Abstract In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux notes that “many compositionists in the seventies and eighties did not find it necessary to claim to be a scientific discipline “(16). I respond to this claim by focusing on the new discourse about writing that emerged in the 1970s in work by Emig, Shaughnessy, Flower & Hayes, and others. Distinguishing between the “formative “ (intellectual) contexts from which this work drew, and the “receptive”; contexts in which it came to valued, used, and resonate, I show that whereas the roots of this work were almost exclusively empirical, their effects in the receptive context, including beyond the academy, were deeply rhetorical.

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