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My hope in this paper is to supply a listing and description of invention components as well as their potential applications. Invention is defined as the process whereby writers discover ideas to write about, and inventionist refers to those who focus on this discovery process, whether that focus be pedagogical or theoretical. Ordinarily, an emphasis on invention is equated with an interest primarily in heuristic procedures.2 However, in this paper I will view heuristics as one of seven items that are implicit in the process of invention or discovery. Though it is clear, from composition texts and the theoretical work inventionoriented texts may be indebted to, that invention involves more than heuristics (e.g., Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by Young, Becker, and Pike), it would be helpful to attempt to describe more explicitly the various constituents of invention and to show why such explicitness is of value. Such a of invention components would have a number of possible uses. One obvious use, though certainly not a major one, would be to allow those of us with a strong inventionist bent in our approach to composition to arrange in an orderly and retrievable fashion the many articles and books that treat the subject of invention and the composing process. Let me first merely list the catalogue items: motivation, ritual, perception, language and perception, heuristics, investigation, and character. This division of items is not intended to be viewed as a natural ordering of the invention stage or to imply that invention itself is a temporally prior step in the composing process. The items, however, are intended to be seen as logically related to each other.

In 1977 Donald Stewart startled his audience at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention by giving them a test.1 Not at all to his surprise, Professor Stewart found that although the teachers assembled devoted forty-five percent of their working time to teaching composition, hardly any of them recognized the names of twenty prominent rhetoricians or titles of works by those rhetoricians. Professor Stewart did not include Alexander Bain on his list, but had he done so very few of the writing teachers in his audience would have heard of Bain. Almost certainly, none would have read his books on composition and rhetoric. That such should be the case seems remarkable, for a great deal of what has been taught in traditional composition courses derives directly or indirectly from Bain's work. In an historical study of the paragraph written at the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Lewis describes Bain's influence as formative. Indeed, Lewis claims that Bain's analysis of the paragraph was presented and defended with the same acuteness and grasp that made him perhaps the ablest writer on rhetoric since Aristotle.2 Bain's stock, however, has plunged since Lewis wrote those words. The revival of interest in rhetoric occurring during the last three decades has led us to call into question what Richard Young calls the current-traditional in the teaching of composition.3 For those challenging this paradigm and attempting to improve or replace it, Bain has become a popular whipping boy, identified with a rigidly prescriptive, product-centered system. Exactly who was Alexander Bain, and has his influence on our discipline been, on the whole, salutary or detrimental? When Bain died at the age of eighty-six in 1903, major newspapers throughout Britain and North America carried the news. The headline in the New York

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IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULT FOR ME to become enthusiastic about credit-by-testing programs. Perhaps because I've never done that well on standardized tests myself. Perhaps because I distrust the self-interest and power of credit-giving conglomerates. Perhaps because I see nationwide as a threat to my own job security (such as it is). Perhaps because testing, testing embodies the sort of dehumanized, regimental process that so much of literature warns against. So I admit that when I was initially appointed to be a Reader for the Advanced Placement Examination (APE) in English Composition and Literature, I had many reservations. However, at the time I remember advising myself to be realistic. The phenomenal success of credit-by-examination programs argued for their increasing influence on the direction of education in the future. I did not want forever to be accused of being out of step with the realities of our modern technological society. And so in 1978 I became a Reader of the free-response section of the APE. I have now been an APE Reader for three years, and, as I write, I have recently returned from the week-long summer grading at Rider College. What I am writing here is my own resignation from the process. APE is the child of the College Entrance Examination Board delivered by the Educational Testing Service. Although English is by far the largest, the AP examination is offered in thirteen fields. The sure growth of the program can be observed in the facts that in 1956, eighty readers scored 2,199 essay examinations, while in

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

With the making of poetry, or not-thinking represents a real, an ironic, choice. At the heart of the continuing controversy over the value of the university a life devoted to poetry is the anti-institutional, even anti-intellectual role that poets in their work and personal styles have taken up h9recent years. In the study and practice of any art other than poetry we find less conflict and confusion, fewer outright attacks on the university-or on any other institution-as a helpful ally. But poetry as a living art particularly commits itself to the personal above all else-to personal survival-which with us often goes along with an anti-institutional stance. Richard Hugo, a fine poet and teacher from Montana, talks about our loss of crucial life-supports in a new book about the teaching of poetry-writing, Triggering Town (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). The accelerated rate of loss . . . accounts, he claims, for the increasing number of people writing poems (p. 73). He points to the essential appeal of such activity on campus when he says, A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters (p. 65). What's irreplaceable in poetry is its personal quality: the intimate, unique gesture, the private, even quirky, perception of people and place, idea and language. Perhaps it is simply economic determinism, but since more and more often poets do work at universities, the open romantic gesture of entire disdain the academy as a stultifying place an artist is encountered much these days. Such resistance takes more covert forms: inner exile, clownishness, views favoring severe primitivism . . . and various honorable forms of not thinking such as Zen Buddhism espouses. social critic Martin Green made a title a provocative book out of Auden's

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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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

THIS ESSAY IS A COURSE DESCRIPTION, but it is also an argument. I would like to use it to give an overview of a course that I have been teaching for three years now, and in the process, I would like to present some proposals about pedagogy in general, about teaching introductory literature courses, about women writers, and about the relationship between feminism and literary study. Some of what I have to say will be familiar, for, although my course is not, strictly speaking, a Women's Studies course, it is in large part a response to the kinds of issues which Women's Studies has been raising, and a great deal of the strength of the course derives directly from what I have learned from my contacts with academic feminism. The course could not have come into being without the work that has been done by feminists in over the past five or six years. My approach to feminist issues, however, is, I hope, fresh enough to justify my writing this piece, and the arguments I want to present are, I hope, sound and useful enough to be valuable to teachers who teach, think, and write about literature both within and outside the structure of a Women's Studies course or program. My course comes to rest right at the junction of several ways of thinking: it combines a shamelessly old-fashioned critical emphasis on theme and character with a new moral and political vision. The hybrid thus created has yielded gratifying results, and I want to recommend the informing ideas of the course to a wide variety of teachers of English. The approach I have developed works no miracles, but it does, I think, provide a coherent framework for exploring the pleasures and seriously confronting the questions that follow when one gives assent to the most basic feminist arguments. That approach, quite simply, is this: I teach a body of good literature, all written by women, and I teach it as specifically female writing; I encourage the students to read for ideas first; I do not ignore my own gender (about which more later); and I try to direct the students toward the kinds of moral and sexual-political insights that are to be found in women writers' vision of the world-especially their vision of the male half of it. English 160/Images of the Male in Women's Writing, was inspired by this passage in Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957):

IN The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn elaborates the concept of the a comprehensive theoretical model that governs both the view of reality accepted by an intellectual community and the practice of that community's discipline. This concept has increasing interest for English studies because new demands on our composition courses, along with new developments in literary theory, have contributed to a hot debate over the premises of our discipline. Maxine Hairston, for one, has explained in an address to the 1978 convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication that we should understand this debate as the sort of profound revolution in accepted thinking that accompanies a new paradigm, rather than as an unrelated group of local disagreements over critical tastes and pedagogical methods. Professor Hairston wants to dignify our debate as a debate because she fears, with good reason, that its beginnings in literary theory and composition pedagogy have allowxved too many practitioners in English studies to regard it as tangential to their main business. Therefore, Hairston emphasizes the comprehensive nature of the as Kuhn explains it. Having characterized our situation as a debate, however, Hairston goes on to support her own candidate for our new by an appeal to evidence. But it is Kuhn's most striking point that a determines the identification and interpretation of empirical in a given discipline. Empirical makes sense only when considered in light of a paradigm; therefore, evidence cannot be imported to establish a above debate. Hairston and others (Janet Emig and E. D. Hirsch, for example) have sought, however, to establish a based on such evidence, under the misapprehension that only a so established can raise English studies to the status of a truly rigorous discipline. On the contrary, Kuhn argues that a is established, even in the natural sciences, not because of compelling evidence, but because of a rhetorical process that delimits the shared language of the intellectual community governed by the paradigm. Indeed, he suggests that he has derived his concept of paradigm for the sciences from a study of the theoretical models that govern the humanistic disciplines. In following Kuhn, we should not be misled into a scientistic faith in evidence as compelling. Instead, the special province of our new may be indicated in his analysis of the ways in which any is constituted by language.

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IT IS A TRUISM TO SAY that successful teaching strategies begin with, and build upon, the skills and competencies that students bring with them to class. But it is a useful truism, for it highlights the distance between our methods of teaching arrangement and what our students already know about it-know intuitively, simply as part of their language equipment, part of their being human. Consider, for example, the experiment devised by David G. Hays, a computational linguist:

Now if there is anyone in this piece of writing who desires something dearly, it is surely the student writer, who is reaching for poetry and, for all his clumsiness, nearly succeeding. In the years since I first read this paper, the term has become for me and my friends synonymous with a certain kind of student error: the strained metaphor, odd juxtaposition, or honest misconception which inadvertently reveals a fresh perspective on the matter at hand. I will try to demonstrate that the true tasty fruit possesses its own inner logic, that it is a sure sign of a capacity for creative and structured thought, and that this potential is worth cultivating. Mina Shaughnessy begins her ground-breaking book, Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) by observing that the freshmen in her basic writing class made mistakes in grammar and syntax because no one [had seen] the intelligence of their mistakes or thought to harness that intelligence in the service of learning (p. 5). What I propose is that Shaughnessy's perception applies equally to the errors in tone and diction made by students when writing about literature. In general, tasty fruits are borne in greatest profusion by the papers of students who are bright but not adept at standard English or the standard methods of literary criticism. It was an open-enrollment student who produced the following observation on religion in America:

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THE WRITING WORKSHOP of the CUNY community college where I worked is housed in a windowless, reconverted science lab walled with concrete blocks. It has been half dark since the Administration removed lights during the budget crunch. Every day we saw confused students, though there have been fewer since the death of Open Admissions. In the back of the room, horizontally filed, were the worksheets. Since originally appearing in this form, they have been collected into a hot-selling grammar, especially designed for community college students. book represents the principles and practices upon which the workshop was originally founded. Paradoxically, it also lays out the strangulating theory of knowledge upon which remedial writing instruction is often based, a theory which denies students the things they really need to know. hip grammars are seemingly unlike the traditional ones. old grammar books abound with subliminal ideological content presented as mere exercise. Sixth Edition of the Prentice-Hall standard, Handbook for Writers, asks students to locate the clause to be diagrammed above the base line in the sentences: This is a mixed economy toward which both communism and capitalism are moving, and The continent of Africa is now divided into nations, but tribal divisions are more faithfully observed. hip grammars have little of this upfront politicking. Instead, they pretend to survey the nitty gritty details of daily urban life. sentences students get to play with deal a lot with partying, interpersonal relationships, and the neighborhood. Wider topics and wider transferences from the particulars of daily life to the general characteristics of the system we live in are discouraged. And the discouragement masquerades as aid and help to the struggling remedial students. Chapter One of Grass Roots by Sandberg and Fawcett promises help in Getting Started. authors then write that step one in getting started is limiting:

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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.

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

IN SEARCH OF A MORE EFFICIENT, effective, and individualized way to teach composition, I have been experimenting for several years with first-sight, in-class reading of students' writing as the entire business of classroom meetings. The exact reproduction of students' papers, necessary for profitable in-class reading, has been, until rather recently, so burdensome that it made fulltime in-class reading impractical, but recent technological innovations have made it easy. This several years' experience has convinced me that fulltime, in-class reading serves the teacher, the student, and the discipline so much better than any other way I know that I offer it here for the consideration and criticism of other teachers in the hope that it might help them and they might improve it. During the first meeting of a term, I explain the purpose of the course, the types of writing we will be doing, the style levels we will be attempting, the final manuscript form required, and give the first of the eighteen weekly writing assignments. I specify only the style level and expository genre and leave choice of specific topic to the students, encouraging them to write on something interesting that they know more about than we, their classmates and I, do. During the second meeting, we discuss the use of the two reference works used in the course: Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 8th ed., and Perrin's Writer's Guide and Index to English, 5th ed., this last to be read a chapter a week and selectively according to the needs of individual students. During the third meeting, I explain and demonstrate how we will read their writing in class, and I collect their first papers. After the third meeting, I take their typed papers and make a thermal transparency and a thermal ditto-master of each page of their writing and run off a ditto copy of each page for each student. At the beginning of the fourth meetingand every third meeting after that-I distribute the dittos for the week. Then I project the transparency of the first page, so the students can easily follow where the changes are being made, and we begin reading, all but the writer of the paper for the first time. A teacher could read the papers before class, but I find my responses fresher, the classes more interesting, and the whole process most efficient if I read them with the students for the first time in class. We read with one question and one restriction in mind: How could we write this better? and, Let's read sympathetically and change the form and content of the author as little as possible. Students participate freely in the reading and discussion, and we read every paper as a whole against the assignment, dealing with

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