Being bodies that learn language / thereby becoming wordlings-thus begins Kenneth Burke's revised definition of human beings.' Here I will suggest teachers of writing and literacy can use Burke to revise our discussion of words and thereby better empower the wordlings we teach. Traditionally, what have we taught our students about words? Probably the first place to look for the answer to this question is the site where our assertions about diction have most power: in the margins of their papers. What my students report about their revision processes matches what composition researchers report. Their primary concern (re: diction) is changing words to avoid such comments as WW, Abst, Amb, especially WW. That is the most potent lesson they have learned from their previous teachers about diction. I. A. Richards was right when he asserted that the best and most effective way to teach writing is to help students understand how words work in (8). The New Rhetoric reframes what we know about words work. It directs attention to the crucial importance of word-ing in both the psychological process of invention and the social process of discourse community.2 It can help us teach writing humanely, critically, and effectively both in the humanities and across the curriculum/'in the disciplines. Most composition textbooks use Burke, if at all, only by mentioning his Pentad. But this presentation of the Pentad is a red herring, an obeisance that allows us to deflect the rest of Burke, to put him under erasure.3 More important than any particular like the Pentad is what Burke can help us understand about language in general, rhetorical processes in particular. We should take into our classrooms Burke's insights into words work, into abstractions move minds, into contexts (especially of that rhetorically most important context called, perhaps misleadingly, audience [cf. Park]), into contradiction and into process-in short, into writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process. In writing classes our discussion of words is all too often based in reductively narrow, dichotomized conceptions of style and diction. We will do well to let Burke remind us words are more important than that, to remind us wording can constitute knowledge and power. We should demonstrate to our students-while

(1993). Mirroring ourselves? The pedagogy of early grammar texts. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 418-435.

The uses of postmodern theory in rhetoric and composition studies have been the object of considerable abuse of late. Figures of some repute in the field-the likes of Maxine Hairston and Peter Elbow-as well as anonymous voices from the Burkean Parlor section of Rhetoric Review-most recently, TS, graduate student, and KF, voice speaking for a general English teacher audience (192)-have joined the chorus of protest. The charges have included willful obscurity, selfindulgence, elitism, pomposity, intellectual impoverishment, and host of related offenses. Although my name usually appears among the accused, I am sympathetic with those undergoing the difficulties of the first encounter with this discussion. (I exclude Professor Hairston in her irresponsible charge that its recent contributors in College English are low-risk Marxists who write very badly [695] and who should be banned from NCTE publications.) I experienced the same frustration when I first encountered the different but closely related language of rhetoric and composition studies some fifteen years ago. I wondered, for example, if I would ever grasp the complexities of Aristotle or Quintilian or Kenneth Burke or I. A. Richards, not to mention the new language of the writing process. A bit later I was introduced to French poststructuralism, and once again I found myself wandering in strange seas, and this time alone. In reading rhetoric, after all, I had the benefit of numerous commentators to help me along-the work of Kinneavy and Lauer and Corbett and Emig, for example. In reading Foucault and Derrida in the late seventies, on the other hand, I was largely on my own since the commentaries were as difficult as the originals, and those few that were readable were often (as even I could see) wrong. Nonetheless, with the help of informal reading groups made up of colleagues and students, I persisted in my efforts to come to terms with this difficult body of thought. I was then, as now, convinced that both rhetorical studies and postmodern speculation offered strikingly convergent and remarkably compelling visions for conducting my life as teacher and citizen. It is clear to me that rhetoric and composition studies has arrived as serious field of study because it has taken into account the best that has been thought and said about its concerns from the past and the present, and I have found that postmodern work in historical and contemporary rhetorical theory has done much to further this effort.

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

(1992). Robert Zoellner's “talk‐write pedagogy”: Instrumental concept for composition today. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 239-243.

Over twenty years ago, Robert Zoellner argued that our post hoc, artifactual approach to writing instruction, our teaching students by commenting on final drafts, is an especially inefficient system. In his College English monograph, Zoellner notes that in directing both our and our students' attention to characteristics of their written artifacts rather than to characteristics of the scribal act which produced those artifacts, we are dealing with effects only and thus adroitly avoiding the problem of cause altogether (272). In trying to teach writing by commenting on student papers, we are, he says, confusing texts with people, written words with the act of writing, the lever with the laboratory rat (280), history with behavior, the past with the present (283). In our confusion we end up trying to teach the page rather than the person, the product rather than the process, which, he notes, is patently hopeless endeavor (280). In other words, Zoellner implies, we are confusing declarative knowledge with procedural knowledge and thus teaching the what of writing rather than the how of writing. Four years ago in a lecture at Colorado State University, Zoellner was still voicing this same critique. In a telling analogy, he said:

My purpose today is to frame, quite briefly, the somewhat different critical assumptions found in literacy and communication studies and then to illustrate the latter perspective with a discussion of rhetoric and the media. Before doing so, however, I want to express my deep appreciation for having been asked to address you today. We are cousins, you and I, for we share a common ancestry. A bit under eighty years ago, seventeen stalwart professors of public speaking walked out of the third annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (which was itself formed in reaction to the MLA) and fashioned what would later become the main professional organization in Communication Studies in the United States. They did so because they felt that rhetoric done orally had a unique character, that that character manifested itself in distinctive conceptual and behavioral ways, and that it took a special pedagogy to tease spoken eloquence out of college sophomores. I mention these historical matters not in the spirit of academic chauvinism but because these facts made a difference in the professional options available to me. Nevertheless, I confess a certain ambivalence when realizing that this intrepid band of dissidents, aided and abetted by the rise of the electronic media, can now claim great-grandparentage to some 200,000 Communication majors in US college and universities today. These students dwarf by a factor of two the current number of English majors, a fact that might dismay some of you but a fact that has gladdened the hearts of both linebackers and Miss Virginia contestants for decades. Being neither a linebacker nor a raving beauty as an undergraduate, I studied English. I did so until I became a college senior, at which time I faced decisions about graduate study. I was not as wise as many twenty-year-olds, but I was wise enough to know that studying English had become an affaire de coeur with me.

Except for the essay and the research paper, perhaps no component of the college composition course is as prevalent as the personal journal, and in recent years the journal has become a principal export in the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum movement. Most composition textbooks contain a section on journal-keeping, and several, such as Christopher C. Burnham's Writingfrom the Inside Out, place the journal at the heart of the writing course. The journal is often associated with what James Berlin has called the Subjective approach to composition instruction, which assumes that insights arising from within the writer are of paramount importance, that reality is a personal and private construct (145). But the journal has proven versatile enough to fit almost any pedagogical model. Textbooks and instructor's guides commonly list a number of functions for the journal: creative stimulant, idea repository, experimental forum, and learning tool. The multidisciplinary essays in Toby Fulwiler's The Journal Book show its protean manifestations, including dialogue journal, learning log, team journal, math record, and office log. Theoretically, we place considerable faith in the journal and what it represents for our students-an opportunity to take control of their writing and to engage in independent inquiry. Yet many instructors who initially sense the potential of this genre give up on it when it leads to disappointing results.

(1991). “Revision/re‐vision”: A feminist writing class. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 258-273.

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.

The freshman composition course is a peculiarly American institution not shared by modern British or European universities. This study grew out of an attempt to understand why rhetoric fell from favor in the British universities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and why composition, as an course, failed to develop. It is the purpose of this study to examine writing instruction in the British universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand such developments.2 Writing instruction within any society is subject to social and political influences, and nowhere is this more true than in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain, that territory that encompassed England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In addition, strong religious movements and a special linguistic situation during this period shaped where and how writing was taught. The eighteenth century in Britain was a period of transition as the agricultural population migrated to the cities in large numbers. Industrialization was rapid. Between 1700 and 1800, England saw the rise of the industrial centers of Manchester and Liverpool, while Scotland changed from a poor agricultural society to a relatively industrialized one with an increase in population from 84,000 to 500,000 during the nineteenth century. Preparatory schools and universities were not available or adequate. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, England had two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although Scotland had four well-established universities, Ireland had one, and Wales none. The eighteenth century was also a period of upward mobility, and good English became a rung on the ladder. With economic stability established, the large and powerful merchant class and those aspiring to better themselves saw education in general, and language in particular, as one of the ways to move up. In response, the school teachers and grammarians, with a strong belief in rationality and rules, set out to standardize the language, firm in the beliefs that change was a sign of deterioration and that Latin was the standard by which all languages should be measured. During the period there was also a rise in nationalism, which resulted in a new reverence for language and literature. Although men and

More often than not, when people write about the relationship of literature and writing, they either argue about the place of literature in composition classes (as Barbara and Francis Lide do in Literature in the Composition Class) or discuss, in the spirit of writing-across-thecurriculum, how to use journals, response assignments, and critical essays to teach literature (an approach Joseph Comprone takes in Integrating the Acts of Reading and about Literature). My purpose in this essay is different from either of those. I hope to suggest a number of the values-for student understanding and appreciation of literature, and for the effective teaching of literature and writing-that can come from having students work at their own creative writing in undergraduate literature classes. For some years, Twentieth Century and Fiction Writing alternated in my teaching load. One course features works in which literary technique is quite important and often very challenging for students, and the other course helped students develop some mastery of literary technique. By thinking about how to make both courses work well, I discovered that many of the activities and exercises of the fiction writing class helped literature students to understand key concepts of technique and to appreciate the subtlety and craft of the works they read. For those unfamiliar with typical exercises of fiction-writing classes, let me offer a brief list of activities that carry over into literature classes:

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.

Karen Burke LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. 173 pages. Carol P. Hartzog, Composition and the Academy: A Study of Writing Program Administration. New York: MLA, 1986. xviii + 166 pages. Walter H. Beale, A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1987. 171 pages. James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth‐Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.92 pages.

The renewed interest in rhetorical studies during past twenty years has caused many scholars to look back to beginnings of education in English as such programs were developed during latter half of nineteenth century. Most would probably agree with William Riley Parker that it was teaching of freshman composition that quickly entrenched English departments in college and university structure (347), and that freshman program continues to account for size and power of most English departments. But in spite of this, until recently graduate education in English has been focused almost exclusively on literary study. Even as progressive a thinker as Richard Ohmann was at one point moved to write, Literature is our subject matter, and, this being so, an inquiry into state of profession must ask how we stand vis-a'-vis literature (Structure of an Academic Field 359). Although Ohmann subsequently repudiated his statement (English in America 20), such an outlook is revealing of climate existing in most English departments for greater part of twentieth century. By seventies, however, scattered voices began to protest pattern and purpose of graduate training in English. John Gerber argued that traditional literary ignored realities of profession, and that graduate education should be devoted to the acquisition of skills, not merely subject matter (315). He specifically encouraged both M.A. and Ph.D. candidate . . . to make writing, theories of writing, and theories of teaching writing an area of specialization (316). Gerber doubted that such a reform in curriculum would come to pass, and, in fact, traditional literary study has changed little since his article appeared in 1977. But reform has taken place, not by revamping entire curriculum, but by opening up new programs in rhetoric-what is still usually termed option (as opposed to mainstream of literary studies). By 1980 William Covino, Nan Johnson, and Michael Feehan were able to identify twenty graduate programs in English offering a concentration in rhetoric (although some of these programs were

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

If you teach writing, you should write. That elementary but radical insight, probably first voiced by Janet Emig fourteen years ago in her influential monograph, Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, has become one of the key components of the new paradigm for teaching composition, endorsed by virtually everyone in the profession who consults or publishes about ways to improve the teaching of The reasoning is simple: Teachers who do not engage in the writing process themselves cannot adequately understand the complex dynamics of the process, cannot empathize with their students' problems, and are in no position either to challenge or to endorse the recommendations and admonitions of the textbooks they are using. Nor can they do as many writing teachers suggest and say, Let's just throw away the textbook and work on our writing. The writing teacher who doesn't write is in no more position to diagnose difficulties and offer advice than a soccer coach who has never played soccer. In fact, much of the success of the National Writing Project's workshops for teachers all over the country has come because its leaders have started teachers writing and talking to each other about But just because so many people in the profession now accept the principle and recommend that writing teachers should write doesn't mean that those who believe in the theory find it easy to practice. In fact, if you are one of the new generation of writing teachers who believe strongly that you should write, you may only have made your life more difficult. You are now enlightened, but as a result you may feel guilty and frustrated; guilty because you aren't writing, frustrated because you don't know what to do about it. Probably the first thing you should realize is that you're not unusual. We don't have good data on how many writing teachers don't write, but a few years ago The Chronicle of Higher Education published figures estimating that at least two-thirds of college professors publish nothing after the dissertation. And if you think about the faculty in your department you may realize that few of them seem to be writing, including those who teach composition. So you shouldn't feel as if you are the only sinner and that everyone but you is It's not true. But knowing that you have plenty of company doesn't help your problem.

The teaching of English grammar in the nineteenth century can be a rewarding subject of study because it reveals attitudes toward language and language teaching that also shaped the pedagogy of rhetoric, composition, and literature during that period. The prescriptive attitude toward grammar and usage inherited from the eighteenth century was a powerful determinant both in grammar teaching and in the teaching of speaking, reading, and writing, where taste, facility, precision, and perspicuity (clarity) were central issues. And when continental notions of inductive (we would say progressive) teaching begin to have an effect on American education, the signs of change appear earliest in the school grammar texts. In this essay I will describe the main strands of theory and practice in early nineteenth-century grammar teaching and then show how these analytic and synthetic approaches were combined in grammar texts around the middle of the century, contributing to an eclectic theory of expression employed in both grammar and composition teaching by the 1890s.

Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the

Advanced composition is now taught in colleges throughout the country to students in a variety of majors. But, unlike freshman English where one finds similar curricula and texts, this course has not had a traditional structure. In some schools, it may even indicate technical writing or advanced grammar study. In a 1979 survey, Michael Hogan discovered that at most colleges the course extended fundamentals learned in freshman English, with work on style and organization for argument, exposition, and other essay forms. Because few specialized texts were then available, teachers relied on books intended for freshmen, such as Hall's Writing Well and The Norton Reader, and thus repeated familiar advice on the modes of exposition, paragraphing and usage, with little attention given to research on composition.1

Like people who keep returning to the same spot looking for a lost object, composition teachers sometimes retrace their steps, seeking the formulas for successful writing instruction. In both cases, those who go back without learning from their search show more hope than wisdom. Recently, a number of leaders in our profession have urged that we recombine literature and composition, arguing that the two disciplines complement each other. However, if we recombine them without incorporating the knowledge we have gained since most composition/ literature courses were phased out, we will show that we have forgotten the reasons for which we did phase them out, and that we do not learn from the part of our discipline which is a science and not an art. Having taught in a composition/literature program that was wisely dismantled, and having listened to the arguments for and against comp/lit, I am convinced that there is a possibility that we will join them in an unenlightened reinvention. On the other hand, I am also convinced that with the benefit of new knowledge, the result of recent research, we can design and teach comp/lit courses more productively than before, though not necessarily more productively than alternative writing courses. Therefore, I would like to suggest three ways in which a reinvented comp/lit course can really be a writing course and can, at the same time, retain the benefits of literary exposure. These suggestions involve the framing of topics, the use of class time for writing activity, and the creation of a functioning sense of audience. Before I present these three suggestions, I would like to summarize several principles of teaching comp/lit offered by three teachers-Hart, Slack, and Woodruff-back in the fifties. These principles are the soundest I know from the days when comp/lit was thriving, and we will show progress by incorporating them into our reinvention. The comp/lit program that I helped dismantle would have been more successful and survivable if it had followed them. First, easy to say but hard to practice, the teacher must firmly resist the temptation to teach literature. The rationale for combining composition and literature is that they reinforce

Written responses to student writing continue to play an important part in most composition classes despite increased employment of peers and tutors as sources of informed opinion and despite increasing emphasis on the importance of oral response. How best to respond to students' essays therefore concerns us all, at whatever level we teach. Yet valuable as we believe our penciled comments to be, this timeconsuming, difficult task proves too frequently a confused, unsatisfying experience for us; worse, our efforts prove too often apparently unhelpful to students who, if uninstructed, are alienated, antagonized, by our thought-heavy marginalia and terminal remarks. I suspect many of us, seated before a stack of papers, wonder over late-night coffee if we are doing this job well, if the results are worth the effort. Much of the research done on response remains buried in unpublished dissertations (for accounts of such research, see Jarabek and Dieterich, Knoblauch and Brannon 1981, Lamberg*), and the published material, scattered throughout the professional literature, is not readily available for comprehensive review. Compared to the growing body of literature devoted to other compositional and rhetorical topics, the amount of accessible advice on how to respond productively to student writing is scant. Nevertheless, enough such material of a practical nature exists to warrant attention. What follows is an attempt to summarize and to synthesize some of the guidelines for writing effective comments that this literature suggests, thereby supplementing C. W. Griffin's recent review-essay, which deals exclusively with the components of a theory of evaluation. To bring together and to group under general rubrics the eighty-one items here reviewed may assist the formation of a useful theory of response and may, more immediately, bring greater coherence and consistency to the almost daily act of commenting on student themes.

When teach modern literature courses, tell students literature evolves through a process of growth through innovation. That is, innovators like Kafka or Woolf or Joyce probed boldly beyond the current state of literary art, extending frontiers and opening territory for writers who later worked their ways toward the new borders. Much this same process, think, is at the heart of the composition teaching enterprise. Researchers and theorists push beyond the state of the art as it is practiced in composition courses, allowing textbook authors, curriculum developers, and classroom teachers slowly to work their ways into new territory. Slowly is a key word in sentence. For as you know, a wide gap separates state-of-the-art theory and state-of-the-art practice in composition. Maxine Hairston illustrates this point/ in The Winds of Change (CCC, 33 [Feb. 1982]), when she gives an answer to people in our profession who say that the admonition to 'teach process, not product' is now conventional wisdom for which further argument is unnecessary. I disagree, Hairston writes:

Articles by Richard Fulkerson, Karen Pelz, and Michael Hogan in the first issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition (Spring 1980) all pointed to a serious lack of consistency in the profession's conception of what should be covered in advanced composition courses in college. Professor Pelz, while arguing against what she perceives as another teacher's advocacy of media-centered rather than writing-centered advanced composition courses, advocates the development of a personal style in advanced writing courses, seemingly calling for an emphasis on expressive discourse and self-discovery (A Reply to Medicott: Evaluating Writing, 7-9). Professor Fulkerson (Some Theoretical Speculations on the Advanced Composition Curriculum, 9-12) uses Abrams' and Kinneavy's theories of literary criticism and the aims of discourse to construct two different curricular models for advanced composition programs--one suggesting courses based on the skills required of students as they produce discourse with different aims, the other suggesting synthesizing all four discourse aims in a single advanced composition course. Finally, Professor Hogan (Advanced Composition: A Survey, 21-29) sent questionnaires to 374 advanced composition teachers at 311 schools and found an enormously diverse range of course objectives and plans among the responses that he received. Hogan also found that many advanced composition courses used the same books as freshman writing courses in the same schools. Although rhetoric, Hogan found, dominated the courses of instruction, there did not seem to be any clear or consistent pattern of rhetorical approach in the schools or teachers who reported. Very few respondents, in fact, reflected much attention to types or aims of discourse, as Fulkerson had suggested, in their assignments or plans. Articles such as these reflect the composition profession's general lack

(1982). Using Carl Rogers’ communication theories in the composition classroom. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 50-55.