Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines Cicero's De Senectute, or On Old Age, as a work of "gentle" rhetoric.

AbstractThe rhetorical figure of speech called prolepsis, describing a presaging of time and events to come, commonly appears in environmental communication and importantly frames the possibilities for action. Prolepsis is a figure employed in communication about climate change that demands attention in its various deployments, configurations, and, importantly, rhetorical inducements. Such inducements may rely upon feelings of hope or fear, and this study investigates the rhetorical and ethical conditions prolepsis may generate. A considerable literature studying the concept of hope offers great insights into climate change perceptions and behavior concerning climate action. The present study examines prolepsis to discuss how the figure's inducement of suasive effect through appeals to hope and fear shape the ethical horizons for action. We examine media coverage of the IPCC's sixth report, Part I, warning of the enormous impacts of the ongoing climate emergency and necessary climate action to mitigate the worst of these effects. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAshley Rose MehlenbacherAshley Rose Mehlenbacher is Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication at the University of Waterloo and the author of On Expertise (Penn State UP) and Science Communication Online (Ohio State UP). She is also the inaugural Co-Director, with Donna Strickland, for the Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology (TRuST) network.Carolyn EckertCarolyn Eckert is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research investigates the ethotic construction of experts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also teaches at Conestoga College and in the Humber College School of Business.Sara DoodySara Doody is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo where she investigates climate change communication and transdisciplinary collaboration between science and philosophy. Her research examines written communication in science and higher education and inter-/transdisciplinary communication and collaboration.Sarah ForstSarah Forst is a graduate psychology student at the University of Cologne and a research assistant in the Department of Research Methods and Experimental Psychology. She was a Mitacs Global Link intern in Summer 2021 at the University of Waterloo.Brad MehlenbacherBrad Mehlenbacher is Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Mehlenbacher is author of the NCTE award-winning book, Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning (MIT Press), co-author of Online Help: Design and Evaluation (Ablex).

This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays of prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines the long-term importance and impact of the 1982 MLA volume The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing edited by James J. Murphy.Dedication: This Rhetoric Re-View essay is dedicated to the memory of James J. Murphy, who edited The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing and, in addition to his impressive scholarship, served for many years on the editorial board of Rhetoric Review. Professor Murphy was 98 years old when he passed away shortly before Christmas 2021.

Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

Rhetoric and poetics have a long historical relationship; however, there is a dearth of literature in contemporary rhetorical studies that analyzes poems as forms of democratic dissent. This article begins with an assessment of John F. Kennedy’s eulogy of Robert Frost, followed with an analysis of Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art,” a poem that both supports and challenges Kennedy’s defense of poetry. Ultimately, this paper makes an argument for why critics might pay closer attention to poetry as both a medium for expressing dissenting messages and as an example of how language play itself can function as valuable democratic dissent.

An explanation of the history of standardized tests in the US reveals the ways they have shifted from tools of articulation to tools of accountability not only in K–12 classrooms but also in higher education. Understanding the competing interests at play and the potential effects of the Common Core State Standards at the college level is crucial to reasserting assessment as a teaching and learning practice instead of a system of accountability.

Abstract An allegoresis of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida illuminates this drama as the playwright's act of mythopoesis that characterizes and interprets the second half of Elizabeth I's reign as an historical and political journey through adversities, crises, and conflict to a moment of unified redemption. Action and dialogue allegorically represent the diverse and disparate civic voices of this journey. The drama is Shakespeare's own civic voice morally and ethically arguing and assessing the period as an arrival to national unification, self-identity, and well-being. Notes 1I offer my gratitude to RR reviewers Mark Gellis and Andrew King for their insightful recommendations, and to Theresa Jarnagin Enos and Rhetoric Review for their patience. 2Allegory of typology as relying on well-established pre-texts—in this instance, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Homer's Iliad; allegory of reification as relying on allusive tropes such as irony, metaphor, simile, pun, image, and personification that are culturally understood by the audience. See Quilligan (ad passim) and Barney (30–38). The two classes of allegory need not be mutually exclusive; they can be simultaneously incorporated into one allegorical work and can support each other to convey the author's perceptions. 3All quotations from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 4For a concise and comprehensive history of Commons' escalating voice and its rise to power, see J. E. Neale's introduction (15–29) and his conclusion (417–24) in Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581; and the conclusion (434–39) of Neale's Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601. Neale identifies the birth of Commons' evolving empowerment with Sir Thomas More's plea for parliamentary freedom of speech as early as 1523 during the reign of Henry VIII. 5Although probable sources, none of these names appear in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde or in George Chapman's Iliad. Only one reference to the Dardan gate appears in Lydgate's Troy Book, in which it is synonymous with the famous Scaean Gate of Iliad fame. It was referred to as the Dardan gate because it faced northwest toward the Dardanelles. Only until the twentieth century did archaeological evidence at the Troy site in Hycarlic suggest other gateway entrances in Troy's walls. 6Ordish identifies seven gates in Elizabethan London: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgarte, Newgate, and Ludgate (5). However, Moorgate was considered a minor gate and originally a postern that would leave a total of six main gates for Elizabethan Londoners. The other six gates mentioned were the original six that descended from the Medieval Period. Another gate, adjacent to the Tower of London, had been demolished to construct the Tower, and only a pedestrian passageway remained. 7Graves uses an interesting turn of phrase for patronage recipients' commitment: "They also reinforced loyalty by pandering to self-interest" (114). 8The "pearl" metaphor as Elizabeth in this context in all probability held three significances for the Elizabethan audience: (1) At least from the time of the poetic works of the anonymous "Pearl Poet," the pearl signifies purity thereby affirming Elizabeth as the "Virgin Queen"; (2) Elizabeth's purity in relation to God and her Realm are divinely ordained; and (3) in like to "divine," she is ubiquitously felt yet distant and tenuous, one whose relation is not easily attained. Elizabeth's symbolic association with pearls is clearly depicted in her Pelican Portrait, c. 1575, and the Armada Portrait of 1588; her gowns and her hair are encrusted with pearls, and she is portrayed in both portraits with elaborate displays of pearl necklacing. From another perspective: In the Parliamentary session of 1597–98 when monopolies, granted under the authority of her Royal Prerogative, were being challenged by the House of Commons as lending to abuses affecting the welfare of the poor, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, quoted her response in stating: "Her Majesty … hoped that her dutiful and loving subjects would not take away her Prerogative—which is the chiefest flower in her garland and the principal and head pearl in her crown and diadem" (Neale, 1584–1601 355). 9Further exploration in identifying allegory as another separate and distinct mode of drama within the corpus of Shakespeare's plays appears viable. Preliminary examination of The Tempest has already indicated to me strong allegorical elements at work and consistent in execution with Troilus and Cressida. They lead me to consider the plays two pieces of a set as "allegory/drama"—a protracted legend of the Tudor Dynasty and its relinquishing evolution to the Stuarts. This preliminary thesis would also include Henry VIII as a necessary stage for Troilus and Tempest to complete the set as a dynastic work. 10… and possibly propaganda for Elizabeth's recent favor toward the House of Commons, also a positive assessment of her reign for the chronicles of history. 11See Dennis Slattery's discussion of mythopoesis as "the ground of narrative knowing" in Sophocles' Theban Plays and the journey from the profane to the sacred in his essay, "Oedipus at Colonus: Pilgrimage from Blight to Blessedness" (ad passim).

Abstract The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In response, the author exhumes an embodied history of rhetoric, reexamining the myths of the Greek goddess Metis as a means of enlivening rhetorical theory and history. The author then connects these myths to other rhetorical traditions invoked by Hélène Cixous and Gloria Anzaldúa, connecting Metis to Medusa and to mestiza consciousness. The author affirms the rhetorical power of the body, specifically of those bodies that challenge rhetorical norms. Notes 1I thank generous RR reviewers Richard Enos and Michelle Ballif for their advice and assistance with this essay. 2In Grosz's words, "[T]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory" (Volatile 3). The body then becomes "what is not mind … implicitly defined as unruly, disruptive, in need of direction or judgment, merely incidental … a brute givenness which requires overcoming" (Volatile 3–4). 3Thanks to Richard Enos for his thoughtful comments in reviewing an earlier draft of this manuscript. 4Disability studies scholars use the term normate to designate the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual. The word normative also converts the idea of normalcy into an active process—norms "are" but they also "act"—we live in a culture in which norms are enforced, a normative society. It can—and has—been argued that in antiquity there was not a concept of normalcy per se. But as Lennard Davis writes, although the word normal appeared in English only in the mid-nineteenth century, "before the rise of the concept of normalcy … there appears not to have been a concept of the normal, but instead the regnant paradigm was one revolving around the word ideal. … [I]n the culture of the ideal, physical imperfections are not seen as absolute but as part of a descending continuum from top to bottom. No one, for example, can have an ideal body, and therefore no one has to have an ideal body" (Enforcing 105). Yet Aristotle had more than one concept of ideality—he expounded on the idea of the mean, for instance. He outlined the idea of both an absolute mean, a method for measuring humans against one another, and a relative mean, a system for disciplining oneself (Nicomachean Ethics II 6–7). I would argue that the commingling of these imperatives results in a normative culture or society—both the upheld fiction of perfection and the systematic self- and Other-surveillance and bodily discipline of normative processes. 5This is true for women particularly, but the stigma of femininity is also applied to men. For instance, Demosthenes was said to have been soft and lame because he spoke with a stutter and had an overly feminine demeanor. Physical disability is mingled with femininity to discredit him—see his exchanges with Meidias in particular and Cicero's investigation of Demosthenes' self-education in De Oratore. The story of Demosthenes that has been popularized holds that through rhetorical practice Demosthenes overcame these "impediments" to become a great orator (see Hawhee; Fredal). The possibility that Demosthenes' difference could have queered his bodily/rhetorical performance in a generative sense is not addressed—indeed, any such transgressive possibility is ignored, despite that fact that other historians convincingly challenge the narratives of overcoming and passing that have been ascribed to Demosthenes (see Martha Rose). 6In contrast, an abstract, flawless (male) body becomes a tool for norming. As (Plato wrote and) Socrates said in the Phaedrus, "[A]ny discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work" (128). 7In the Phaedrus, Plato could be seen to change positions slightly, suggesting that certain forms of more "scientific" and therefore "noble" rhetoric might be acceptable (see White; Ramsay; McAdon; Solmsen for a range of readings). 8I gesture here to the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, foundational in disability studies. Garland-Thomson was one of the first scholars to show that "seeing disability as a representational system engages several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications" ("The New Disability Studies" 19). These premises are also the premises of this essay. 9Hawhee's linkages between mêtis and wrestling, and then between wrestling and rhetoric, provide an interesting image for this form of intelligence: "the corporeality of mêtis" as "struggle" or "the swarming mass of cunning craftiness and flailing limbs" (46, 45). 10In Randy Lee Eickhoff's recent translation of the Odyssey, he points out that Odysseus, considered to be another exemplar of mêtis, uses the name me tis or "no man" as a pun (n4; 404). 11 Mêtis has the practical advantage (and perhaps theoretical disadvantage) of "disappearing into its own action [so that] it has no image of itself" (de Certeau 82). Mêtis cannot be contextualized or schematized because each time it occurs in a context, it shifts that context, and each sequence it is inserted into is distorted (de Certeau 83–84). 12In the classical context, Homer, the mythical seer Tiresias, Oedipus, the great orator Demosthenes, Paris's killer Philoctetes, Croesus's deaf son, and others form our view of disability. In these stories, typically, disability impels narrative through the themes of overcoming, compensation, divine punishment, and charity. 13As I have previously argued, we can also view mythical discourse as, in the words of Susan Jarratt, "capable of containing the beginnings of … public argument and internal debate" (35). Despite the idea, advanced by Eric Havelock in particular, that myth was rote and didactic, we might see myth as being connected to the body, as being highly rhetorical, as being an arena for mêtis—thus my retellings hopefully honor this spirit (see also Slatkin). 14The myth of Metis can be traced as far back as Hesiod (Theogony lines 886–900). 15It is worth noting that these ableist accents on the denunciation of mêtis are also accompanied by a distinct ethnocentrism and even xenophobia. The word metic meant immigrant in ancient Athens. The word is a compound of the words change (meta) and house (oikos), and literally meant someone who changed houses. Many of Plato's attacks on the flexibility, malleability, and the bodily materiality of rhetoric are aimed at the Sophists, metic non-Athenians, and are part and parcel with a larger ideological agenda. 16 Techne was similarly made practical. As Janet Atwill explains in Rhetoric Re-Claimed, techne, when it is allied with mêtis (as it is by the Sophists), "deforms limits into new paths in order to reach—or, better yet, to produce—an alternative destination" (69). Yet we now refer to technai, handbooks full of sets of rules and examples, when we think of techne. William Covino argues that "reactions against the Sophists contributed to the establishment of rhetoric as techne without magic" (20). This distortion is similar to the attempt to ally mêtis only with the forms of knowledge Plato and Aristotle most highly value—to make it precise, a science, as Aristotle does. 17When defining phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle never truly rules out the idea that one would need some form of cunning intelligence to have "prudence," and the version of phronesis he outlines is certainly an abstract form of knowledge. He suggests that to have prudence one must understand particulars as well as universals. Yet the version of phronesis that was later adopted—for instance as one of the Medieval four cardinal virtues—sheds much of this uncertainty and avoids reference to cunning intelligence. 18There also may have been a familial connection between Hephaestus and Medusa—in some myths the two are sexual partners. Their child, Cacus, was said to be a fire-breathing giant. Cacus was said to eat human flesh and nail human heads to his door. Killing him was one of Heracles's twelve labors (Graves, The Greek Myths 158). This link is not made by all scholars, though the story shows up in Ovid and in Virgil's Aeneid. 19Often, Medusa wasseen to symbolize "artful eloquence." For instance, Coluccio Salutati in the fourteenth century and Nancy Vickers in the twenty-first both argue for this reading. As Salutati suggests, the snakes on her head might be seen as "rhetorical ornaments … instruments of wisdom" because snakes are "reported to be the most cunning" (55). In this interpretation Medusa turns an audience to stone not because of her looks but because of her rhetorical power—her audience "so convinced of what they have been persuaded that they may be said to have acquired a stony quality" (56). Vickers goes further, sourcing this connection back to Plato (254). She also argues that Medusa's "stoning" be seen as a rhetorical power, an ability to change the audience's state of mind, accompanied by a somatic effect. Finally, she suggests that Medusa's rhetorical power might represent the freezing of us all before the specter of the feminine—and she asks what we might do to reverse a legacy of neutralization and appropriation of the Other. 20As an example of the ways that myths crucially disagree with one another, we can see that in Homer's version of the story, Medusa comes into the world with her head of snakes. I think such differences reveal quite marked transitions in and contestations of signification. 21Of course it matters very much whether Medusa was raped or not. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin has argued, this rape has often been elided, and responsibility for it shifted away from Poseiden to Athena. She suggests that this shifting of responsibility essentially excuses men's violence toward women and thus silences women further. 22Detienne and Vernant write that mêtis was often symbolized by the octopus. Thus this connection to the octopus of mêtis may not have been coincidental. Certainly the original Medusa myth relied upon a reference to the dangerous, trapping "knot made up of a thousand arms" that the octopus represented and that conveyed a sense of the powerful double-ness and unpredictability of mêtis (38). 23Graves writes that vials of Medusa's blood were widely distributed: The blood had the power both to kill and to cure (Greek Myths 175). There are many contradictory stories about who received the blood, who distributed it, and who used it for good, who for bad (Greek Myths 175). 24The myth may also express a male fear of Medusa's creative power—she is so "procreative" that her children Chrysaor and Pegasus spring from her dead body (Graves, Greek Myths 127). 25I would argue that as teachers, we need to avoid the temptation to "eat" mêtis and wrest control over knowledge away from students. Students' cunning strategies and divergent expressions may threaten us or challenge us, but we cannot believe that mêtis is something we use on students, that we can be the sole tricksters, holding student bodies captive. Nor can we use the brute force of Zeus or Perseus to coopt their power when it threatens us, to subordinate their thinking bodies. 26The French word métis is related to the Spanish word mestizo, both coming from the Latin word mixtus, the past participle of the verb to mix and connoting mixed blood. 27In critical theory the concept of metissage also locates and interrogates the ways that certain forms of knowledge have been relegated to the margins, and thus this concept links usefully to the stories I have been reanimating. Metissage, obviously etymologically linked to mêtis and meaning mixture or miscegenation, has been used as a critical lens through which one might observe issues of identity, resistance, exclusion, and intersectionality. Relying upon metaphors of mixture that are biological and cultural, this concept of metissage both is like and is what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to when she writes about mestiza consciousness. (See Steinberg and Kincheloe; Hardt and Negri; Gruzinski; Glissant.) 28Coatlalopeuh later becomes conflated with the Virgin of Guadalupe after the Spanish Roman Catholic conquest of Mexico. 29Carrie McMaster also suggests that we might learn from Anzaldúa's writing about her own bodily difference—having experienced congenital disease, chronic illness, disability—to "draw non-homogenizing parallels between various embodied identities" ("Negotiating" 103). In Anzaldúa's own words, "[T]hose experiences [with disability] kept me from being a 'normal' person. The way I identify myself subjectively as well as the way I act out there in the world was shaped by my responses to physical and emotional pain" ("Last Words?" 289). From this we can make some suggestions about the epistemological entailments of mestiza knowledge—it comes from unique, never "normal," bodied experiences. The "leap" that should be encouraged, then, is to see such situated knowledge as vital and perhaps even central to human experience. The "abnormal" body is not something given to women symbolically as a form of derogation; it is an engine for understanding and thus has serious rhetorical power.

The Rate My Professors (RMP) online student discourse community shapes and defines current public rhetorics of pedagogy. RMP is a cultural phenomenon indicative of a larger movement in extra-institutional discourse toward ranking and assessing people and products. More important than the postings on RMP, however, or their measurable accuracy, is how RMP reflects the increasingly convergent interests of consumer culture and academic culture, shaping the ways that pedagogy is valued and assessed by students within the public domain. Faculty therefore must consider RMP's effect on public discourse about pedagogy in order to help students understand evaluation as a tool for civic exchange.

Last summer, I wrote a letter to editor of my local newspaper and coauthored a response to George Will's now-infamous assault on college writing instructional Big deal? Yes. And here's why: Like many composition instructors, I've been preoccupied for some time with what S. Michael Halloran once called the need for a revival of public discourse (246) and what 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication called literacies, technologies, responsibilities. My response to these preoccupations has always been passive: I figured that I could best promote responsible practice of public literacies by enhancing my students' awareness of-and thus, I thought, their stake in-public issues. Unsure of whether I was actually accomplishing this, though, I decided to investigate whether there were indeed connections between students' classroom-initiated participation in literate behavior (e.g., writing, reading, and talking about issues) and their self-initiated participation in civic behavior, such as voting and writing letters to editor. To do so, I looked closely at several current issues-type writing textbooks and selected one that appeared to share my goals; I designed an attitudinal survey and a sequence of assignments; and I assembled a file of student writing samples. I'll discuss results of my study in more detail later in this essay, but for now, let me suggest that writing-about-issues texts that I examined (including America Now, one I eventually chose) do not particularly encourage students' participation in world beyond classroom, and may unwittingly repress it. And while this came as a great surprise to me, my students seemed aware of profound difference between writing about issues in class and acting on them (in writing or otherwise) outside of class. For example, in response to some end-of-semester assessment questions about America Now, one young woman, Laura G., wrote, Well, I'm not going to go join [G]reenpeace or storm White House or anything but, yes, reading some of these chapters really did [a]ffect my thinking. . . . Reading these articles caused me to speak out at times when I would have normally remained silent. I don't want to underestimate move from silence to speaking out, but I

Miriam Brody. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 247 pages. Carol J. Singley and S. Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narratives by Women. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. xxvi + 400 pages. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.281 pages. Donovan J. Ochs. Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol, and Ritual in the Greco‐Roman Era. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. xiv + 130 pages. $29.95 cloth. Walter L. Reed. Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvi + 223 pages. Barbara Warnick. The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993. 176 pages. John Frederick Reynolds, ed. Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. xii + 170. $19.95 paper. Edward M. White. Teaching and Assessing Writing. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass Publishers, 1994. xxii + 331 pages. $34.95. Sharon Crowley. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. New York: Macmillan College Publishing Company, 1994. 365 pages. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. xviii + 150 pages.

Over the last two decades, the development of graduate programs in composition has provoked a number of questions: Is this study a genuine discipline? What are its origins, its domain of investigation, its modes of inquiry and methods of evaluation? To some it seems a newcomer to academia even though part of its work reinstates and reorients the written branch of rhetoric, one of the most ancient disciplines of higher education. To others its character is puzzling because its scholarship has a highly multidisciplinary cast. These attitudes manifest themselves in many circumstances. A panel at the last meeting of the Modern Language Association raised questions about criteria for assessing composition research. A recent article in College English by Scott and Castner implied this puzzlement by offering some bibliographic starting places for those wishing to enter the field.' Such questions are normal and appropriate for a developing field, which must define itself. This essay does not attempt to offer definitive answers to these questions but rather some preliminary reflections on the nature of composition studies as a discipline, first delineating some of its distinctive features and then discussing advantages and dangers associated with these features.

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.