Creating a Computer-Supported Writing Facility: A Blueprint for Action, Cynthia L. Selfe Computer Writing Environments: Theory, Research, and Design, Bruce Britton and Shawn M. Glynn Fred Kemp Critical Perspectiveosn Computers and Composition Instruction, Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe Bruce L. Edwards Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl Sharon Crowley Audience Expectations and Teacher Demands, Robert Brooke and John Hendricks Alice M. Gillam The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience, Alice Glarden Brand Robert Brooke Coping with Failure.: The Therapeutic Uses of Rhetoric, David Payne Paul W. Ranieri Critical Thinking: A Semiotic Perspective, Marjorie Siegel and Robert Carey Alice Heim Calderonello Effective Documentation: What We Have Learned from Research,Stephen Doheny-Farina Jack Selzer

To understand the ways that teachers adapt writing instruction to a microcomputer classroom, the researchers observed and recorded activities minute-by-minute in four classes for a full semester of introductory composition. Two experienced teachers each taught two classes: one traditional class and one class that met for half of its time in a microcomputer classroom. This report contrasts their classes, calling attention to (a) the time pressures created by teaching with computers, (b) issues in training students to be proficient at word processing and revising, (c) ways a microcomputer classroom can foster workshop approaches to teaching writing, (d) the need for carefully structured classroom activities, and (e) the importance of teachers sharing with students common values for learning with computers in a group setting.

Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.

In her opening address, Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing, Andrea Lunsford challenged the participants at the 1989 CCCC to tell the story of the teaching of writing in multiple voices which encourage differences and diversity. Cautioning against definition by others, particularly by those who would describe writing instruction in reductive terms or define writing instructors in limiting ways, Lunsford warned those present that we could be composed in the discourses . . . of others (75). For those of us teaching in two-year colleges, Lunsford's descriptions of historical precedents of marginalized voices writing themselves into being were particularly evocative. Her imperative for composition studies to remain inclusive, interdisciplinary, collaborative, nonhierarchical, and dialogic was a further articulation of the CCCC 1989 theme of empowerment and of interdependence. Furthermore, the 1990 CCCC theme, community through diversity, includes a strand on English in the two-year college. This focus recognizes the significance of teaching writing in two-year colleges and should provide the opportunity for participants to explore and articulate the strength in diversity among two-year institutions of higher education. Indeed, two-year schools are the largest single sector of higher education in the United States, with approximately one half of all students taking composition in two-year colleges (Facts 3). These 1,224 accredited schools serve more than five-million credit students, and many of those students transfer to four-year schools (AACJC Commission vii). The numbers of students taking composition in community colleges alone indicate the significance of community-college English departments (Raines 29). Yet no major study has been published since the 1965 NCTE and CCCC report, English in the TwoYear College. A follow-up to this report could be a critical contribution to an evolving text on the teaching of writing. In fact, the Association of Depart-

In just about half of a colleague's teaching evaluations (twelve of twenty-six evaluations) from two first-year composition and introduction to literature sections, she read objections to her feminist stance, especially her discussions of feminism and pedagogy. Most of the objections came from students who insisted that the classroom ought to be an ideologically neutral space free from the instructor's interests and concerns. The following samples, copied verbatim, suggest the drift of the students' complaints:

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

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

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This article discusses the recommendations made by compositionists to import the findings of linguistics into composition instruction during the middle years of the twentieth century. The article classifies these recommendations for the uses of linguistics into three kinds: (1) improvement of instruction in grammar and usage; (2) enhancement of students' syntactic and stylistic repertoires; and (3) an aid to invention. Utilizing this history, the article argues that while linguistics can offer teachers of composition some assistance in matters that are proper to linguistic investigation and analysis, the noncontextual orientation of modern linguistics renders it insufficient as a comprehensive source of theoretical or practical assistance in composition instruction.

learning, one that will bring about changes in teaching as well as in student writing. We also need to establish quite clearly that WAC programs certainly do not exclude examinations and more coursework in writing as a means of establishing proficiency, but that WAC is not to be identified solely with writing proficiency. Finally, there is an issue not dealt with directly by my survey, but which has come up in anecdotal comments at the meetings of the National Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs and which deserves further study-the matter of change and faculty resistance to it. The idea and the practice of writing to learn goes against the predominant paradigm of education in the university, which valorizes the teacher-centered lecture class. In this paradigm, students are passive rather than active learners; they learn from the expert, not from each other. WAC programs challenge this notion of education, and those of us involved in such programs like to point to the successes we have had in changing faculty attitudes towards writing and learning (See Robert Weiss and Michael Peich, Attitude Change in a Cross-Disciplinary Writing Program, CCC 31 [Feb. 1980): 33-41). But changing attitudes and changing actual classroom practice may be two different things. Faculty resistance to change can be profound, as Deborah Swanson-Owens found in Identifying Natural Sources of Resistance (Research in the Teaching of English 20 [Feb. 1986): 69-97). Such resistance could, over a number of years, gradually wear away even the most firmly established institutional program. But I do not want to end on a negative note. While we need to be aware of the dangers that face the WAC movement in general and second-stage programs in particular, the survey results indicate cause for some cautious celebration. WAC as a movement is strong and is continuing to grow. It is up to all of us involved in such programs to be alert to the dangers, but also to be pleased that we have come this far.

Edward M. White, Developing Successful College Writing Programs. Foreword by Richard Lloyd‐Jones. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 1989. xxii + 232 pages. Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Composition as a Human Science: Contributions to the Self‐Understanding of a Discipline. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xiii + 268 pages. Louise Z. Smith, ed., Audits of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of Ann E. Berthoff. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1988. Foreword by Paulo Freire. xv + 264 pages. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrlda, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 252 pages. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988. xi + 508 pages.

Recent studies indicate that scientific research is part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. This article argues that since invention in scientific research is discovery of the unknown of the scientific community and invention in writing is discovery of ideas within existing knowledge, scientific research cannot be part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. Researchers should be aware that inventional heuristics introduced in freshman composition courses, which serve to discover ideas within existing knowledge, are not always applicable in real-life situations where scientific writing occurs, because the content of discourse is sometimes given in these situations.

with their intentions, however absent these intentions seem to us at first. In order to respond to these intentions we may ask our students to be responsible for their development, to monitor and record this development. We may lead them into an internal struggle, in support of which our advice is only marginally significant. Our soundtrack is defined by a constant deferral to their powers of production. And victory over the ape will be won with the sound of many voices, and the strength of one's will to hear the silence.

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 a style that combines scholarly care with remarkable readability, North examines the development of the field of composition in a way it has not been examined before. Rather than focusing on what people claim to know about teaching writing, he concerns himself primarily with how they claim to know it. Eight groups of knowledge-makers are treated in separate chapters: Practitioners, Historians, Philosophers, Critics, Experimentalists, Clinicians, Formalists, and Ethnographers. Each of these chapters orients the reader by tracing the mode's first uses in the field and listing its best known and most important adherents; then goes on to explain how the mode of inquiry works, illustrating key points with painstaking analysis of well-known studies. In his final three chapters, North turns from these individual modes to consider the field as a whole: How have these different ways of making knowledge come together? What is Composition now, and what is it likely to become?

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In their freshman year in college, Puerto Rican students take composition courses in both Spanish and English. Although the rhetorical structure of the final product, the composition, may respond to national writing styles in the two languages, studies show the composition process to be similar. Writing instructors in either language find similar problems in student compositions, regardless of the language code used. One of the difficulties students have in both languages is blocking, or apprehension about writing. Although some aspects of the composition process may be universal, we assumed that in bilingual writers the source of writing block depended on the language used. This article presents the results of a questionnaire designed to determine the sources of bilingual students' apprehension in writing by considering three groups of bilingual writers: graduate students in English, freshman English composition students, and freshman Spanish composition students. The results suggest some insights on the nature of blocking in a native language (Spanish) and a second language (English), which may then lead to ways of helping bilingual students to overcome blocking.

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In the new world of writing across the curriculum, English departments are still trying to find their role. They have been in charge of writing instruction for so long that they often feel that they should institute, or at least lead, writingacross-the-curriculum programs. But I want to argue that the English department should have no special role in writing across the curriculum-no unique leadership role and no exclusive classes to teach-not even freshman composition. Instead, a writing-across-the-curriculum program should be designed, administered, and taught equally by all departments. True writing across the curriculum should be based on dialogue among all the departments, and, in this dialogue, the English department should be only one of the voices.

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

(especially the reading of literature) has often been justified in the writing classroom because reading gives students something to imitate (see, for example, Miller's Composition and Decomposition and Comley and Scholes's Literature, Composition, and the Structure of English). The text, it is argued, provides a model of effective writing which students can copy, and the process of reading critically, practiced on literature, can become a model of how writers should behave in reading their own work. is thus seen as useful because it models both forms and processes for writers to imitate. But is this kind of imitation how writers really learn to write? Or does imitation in learning actually work some other way? In this article, I'll suggest an alternative understanding of imitation and reading in the writing classroom, and I'll exemplify this alternative using material from a semester-long participant-observation study of a freshman Composition and Reading course. The alternative runs as follows: when a student (or any writer) successfully learns something about writing by imitation, it is by imitating another person, and not a text or a process. Writers learn to write by imitating other writers, by trying to act like writers they respect. The forms, the processes, the texts

Most Freshman English programs conceive of themselves as providing some form of introduction to university level discourse. The expectation is that students will leave English I (or whatever its designation) with the requisite reading and writing skills to enter a new discourse community, the world of the academy. Just what that means, however, is invariably in contention. Even within our own discipline, the acts of reading and writing have become the subject of much controversy. A recent review in College English gives some indication of one of the current divisions within the profession about exactly what we teach people when we teach them to read: Despite the recent wrangle and heated debates among the various camps of literary criticism, there are quite a few of us-most,

The theory that reading is composing-an open-ended, investigative, and active process-is hardly new. Over the past few years, writing teachers have turned their attention to reading and extended the useful term to describe not only the recursive movement among the pre-writing, drafting, and revising stages of writing, but also the construction of meaning through reading. The theories they have drawn on range from the work of reading researchers like Harry Singer, Frank Smith, and Charles Cooper and Anthony Petrosky to critical theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt and Roland Barthes.' While it is difficult to generalize about such wide-ranging work, a quick review of the literature of constructive reading shows agreement on one point: the power of conventions, or schemata, to shape our understanding of a text. But the language for naming this phenomenon is divergent. Reading researchers describe the process of composing meaning in apparently neutral terms-comprehending, reading for meaning, learning from text-and some separate a literal from an interpretive level of reading,2 using Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy (89-90), influential since the 1950s. Critical theorists, on the other hand, show that all composed meanings are interpretations; this is the view we want to illustrate as we describe, theoretically and practically, a sequence of writing assignments used to encourage interpretation in our introductory composition classes. In our view, the same questions asked by critical theory-what is reading, what is the status of a text, how do we clarify approaches to interpretation-are questions to be asked by composition teachers, whose job is to teach students how to compose readings of texts, literary and non-literary, written and nonwritten. With this aim in mind, we agreed to define interpretation as a process of both reading and writing. We discarded conventional injunctions to look at the words, as if simply gazing at words on the page would force them into meaning. We insisted instead that good readers must understand the assumptions that determine what they see, that good writers do not wait for meaning to take

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

James Sledd, Sally Reagan, Reginald D. Clarke, A Comment on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge" and "A Polemical History of Freshman Composition in Our Time", College English, Vol. 49, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 585-593

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

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The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

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I am coming on my twentieth year of teaching composition to college freshmen, and my fifteenth administering a composition program. These anniversaries incite me to think about the circles we who teach writing have perambulated in that time-to count the ways we have, for worse and better, changed how we shape composition programs, how we manage those programs, and how we teach the courses in them. From the fifties through my days as a student and then as a new teacher, rhetoric-meaning the analysis and presentation of arguments-dominated college composition programs. But at many colleges then, the English requirement included a literature survey, and composition programs often and awkwardly stirred rhetoric and literature in one pot. For example, research papers were on literary topics, an approach that encouraged publishers to produce hundreds of excellent casebooks, all recycled long ago. The rhetorical lion and literary lamb did not get on amicably, however. They tussled. The lamb often turned wolfish. The experiential programs of the early seventies-with their emphasis on narration and description, on journal writing, on films and visual arts as aids to invention-were a victory for the literateurs, and their last hour. For then came graduate programs in composition, and the gospel of process was heard in the land. Rhetoric-now meaning heuristic strategies-ascended. Literature became, and has remained, a negligible part of most composition programs. And today, as the slogan Writing Across the Curriculum is blazoned on textbook covers and eagerly mouthed by deans who see a way to save a buck, literaturemeaning the study of fiction, drama, and perhaps even (though that's radical) poetry for their own sweet sakes-dwindles to a thin shade in freshman writing

According to a recent survey, top and mid-level managers admit that one of the four main difficulties that beset them in their writing is to organize content. Yet another survey reports that of weaknesses found by college teachers of composition in freshman writing, inability to organize essays falls sixteenth, after, for instance, failure to proofread and over-use of the passive. 1 This gap between what students will need to be able to do on the job and what teachers think students need appears even more serious when one looks at how the teachers worded this sixteenth weakness: Students are aware of only one organizational pattern-the five-paragraph theme. Five paragraphs, of course, are not necessarily a pattern of organization at all, but rather a stylistic uniform. As we shall see, college freshmen, even writing impromptu on the second day of class, actually generate a variety of good organizational patterns. The implication is that writing teachers do not distinguish extended patterns in student writing very readily. This is an ungenerous conclusion, though later I will offer more support for it, and I hasten to say that college students often make their organization hard to see. Researchers, too, have not helped teachers here, and not one piece of research can be found even naming the sorts of organization that students do use for whole essays. Basic information seems called for. Such, at least, is all my essay here pretends to offer. First I will describe a classification of organizational patterns for whole essays and a method by which both teachers and researchers may use it to analyze student essays. Then I will report the results of such an analysis applied to a controlled study of underclass writing. Since this study distinguishes freshman, sophomore, junior, and competent adult levels of achievement, I can conclude with recommendations for teachers that are not wholly intuitive.

To establish the issues that must be considered by evaluators of college writing programs, Witte and Faigley review major evaluation studies conducted at the University of Northern Iowa, the University of California San Diego, Miami University, and the University of Texas.For each study the authors devise a series of questions that probe every aspect of theory, pedagogy, and research: What do we presently know? What assumptions are we making and how do those assumptions limit our knowledge? Are those limitations necessary or desirable? What do we still need to know?Such questions demand much of program evaluators, who also must face additional difficult questions as they evaluate a writing program. Do the instructors conducting the writing classes share common assumptions that are reflected in their assignments, evaluative procedures, teaching procedures, and course content? How stable will the program prove to be over time? Will the writing program have a lasting effect? Do students leave the program with increased confidence in their ability to write?As Witte and Faigley urge program evaluators to pose these questions, they also bring to the problem a new comprehensive conceptual framework that both necessitates such queries and provides an opportunity to answer them.

In the summer of 1936, George Orwell sat at his desk in his cottage in Wallington, Near Baldock, Herfordshire. with birds chattering or squabbling in the rafters overhead, he began to write an essay about shooting an elephant, an essay which would become remarkably popular. (See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life [London: Secker and Warburg, 19801, p. 200.) Most remarkable of all, even for the author of 1984, Orwell foresaw with incredible clarity my 1980 freshman composition class: black, Chicago bornand-raised Paula Smith; Massey-Ferguson-seed-cap-wearing Dale Harvey; all A's, small-town (Sheldon) Kevin Youngers, and all the others. With at least my Iowans in mind Orwell wrote, And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a (Shooting an Elephant, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus [New York: Harcourt, 19681, I, 239). Of course the notion that Orwell included a cow comparison for farm-oriented Dale and Kevin is absurd. But nearly all the editors of the composition textbooks we call readers imply that Orwell (and other authors) wrote specifically for college students or generally for anyone ever able to read English. Actually Orwell's concern about a specific audience began before my students were born. In a May 27, 1936 response to a query from Michael Lehmann, editor of New Writing, Orwell writes:

Research and theory in composition is divided regarding the role of audience awareness more generally, social cognition in writing. One position holds that social cognition is central to all composing processes, though the nature of social cognitive activity differs depending on such factors as the function of discourse (e.g., expository or persuasive) and the determinateness of the audience (e.g., a known individual or a generalized other). Another position, in contrast, regards social cognition as coming into play only in manifestly persuasive writing; for most school and literary uses of writing, writers are guided more by genre conventions than by anticipating audience responses. Thirtyfive college freshmen of heterogenous writing abilities wrote a typical academic essay and also a persuasive appeal directed toward a specific readership. They also completed a battery of four social cognitive assessments. Results indicated that the social cognitive assessments predicted 26 percent of the variance in judged quality of the persuasive writings. The most powerful single predictor was the degree to which participants were able to recognize and reconcile divergent traits in others. Quality ratings of the expository essays were more adequately predicted by composition length, though multiple regression indicated an additional contribution attributable to social cognitive ability. Results tend to confirm the position that social cognition is most important in persuasive writing, but do not support a strong disclaimer of the role of audience awareness in nonsuasive discourse. The notion of audience awareness commands a central position in composition theory, research, and instruction. (See recent reviews by Ede, 1984; Kroll, 1984; Rubin, 1984b). Proficient writers attend to the broad rhetorical dimensions including audience of their writing task, while nonproficient writers show a compulsive attention to matters of surface correctness (Flower & Hayes, 1980; Perl, 1979. While current research shows some of the ways in which good writers attend to matters of audience through specific discourse features (Rafoth, 1985; Rubin & Pliche, 1979), there is conThis research was supported by a grant from the University of Cieorgia Research Foundation to the first author. The authors express appreciation to John O'Looney for assistance in data analysis. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1986