This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration. Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition' s place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a how-to, and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature' s presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals. Winner of three major book awards: The Modern Language Association' s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize The Conference on College Composition and Communication' s Outstanding Book Award The Teachers of Advanced Composition' s W. Ross Winterowd Award

The visual dimension of meaning is widely accepted in technical communication. But theories (and pedagogies) that direct the making of visual meaning are still under development. A guidelines approach, a design decisions approach, and an information/reader model approach are applied as lenses for viewing the marking of meaning on an instructional page. A case study invokes these approaches to describe the visual markers students employ as they write descriptive and instructional text. Although neither group described marked their texts thoroughly, beginning technical writing majors enrolled in a writing class used fewer illustrations and visual markers than technical majors used. The difference in beginning students' performance may be due to prior reading patterns, since the difference is more pronounced in the descriptions than in the instructions. Thus, the paper proposes a longitudinal approach to sensitizing writing majors to visual cues.

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

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

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Teachers are recruited from the technical professions and from advanced composition courses to instruct the new discipline: technical writing. Students in a single class major and work in diverse fields. As a common denominator, organization, research, and writing a major paper are emphasized. Classroom discussion, specialized workshops, and individual conferences are utilized. Quality is the key.

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Imaginative Writing in Advanced Composition: The Report of Workshop No. 14, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 6, No. 3, Workshop and Panel-Discussion Reports of the 1955 Conference on College Comosition and Communication (Oct., 1955), pp. 153-155