neither my stories of teaching nor those of many of my feminist colleagues. These practitioners, along with many women and men writing about composition studies today, urge us to design curricula to empower women and other students marginalized in relation to the dominant discourse. In their stories we see them empowering those women, who experience life and the academy from a marginal perspective, to write. Moving away from the developmental theories of William H. Perry and Jean Piaget, these researchers cite studies by women about the different ways women know and write to justify the ways they encourage their female students' literacy.2 But these feminists do not describe the nonmarginalized students many of the rest of us meet in our classes-those men, women, and culturally different ones who already belong in the academy. How many of those of us who are feminists and composition teachers interact only with students eager to be transformed by the political agendas of feminist, or for that matter, even composition pedagogy? The affirmation in the first part of my title gives away the ending of my story,

sharply and clearly than I had been able the pedagogical problem I want to explore here. He or she noted, with an undisguised exasperation I understood all too well, God knows, the seniors in my personal essay class still seem to want to read even the best of essays as if the essays belong to [a] 'monological regime of silence and facticity' (citing one of the phrases that appears below). This comment was

John Paul Russo. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 843 pages. Robert J. Connors, ed., Selected Essays of Edward P. J. Corbett. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. xxii + 359. W. Ross Winterowd, The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 226 pages. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xii + 557 pages. Chris Anderson, ed., Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. xxvi + 337, 1989.

(1990). Cultural literacy, curricular reform, and freshman composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 270-278.

Richard Leo Enos, The Literate Mode of Cicero's Legal Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. xii + 127 pages. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Ixxvi + 415 pages. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 252 pages. William A. Covino, The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook; Heinemann, I988. 141 pages. Bruce A: Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. Foreword by Joseph L. Featherstone. Columbia University: Teachers College Press, 1986. 293 pages. Jean‐François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Frederick Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 110 pages.

Since the mid 1960s, empirical approaches to scholarship in rhetoric and composition have emerged.' The use of empirical approaches can be seen in much of the work of scholars who study reading, writing, and literacy, their interconnections, and their relation to thinking and learning. Given the relative high profile of empirical approaches over the last three decades, most people in rhetoric and composition have some understanding of their nature. However, given the rise of recent challenges (Berlin; Irmscher; North), it seems important to begin a discussion about the assumptions that inform empirical inquiry. This paper is aimed at initiating such a discussion, and, in particular, it is concerned with characterizing theory building in empirical scholarship and research within the context of humanistic inquiry. In this way, I hope to show that empirical practices in rhetoric and composition can be important for provoking better rhetorics of inquiry (Nelson 430). Empirical scholarship and research in rhetoric and composition grow out of a tacit assumption that knowledge in our field is probabilistic and contextual. In its broadest sense, empirically based theory building is aimed at understanding and evaluating existing knowledge and at generating new knowledge about language-using in society. Empirical inquiry in rhetoric and composition is a humanistic activity that is built on the premise of the epistemic, dialectical, and generative nature of our knowledge. (See Scott's corpus for a sustained discussion of rhetoric as epistemic.) As with other kinds of knowledge-making, empirical knowledge is a product of a dialectic which takes place among a speaker, an interpretive community or social group in which the speaker is trying to contribute, and the historical, political, material, ideological, and situational context in which the speaker is working. For example, say that one is interested in exploring the role of sophistic rhetoric on Greek and Roman thinking through case histories of early

In the century or so that required freshman composition courses have been in existence, critics have often called for their abolition. Indeed, no other subject of study in the university has been so persistently and bitterly attacked, as historians have often noted (Berlin, Rhetoric; Greenbaum; Parker). I cannot in this space recount the whole history of the attempts to abolish composition courses. Instead I will analyze the arguments that the abolitionists used to attack the courses, and in doing so explore the assumptions which lay behind their opposition-assumptions which continue to fuel the conflicts within English studies: between teachers of literature and of literacy, between exponents of competing theories of the composing process, and, finally, between those who favor and those who oppose wider access to the academic community. Though English departments were founded at the close of the nineteenth century largely to teach writing, and freshman composition has been the most constant part of a shifting elective curriculum ever since, composition courses have rarely been a full part of the university. Dismissed as remedial or preparatory, condemned as ineffective, passed down like old clothes to

When we teach, we tell a story to our students and to ourselves, a story about the acquisition of knowledge. The telling of this tale is what we usually refer to as pedagogy. A syllabus, in this view, is a kind of fiction inhabited by nonfictional characters who journey together through the plot of the story. Every syllabus, of course, tells a slightly different tale. However, when a syllabus is codified into a textbook-that most maligned of literary genres-it begins to resemble something more akin to what Jean-Franvois Lyotard calls a master narrative, a story around which other are constructed. According to Lyotard, even in an age of science, narration is the quintessential form in which how-to knowledge is established and transmitted. I would argue that in the largely literate and institutionalized societies of the West, textbooks provide us with many of these culturally essential of knowledge. In this essay I propose to anatomize the stories that four influential composition textbooks tell, both to reveal their pedagogical and epistemological suppositions and also to uncover the master narratives that give their theories of writing consequence and shape. The four texts are Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike; ForminglThinking/Writing by Ann Berthoff; Teaching Composing by William Coles; and A Short Course in Writing by Kenneth A. Bruffee. In the case of these four, at least, the tale told follows the ancient pattern of heroic adventure, a pattern of separation, initiation, and return. Joseph Campbell's comparative study of eastern and occidental mythologies, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, identifies a basic form of this heroic story, the monomyth.

(1987). Creating a literate environment in Freshman English: Why and how. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 4-20.

That anyone should want to use critical reading in analysis of advertising should be surprising if one accepts a broad conception of letters as including anything in print that worth studying. My idea of English studies supports point of view that our concern in English departments ought to be with critical reading and writing of all kinds of texts, just imaginative literature. In other words, we ought to be concerned as much with rhetorical inquiries as with aesthetic inquiries. In its own right, advertising provides a kind of distinctive knowledge about society. To some critics, advertising fills a genuine need by creating markets for new and valuable products and by expanding and strengthening economy. Advertising also reveals how techniques of science can contribute to better living. In addition, it informs people about available goods and services and invites them to secure good things of life-material comforts, entertainment, travel, and so forth. To some critics, however, advertising creates false values. These critics contend that since some products are basically alike, all too often advertisers appeal to people's baser instincts and emotions to sell their products. To stimulate demand for a product, they attach psychological values such as acquisitiveness, power, sexual pleasure, attractiveness, social approval, and competitive success, none of which are in product. To attain these values, all consumer needs to do to buy appropriate product. In brief, advertising an exercise in a special kind of persuasion. As if these criticisms were enough, advertisers have been accused of manipulating people without their consent at some deeper level of consciousness, of selling to id, as one critic put it (Seldin 442-43). A number of critics have commented on use of techniques in advertising. Vance Packard calls them hidden persuaders(3). Marshall McLuhan refers to them as subliminal pills for subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell (228). They are not meant for conscious consumption. Their mere existence, asserts McLuhan, is a testimony to somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis (229). There evidence to suggest that some of these criticisms are justified. As early as 1934, James Rorty, in his book Our Master's Voice:Advertising, noted that the advertising man is, in fact, a journeyman psychologist (241). He

(1985). Multicultural literacy for faculty: Accommodating non‐native speakers of English in content courses. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 100-107.

The has become an increasingly popular mode of testing, a staple of more and more placement and proficiency tests. I The following scenario is common: A student receives a topic and the specifications for a piece of writing to be completed in twenty or thirty or forty minutes. The student writes furiously (I mean this in at least two senses). The completed essay is bundled with dozens or hundreds of others and delivered to a roomful of teachers, all cranky with anticipation of their task but glad to pick up some extra money for their pains, who spend about a minute on each essay, reducing it to a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 while they watch the clock and wait for the lunch break, and occasionally chuckle together over a particularly dumb and funny student sentence. Sometime later, the student receives notification of whether she is competent, or proficient, or literate, or whatever label this enterprise is supposed to impose. The absurdity of all this is apparent.2 Good writing comes from a writer with something important to say to an interested reader. But committed writers and interested readers are nowhere in this scenario. It would appear that testing writing means asking students who would rather not write to produce something for readers who would rather not read. Without commitment and interest, all concerned must settle for efficiency: writers try to finish off a topic in minutes, and readers try to finish off each essay in seconds. While complaining about the perversion of writing and reading into a disinterested rush, I must also admit that producing an acceptable writing sample does require, however scarcely, those skills exploited more fully in most academic writing tasks. The writer being tested must invent content, focus and form it into sentences and paragraphs (keeping audience and purpose in mind), revise, and edit. Because writing samples mimic the production of an academic essay, we can conclude that the writing sample test, with all its shortcomings, does test skills relevant to academic writing.3 This conclusion introduces the central problem I wish to consider. When tests equate proficiency, competency, and literacy with writing academic essays, they maintain a severely understated and mistaken