An instructional note on foregrounding rhetoric across the curriculum to convey the rigor of professional and technical writing and assist instructors in claiming pedagogical ethos in a course that spans many disciplines.

As we begin a fresh academic year, anticipating new challenges, frustrations, and, we hope, rewards, I find myself thinking of Kenneth Burke’s “unending conversation” (The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: U of California P, 1941, 110–11). In our classrooms we continue that unending conversation in our discipline, engaging with the knowledge built in the past, beginning to build new knowledge.

Reviews of three books: The Profession of English in the Two-Year College reviewed by Edwina Jordan; Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise reviewed by Cathy Buckingham; Designing Writing: A Practical Guide reviewed by Jill Wright.

By focusing on local problems or issues, student writers can craft research essays that exemplify civic engagement, a practice that reaffirms composition tradition from classical rhetoric and the educational philosophy of John Dewey.