerful reforms in language training and literary education. But none of these are attainable if good literary works of art are envisioned as the province of only a small, highly trained elite. Once the literary work is seen as part of the fabric of individual lives, the gap may be at least narrowed, without relinquishing recognition of standards of excellence.

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Dear Kyle, Pat and Larry, I think our basic writing curriculum works! After ten weeks of discussing reading and writing about the generative theme of marriage, students have actually begun to use their newly won knowledge and skills for their own purposes. Last night we were reviewing for the final-a test designed, administered and graded by the College English Department-when Louise, one of my students, broke in to say that no test could measure what she had learned over the semester! Another student nodded in agreement. She said, learned about marriage, men, and women. We've learned to write. We've learned about ourselves. Perfect Freirian synthesis! As if that weren't reward enough for one night, Eurena suggested that the class-all womensummarize and publish their knowledge. Then everyone jumped in. Our review of dashes and semicolons was forgotten as the class designed its first publication. It's hard to believe that in September these women had difficulty thinking in terms of a paragraph-now they want a manifesto! I'll keep you posted. Love, Nan

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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

THE STUDY OF RESPONSE TO LITERATURE has tried to use the epistemological standards and research procedures of the quantitative sciences. In this well-known method, a research site is established, the object of research is stripped of inessential features, the researcher stipulates and seeks to maintain independence of the object and its independence of him, and then draws conclusions that he believes others will have no trouble accepting. If accepted, the conclusions are considered objective knowledge and are discarded only when there is a more persuasive argument for another conclusion. Because both the old and new knowledge are considered objective, the new is considered true and the old false. True knowledge is understood as the representation of something intrinsic to the object of study; the process of knowing is the act of representing the object and its working in the correct way. The object of study, it is presupposed, is unaffected by the attempt to understand it. In Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) I have discussed how, in major areas of human knowledge, this objective epistemology has been questioned, and in some instances, suspended or discarded. Many who have studied response have indicated similar misgivings about the traditional research methodology and reasoning. Nevertheless, most response researchers have continued to expect results from the approaches that have brought success in science in the past. The task of developing knowledge of response to literature, however, presents an especially clear occasion for showing how and why to change these expectations, and how to reconceive the problem of research in this area along more productive lines. This change in perspective involves identifying response research with literary pedagogy. The interest in response has evolved historically from the growth of the pedagogical profession and from the gradual onset of universal literacy. When few could read, pedagogy aimed to develop reading skill and then reading habits. When the

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

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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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