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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).

In Philosophy in a New Key Susanne Langer writes of the great generative ideas that periodically arise to transform our intellectual enterprises by changing the very terms in which we frame our questions and conceive our purposes. When one of these concepts bursts into consciousness, we cannot at first view it critically, because it is the nature of a key change to possess us with its compelling new vision of the world. For some time afterwards we are absorbed in exploiting the energizing, fertilizing power of the new idea, which seems limitless in its implications and applications. Only later, as a paradigm matures, can we begin to refine and correct its key concept and to achieve the critical distance necessary to recognize its bounds. We are approaching this moment in composition, which has taken process as its generative theme for over a decade. By keying composition studies to writers' thought processes and the relations between cognition and language, this theme has restored to the field what was lost with the decline of rhetoric: a genuinely rich, humanly significant, and inexhaustible object of inquiry. In the next stage of our development as a discipline, we need to take up a more critical attitude toward process theory, to probe its limits and to articulate and address some of the conceptual problems it leaves unresolved. I would like to make a contribution to that work in this essay. My starting point is the difficulty of handling textual issues-for example, matters of style or discourse form-within the process framework. That framework has no principled way to account for the role of texts in discourse events because it was constituted initially by a contrastive opposition between composing (dynamic process) and texts (inert product). Texts were therefore rejected as proper objects of inquiry in composition. I suggest we might resolve this problem and work toward a more comprehensive theory of discourse by developing concepts on the principle of integrating text and process at all levels of analysis.

In his critical writing Kenneth Burke approaches texts as for dealing with situations.I In terms of his dramatistic pentad, each text may be seen as an or strategy which responds to a given scene or situation (GM, p. xv). His approach that a [text's] structure is to be described most accurately by thinking always of the [text's] function. It assumes that the [text] is designed to 'do something' for the [writer] and his readers, and that we can make the most relevant observations about its design by considering the [text] as the embodiment of this act (PLF, p. 89). But Burke's own texts have rarely been approached with Burke's critical methods. Few have been seen as strategies that respond to particular historical-cultural situations. Yet is is clear from Counterstatement (1931) through Language as Symbolic Action (1966) that Burke's texts name and strategically respond to particular historical-cultural situations. In A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) the situation so named is one dominated by language and thought which privilege the economic forces of production (RM, p. 290) and the scientific ideals of an 'impersonal' terminology (RM, p. 32). Burke's pentad clusters these emphases in modern thought and language under the term scene; that is, all favor motivational explanations based in the scene. Thus in A Rhetoric of Motives the scene Burke addresses, the situation he names, is one which emphasizes the scenic. Burke's strategic response to this situation is to restore an emphasis on act: substance, in the old philosophy, was an act; and a way of life is an acting together (RM, p. 21). In A Rhetoric of Motives Burke aims to change the reader's central emphasis from scene to act. Yet, while intending this emphasis, Burke in his writing is also aware of a tendency to slight the term, act, in the very featuring of it. For we may even favor it enough to select it as our point of departure (point of departure in the sense of an ancestral term from which all the others are derived, sharing its quality 'substantially'); but by the same token it may come to be a point of departure in the sense of the term that is 'left behind' (GM, p. 65). Burke acknowledges the difficulty of writing against his times-against the prevailing

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Like thousands of other composition techers in America, I teach in a writing program that uses an anthology of nonfiction prose. Moreover, like a great many such teachers I enjoy reading and teaching nonfiction prose, and I believe that, by learning to read and analyze such prose critically, students can improve their own writing and, incidentally, their reading too. Still, I am aware that the use of nonfiction in a composition course is not automatically a good; the decisive factor is what teachers have students do with the prose and how they have them do it. Over the past several years I have also become increasingly aware that teachers are pretty much on their own when it comes to analyzing and evaluating nonfiction prose, especially the twentieth-century English nonfiction that comprises the bulk of most composition anthologies. In this article I want, first, to call attention to the paucity of rhetorical and stylistic criticism of twentieth-century English nonfiction and to offer some explanations for this phenomenon; second, to show why this lack of criticism concerns me and should concern other writing teachers; and third, to offer some proposals to remedy the situation.

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Dorothy Augustine's Geometries and Words: Linguistics and Philosophy: A Model of the Composing Process (College English, 43 [1981], 221-31) illustrates how radically our understanding of the composing process has changed from the linear schemes of the last generation.' However, this new understanding is not always applied to discussions of technical writing. In fact, technical writing is sometimes assumed to be a rhetorically simple process because the rhetorical context of the completed product, the document, is generally limited.2 This assumption is not borne out by practical experience. My own initiatory adventures as a technical writer have led me to the conviction that technical discourse of any seriousness is a structure necessarily created by the writer out of the elements of the writing situation. In other words, the writing situation cannot by itself determine for the writer or editor the meaning of the technical document to be produced; in a fundamental sense, technical discourse is a lamp upon rather than a mirror of the world it represents. Of course, not all technical writing is complex; the IRS form 1040A is simple, not only as product but also as process. Moreover, a given technical document

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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

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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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

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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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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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THE ARTICLE you are about to read is a truly superlative piece of craftsmanship! This excitingly new, amazingly perceptive study presents a unique discussion of one of the significant issues so pervasive at this particular point in time. Some of you only go around once in these journals, so you've got to grab for all the gung-ho you can get! You've got a lot to get, and this paper's got a lot to give! Illumination is just a sentence away! You'll find every sentence, every phrase, chockfull of nourishing information! After this one, other essays just won't stack up! The paragraph you have just read is an example of unmitigated buncombe, balderdash, and bafflegab-precisely the topic of this paper. Like much of the rhetoric of the estimated 500 messages of Madison Avenue advertigo to which the average American is daily subjected, the rhetoric of the preceding paragraph

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