Many researchers in composition instruction assume that free and journal writing exclusively and necessarily produce “meaningful” writing. This is not substantiated in their limited case study research, or in the research of anyone else. We need to establish a precise definition of “meaningful” writing, determine its place in the curriculum, and determine better means of designing instruction that produces writing that is both meaningful and of high quality. The meta-analysis of Hillocks (1984) indicates that structured composition assignments produce better writing than nondirectional writing experiences. This article explores the reasons for this, and establishes hypotheses based on these reasons for developing a theory of composition instruction. The hypotheses support a need for structured instruction, rather than student-generated direction.

Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,

I. GROWING UP. Elizabeth Wong, The Struggle to Be an All American Girl. Gary Soto, The Jacket. Maya Angelou, Graduation. Harry Mark Petrakis, Barba Nikos. Maxine Hong Kingston, Girlhood Among Ghosts. Maria Laurino, Scents. Grace Paley, The Loudest Voice. Lindsy Van Gelder, The Importance of Being Eleven: Carol Gilligan Takes on Adolescence. Vendela Vida, Bikinis and Tiaras: Quinceaneras. Countee Cullen, Incident. II. EDUCATION. Sun Park, Don't Expect Me to Be Perfect. Daniel Meier, One Man's Kids. Sherman Alexie, Indian Education. Mike Rose, I Just Wanna Be Average. Marcus Marby, Living in Two Worlds. Martin Espada, Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper. III. FAMILIES. Dan Savage, Role Reversal. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Wars. Jane Howard, Families. Stephanie Coontz, Where Are the Good Old Days? Ruth Breen, Choosing a Mate. Alfred Kazin, The Kitchen. Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz. IV. DEFINING OURSELVESS. Gish Jen, An Ethnic Trump. Robin D.G. Kelly, The People in Me. Roxane Famanfarmaian, The Double Helix. Tony Morrison, A Slow Walk of Trees. Nicolette Toussaint, Hearing the Sweetest Songs. Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria. Malcolm X, Hair. Nell Bernstein, Goin' Gansta, Choosin' Cholita: Teens Today Claim a Racial Identity. Wendy Rose, Three Thousand Dollar Death Song. V. AMERICAN ENCOUNTERS. Bette Bao Lord, Walking in Lucky Shoes. Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, What Is an American? Recapture the Flag: 34 Reasons to Love America. Brent Staples, Night Walker. Piri Thomas, Alien Turf. Walter White, I Learn What I Am. Malcolm Gladwell, Black Like Them. Jeannne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Arrival at Manzanar. Dwight Okita, In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers. VI. CHANGING PLACES. Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways of Belonging in America. Anton Shammas, Amerka, Amerka: A Palestinian Abroad in the Land of the Free. Mark Salzman, Teacher Mark. John David Morley, Living in a Japanese Home. Laura Bohannan, Shakespeare in the Bush. George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant. Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal. Gloria Anzaldua, To Live in the Borderlands Means You. VII. HOW WE LIVE. Geraldine Brooks, Unplugged. Pico Iyer, Home Is Every Place. Robert Levine, Tempo, The Speed of Life. Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving. Barbara Brandt, Less Is More: A Call for Shorter Work Hours. Michael Pollan, Town-Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation. Aurora Levins Morales, Class Poem. VIII. COMMUNICATING. Gloria Naylor, The Meaning of a Word. Amy Tan, Mother Tongue. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation. Ian Buruma, The Road to Babel. Jack G. Sheehan, The Media's Image of Arabs. Alexis Bloom, Switched on Bhutan. Jasua Gameson, Do Ask, Do Tell. Lisel Mueller, Why We Tell Stories. Credits. Author/Title Index.

Teaching students writing, reading, and thinking across the curriculum requires the acceptance of a premise, relatively simple on its face, but imbued with substantial promise for reinventing the formidable tradition of making writing the central cog of the intellectual machinery that facilitates learning. The premise is that all teachers in all disciplines should be actively involved in students' writing, reading, and thinking and should not function as mere judges and graders of purportedly finished writings. I expect to be encouraged by the administration of my college to require more writing, revision, and rewriting in courses that I teach in the future, and to expand the audiences for written work to include the class, the writing laboratory, professors in collaborative teaching arrangements, and others. The college will be participating in one of the national writing programs, and we must also assist our students in completing the writing requirements of the testing program that is mandated for all institutions in the state system of higher education. Recognizing that writing is a process and a mode for also helps students to read with more understanding of the structure of language. Writing and reading are connected, interactive processes requiring students to cooperate in the act of learning. Our students need instruction and practice for reading in their subjects. Reading assignments need to go beyond the text to include materials that offer balance, put the subject into perspective, and place it in the context of real-world points of reference for our students. Discipline-based reading helps students to acquire the learning and expected characteristic of the field. Reading also adds to the value of the writing within the subject or discipline by defining and illuminating basic practices, procedures, and values of the field. Reading and related writing in chemistry and other scientific areas are also forms of social behavior that we must teach if students are to be successful thinkers and scholars in the discipline. That is not revolutionary, it is merely practical. I invite my colleagues in the hard sciences to join the enterprise and re-

This study investigated the relationships among features of textual cohesion, as identified by Halliday and Hasan (1976), and primarytrait assessments of writing quality and coherence, with manuscript length held statistically constant. A random sample of 493 persuasive papers written by 17-year-olds during the 1978-79 National Assessment of Educational Progress writing evaluation were analyzed. The results of the analyses indicate that general coherence is an important element of writing quality and that the lexical cohesive features of synonym, hyponym, and collocation are important elements of writing quality and general coherence in manuscripts of the same length. When Alexander Bain (1867) first categorized prose discourse into four discourse modes, he stipulated that quality in each mode consisted of the elements of unity, mass (later known as emphasis), and coherence. Conners (1981) notes that Bain's ideas greatly influenced composition instruction in this country until 1950 but have waned since then, giving way to conceptualizations of written discourse that place increased emphasis on the contexts for writing (e.g., Kinneavy, 1971) and the processes that writers use to produce writing within varying contexts (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1980). Clearly, these emphases now permeate all levels of practice and theory. Yet Bain's notion of coherence still holds sway, as Bamberg (1983) points out: Coherence is generally accepted as a 'sine qua non' in written discourse. Oddly, little research has been conducted to determine the relationship between writing quality and coherence, an important relationship because coherence is often used to identify the strengths and weaknesses in student writing. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 1980a) hypothesized that the apparent drop in the writing abilities of 13and 17-year-olds between the first national writing assessment (196970) and the second (1974-75) was due in part to a drop in the number of coherent paragraphs. However, at that time NAEP had no way of empirically determining whether this assertion was accurate. In an effort to determine if coherence in student writing was indeed declining, NAEP (1980a) constructed a primary-trait coherence measure (referred to as a cohesion measure by NAEP) for use in the third national writing assessment (1978-79). Scores on this measure were shown to have the same degree of reliability as scores on primary-trait measures of writing quality. What differed was the focus of the assessment. The primary-trait Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

Some of the attempts to establish what standards can define acceptable writing have resulted in the development of grading scales of one sort or another. The controversy about using grading scales to evaluate written composition has received much attention in research and in theory over the past 50 years, but the results of a survey of 600 members of the College Section of National Council of Teachers of English revealed that in the spring of 1984 only 45 or 11.6% of the 386 respondents actually used scales in their evaluations of freshman composition. The theoretical interest in these scales is apparently not matched by their use by teachers of freshman composition.

Halpern and Liggett provide a close look at several of the new communication systems, present a model of field research through which one of the new technologies is closely examined, and draw conclusions that lead to specific changes in emphasis in the teaching of They describe instructional units that introduce the new technologies in college writing classes and the results of classroom experiments in which these units were tested. Finally they define additional research questions about the new technologies and timely approaches for answering them. They highlight the role of long-term and short-term memory, show how the choice of a composing medium influences the writing process, and discuss critical differences between speaking and writing.

Preview this article: A Freshman Writing Course in Parallel with a Science Course, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/36/2/collegecompositioncommunication11765-1.gif

Preview this article: Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/36/1/collegecompositioncommunication11779-1.gif

Up until the publication of Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric in 1866, most American college textbook rhetorics were organized around belletristic discourse classifications; that is, they divided up the subject of writing into established literary forms such as orations, history, romance, treatises, sermons, and the like. Bain's textbook brought about what we now, thanks to Thomas Kuhn, refer to as a paradigm shift, sweeping away these belletristic schemes and substituting five forms-Description, Narration, Exposition, Persuasion, and Poetry-that, with the exception of Poetry, have survived up to the present in Freshman Composition and are known in the trade as the Modes of Discourse. 1 In recent years, however, another paradigm shift has been taking place, and Bain is now often held responsible for the impoverishment of rhetoric in the late nineteenth century.2 Regrettably, in the campaign to undo the damage he did, little attention has been paid to his intellectual milieu or to the question of why he did what he did, with the result that the true historical importance of the modes has been obscured. The most noteworthy feature of Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric-and the reason perhaps for its popularity among his contemporaries-may be its reliance upon the scientific thought of the day. During the previous century in Bain's native Scotland, Adam Smith, George Campbell, Hugh Blair and Joseph Priestley had sought to redefine the basic aims of rhetoric, largely in an effort to accommodate the increasingly prestigious natural sciences. As Wilbur Samuel Howell has argued, the classical rhetorical systems offered little guidance to the scientist in presenting his discoveries to the learned community and to the public at large: they conceived of persuasion as an appeal to commonplaces rather than facts, they depended for methods of proof on the logic of deduction rather than induction, they encouraged the use of ornamental figurative devices rather than plain statements, and in general they were designed for popular exhortation rather than for disseminating fresh knowledge.3 In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke points the way to-

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

Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).

In 1980-1981, a new requirement of a junior course in went into force at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. The course was created by the University to ensure that future UM graduates would be more literate and more articulate than recent graduates. The staff of the new course chose to meet the University's goal by giving the course a strong technical writing or professional writing emphasis. The course is taught (with English Department supervision) by professors from every division of the University, and by professionals in many fields (from law to veterinary medicine) from the Washington, D.C. area. Students write papers using subject matter from their intended professions, and they are graded on their ability to make that subject matter clear to students (semi-professionals) in other disciplines. This new junior course has led those of us who teach the freshman course to seriously reconsider what we are teaching. Since our course has shifted from independent to sequential status, we naturally feel some anxiety about possible new restrictions, but we also see the change as an opportunity to think through, more systematically, some crucial issues-what to teach, where to begin and end, and what theories should be guiding our discussion and analysis. We have decided that setting limits on content in the freshman course on the grounds that what we teach might be repeated in the later course would be counter-productive. Students, especially at the college level, should be tested, prodded, and stretched to their limits. Moreover, we-and the students-ought to be able to see a second course not as repetition, but as welcome practice. William Irmscher has reminded us (in Teaching Expository Writing) that better is largely a matter of better-educated intuition, and that better-educated intuition comes from repeated practice in reading and writing. We all know studies like the Dartmouth study reported by Albert Kitzhaber in Themes, Theories, and Therapy (p. 109), which show that

Preview this article: Freshman Composition-Junior Composition: Does Co-ordination Mean Sub-ordination?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/35/2/collegecompositionandcommunication14884-1.gif

Our advanced degrees in English did not train us for all these roles, and many of us enroll in courses and seminars in everything from grant writing to computer literacy in an attempt to make up for what we have missed.But there is one important

Preview this article: Computers and Composition Instruction: An Update, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/45/8/collegeenglish13594-1.gif

Preview this article: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Teaching College Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/45/8/collegeenglish13596-1.gif

In Fall Semester, 1981, randomly selected students taking freshman composition at Colorado State University wrote essays using word-processing equipment and a computer programmed with DICTION, SUGGEST, STYLE, and SPELL, programs developed by Bell Laboratories. Studies at Bell Laboratories have shown that technical writers using these programs not only edit more thoroughly but also learn to edit on their own. This study tests for similar improvement in college writing and editing skills and also measures effects of computer assistance on attitudes toward writing. Our tests suggest that textual analysis with computers intrigues college writers and speeds learning of editing skills by offering immediate, reliable, and consistent attention to surface features of their prose. Most freshmen writers have had little practice editing their own written work so little that wordy expressions, faulty diction, and spelling errors increasingly mar even their most careful composition. Bedeviled by these and other problems of young writers, we began exploring ways of using word-processing technology and computers to help students analyze and edit their own writing before handing it in for marking. While we were preparing a computerized diction list, reports reached us about Bell Laboratories' extraordinary editing software Writer's Workbench (Macdonald, 1980; Cherry, 1981, 1982; Cherry & Vesterman, 1981; Frase, et al., 1981; Macdonald, et al., 1982). Discovering our parallel interests, Colorado State University and Bell Laboratories began discussions leading to a research exchange permitting CSU to test and adapt Writer's Workbench for teaching composition. During these negotiations, CSU leased the three Workbench programs then available. In Fall Semester, 1981, randomly selected students taking freshman composition wrote essays using word-processing equipment and a computer programmed with DICTION, SUGGEST, and STYLE. Also included in the test was SPELL, Bell Laboratories' spelling checker distributed with the computer we used for the experiment. Studies at Bell Laboratories (Gingrich, et al., 1981) have shown that technical writers using Writer's Workbench not only edit more thoroughly but also learn to edit on their own. What might the effect be on college writers? Few would doubt the value of students correcting their own spellResearch in the Teaching of English, Vol. 17, No. 3, October 1983

Preview this article: An Instrument for Reporting Composition Course and Teacher Effectiveness in College Writing Programs, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/17/3/researchintheteachingofenglish15705-1.gif

Preview this article: Toward Determining a Minimal Competency Entrance Examination for Freshman Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/17/3/researchintheteachingofenglish15706-1.gif

Native and international science, engineering, and humanities graduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington experience real-world communication situations in an interdisciplinary, projected-oriented technical communication course team-taught by a technical writer and a mechanical engineer. The course simulates the writing requirements of industry and helps students prepare theses and dissertations. A special feature for international students is a supplementary weekly laboratory session devoted to intensive review of writing fundamentals. The course, which has been offered three times since 1976 with enrollments of eleven, five, and nine students, has been received well by science and engineering students for whom it was initially designed and by humanities students who now also enroll. Even though in some cases the progress that a foreign student makes in one semester is limited, all students have found the course of great benefit. The interdisciplinary team approach is an effective way of teaching graduate-level technical communication, providing engineers an opportunity to learn to express ideas to humanists and providing humanists an opportunity to learn to communicate effectively with engineers and scientists.

Rhetoric Revalued Brian Vickers, Editor. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. 1982. The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages. David L. Wagner, Editor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Philosophical Style: An Anthology About the Writing and Reading of Philosophy. Berel Lang. Editor, Chicago: Nelson‐Hall, 1980. Pp. xiii + 546. The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief. By Clayton Koelb. Ithaca. Cornell University Press, 1984, 240 pp. Evaluating College Writing Programs. By Stephen P. Witte and Lester Faigley. Published for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Carbondale and Edwardsville. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983

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

Preview this article: Sentence Structure in Academic Prose and Its Implications for College Writing Teachers, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/16/3/researchintheteachingofenglish15734-1.gif

Preview this article: Learn & Shop: Teaching Composition in Shopping Centers, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/33/3/collegecompositionandcommunication15841-1.gif

Preview this article: Freshman English Ten Years After: Writing in the World, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/33/3/collegecompositionandcommunication15843-1.gif

Preview this article: Libraries and Librarians as Depicted in Freshman English Textbooks, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/44/5/collegeenglish13703-1.gif

Preview this article: Freshman English: In Whose Service?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/44/5/collegeenglish13699-1.gif

Preview this article: Applications of the Wilkinson Model of Writing Maturity to College Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/33/2/collegecompositionandcommunication15856-1.gif

Preview this article: With Reason and Less Pain: Preparing High-School Students for Freshman Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/44/4/collegeenglish13715-1.gif

Preface 1. THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING PERSPECTIVES Richard Fulkerson: Four Philosophies of Composition James Berlin: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class Edward P.J. Corbett: Rhetoric, the Enabling Discipline Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner: The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy TEACHERS Peter Elbow: Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process Donald M. Murray: The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference Lad Tobin: Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher's Role in the Writing Class Dan Morgan: Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing STUDENTS Mina P. Shaughnessy: Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing Vivian Zamel: Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum Todd Taylor: The Persistence of Difference in Networked Classrooms: Non-Negotiable Difference and the African American Student Body LOCATIONS Hephzibah Roskelly: The Risky Business of Group Work Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe: The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class Muriel Harris: Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors APPROACHES Min-Zhan Lu: Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence Mariolina Salvatori: Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition Gary Tate: A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition Carolyn Matalene: Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues 2. THE TEACHING OF WRITING ASSIGNING Mike Rose: Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal David Peck, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Mike Rose: A Comment and Response on Remedial Writing Courses Richard L. Larson: The Research Paper in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor: Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types Catherine E. Lamb: Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition RESPONDING AND ASSESSING Brooke K. Horvath: The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views David Bartholomae: The Study of Error Jerry Farber: Learning How to Teach: A Progress Report COMPOSING AND REVISING Nancy Sommers: Between the Drafts James A. Reither: Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process David Bleich: Collaboration and the Pedagogy of Disclosure AUDIENCES Douglas B. Park: The Meanings of Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy Peter Elbow: Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience STYLES Robert J. Connors: Static Abstractions and Composition Winston Weathers: Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy Elizabeth D. Rankin: Revitalizing Style: Toward a New Theory and Pedagogy Richard Ohmann: Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language

College writing courses offer more practical guidance than ever, but they still fall short of business-and-industry needs. Missing in the main are writing mechanics tailored for communicating the who, whats, and whys involved in running an organization. A writing course aimed at reducing, if not closing, that gap has been in existance for some time now. Dealing with writing to prescribe, persuade or report, it is structured around the proper selection and arrangement of both what must be stated and the words with which to state it, and then stating it with reader ease. This article details the components within that structure.

Sidney Greenbaum, John Taylor, The Recognition of Usage Errors by Instructors of Freshman Composition, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 2, Language Studies and Composing (May, 1981), pp. 169-174

BECAUSE THE FRESHMAN COMPOSITION CLASS is usually the students' first introduction to college, what better place to challenge sexist reading, writing, and thinking? What better place to help students understand the relationship between language and thought? Instead of grammar-book rules that instruct students to avoid the masculine pronoun when gender is unclear, classroom activities can encourage students actively to explore their sexist values and draw their own conclusions. These activities should attack sexism at its roots by examining the cultural conditioning which both encourages faulty thinking and limits options for women and men. At the same time, through an examination of sexism, teachers can get at some of the students' persistent writing difficulties, such as generating essay topics, supporting topic sentences with sufficient proof, and selecting appropriate words and tone. Even though students have read and written for the better part of their lives, they seem unaware of the power of language to condition minds. They do not recognize that the assumption that males hold all prestigious positions lies behind the business correspondence salutation of Dear Sir. Nor can they identify the cultural bias toward single women reinforced by the titles Mr., Mrs., and Miss. If confronted directly with this sexism, many students acquiesce by using Ms. and by revising all he pronouns to read he/she. Nonetheless, they view such practices as arbitrary, senseless, and bothersome. A study of the causes and effects of sexist language can be integrated with and grow naturally from existing course structures and objectives. The three activities which follow are designed to explore the implications of sexism while building reading and writing skills. The first comprises word lists that develop awareness of sexist language used in literature and in students' own writings, while the second explores fairy tales that, like other literature, transmit sex role stereotypes and biases. The third considers research topics related to the two preceding activities. These three activities can be arranged in several sequences to develop writing objectives. For example, a teacher who views writing as a discovery process might use the following sequence: (1) students look at the data in the Hemingway passage from differing viewpoints, manipulate the data, and form tentative hypotheses; (2) students, in a

In a now-famous critique, Richard Ohmann took composition textbook authors to task for envisioning student writing ahistorically and for administering rather than liberating the composing process (Freshman Composition and Administered Thought, in English in America [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976], pp. 133-171). A few years earlier, Richard Lanham had gleefully ripped into the condescension and vague precepts in the writing texts that lined his shelf (Style: An Anti-Textbook [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974]).1 Their criticism implied that better textbooks could be written. But I have come to believe that even if ahistoricity, coddling, and fingerwagging disappeared from composition texts, they would still be an ineffective way to teach writing. They are, by nature, static and insular approaches to a dynamic and highly context-oriented process, and thus are doomed to the realm of the Moderately Useful. Let me explain further by tracing the steps that led me to my conclusion.

That the English language is male-oriented can scarcely be denied. For centuries the human race has been called man, the individual he, everyone himself-with the constant reassurance that of course man, he, his, him, and himself are generic terms which include women as well as men. But do they? Although the sentence Every student should bring his book to class does not necessarily evoke mental picture of thirty uniformed boys, I believe that such sentences subtly reinforce the sex role stereotype that most students (writers, readers, professors, doctors, executives, individuals-persons worthy of note) are male. Such linguistic bias should be of particular concern to teachers of composition, whose job it is to emphasize the subtle rhetorical powers of language, the connotative complexities of the words we use. main concern in this paper is the way sexist language manifests itself in the college classroom, particularly in freshman composition courses. In 1976 H. Lee Gershuny conducted detailed investigation of dictionaries and textbooks to determine the extent to which they reinforce sexual stereotypes. Gershuny concluded that although sexist language was common in dictionaries and public school textbooks, it was not as prevalent in recent college composition manuals: My own informal examination of representative sample of college English handbooks and rhetoric texts published after 1972 indicated that English language texts are far ahead of other disciplines in 'de-sexing' illustrative sentences and prose passages.' Yet while praising number of these texts for specific achievements in reducing or eliminating sexist offenses, Gershuny also asserts that have way to go. Many texts fail to depict women in traditionally male roles and professions, and when they do, Gershuny suggests, a woman's work is often trivialized or described as dependent on that of others (p. 157). Also, Gershuny mentions only one work, Suzanne E. and Roderick A. Jacobs' The College Writer's Handbook, as alternating she and he each time in generic use; presumably most of the rely upon the more conventional generic he. In similar study, Candace Helgeson refuses to give authors of freshman composition texts as

I can't do anything I want, if I can't write English. " Margarita's desire to improve lights her eyes and makes her soft Ecuadorian accent tremble with emphasis. This strong motivation, possessed by almost all the ESL students at George Mason, will help her achieve relative fluency in writing in a remarkably short time. But, like many of the other 100 of these students who visit George Mason's Writing Place each semester, Margarita is hindered by an impatience to move more quickly than she can through her composition courses. Above average, sometimes brilliant, students in their native countries, they discover that their writing of English -which they may have studied for years in school -keeps them from passing introductory courses. For the Writing Place staff, the task is as much to put this ' 'failure" in the perspective of reasonable expectations as it is to discover strategies for improving the writing. Of course, reasonable expectations vary with the individual, so that when a student declares, as Margarita will later in this session, "I must pass English 101 this semester," I try to learn as much as I can about his or he/ academic goals, as well as about course standing, before either encouraging or trying to mitigate the sense of urgency. Occasionally, a student is under a constraint -a government scholarship for two years of study in the United States, for example-which compels rapid advancement; in these cases, the staff member carefully maps out, with the student's teacher, a program of extra work in the Writing Place to help the student complete the course as efficiently as possible. The reason for Margarita's urgency is the more common: she feels that she must quickly prove her ability to succeed in the American university, and her difficulty in English 101 has given rise to self-doubt. For Margarita, her doubts as an ESL student are compounded by those she feels as a woman in her forties returning to college after a long absence.

PICK UP ANY RECENT PUBLICATION on composition and you will almost surely find some reference to the problem of evaluating writing. Teachers and researchers alike acknowledge that pronouncing judgment on a piece of writing is both important and difficult. Important because teaching students to write, sorting students for placement or admission, and research in composition all depend upon ability to discriminate levels of quality in writing. Difficult because the theoretical basis of evaluation remains unarticulated. In contrast, composition instruction has begun developing a coherent set of assumptions. For example, theorists may disagree on the relative merits of classical, tagmemic, dramatistic, and prewriting forms of invention, but they agree on the principle that invention is part of the writing process. Evaluation of writing proceeds without a similar set of principles. Yet evaluation does proceed. The need for deciding who shall attend which college, designating those competent to graduate from high school, identifying growth in writing, or determining our nation's educational progress have spawned various systems for evaluating writing. Holistic scoring, quantification of syntactic features, analytic scales, and primary trait scoring illustrate the range of existing methodologies for evaluating writing. Rather than evolving from commonly held assumptions about evaluation, each method rests upon its own set of assumptions. Statistical computations of reader responses provide the rationale for holistic scoring and analytical scales; developmental stages of language acquisition account for quantification of syntactic features; a triangular model of discourse underlies primary trait scoring. Each of these systems and the assumptions underlying it represent careful and intelligent thought, and my purpose here is not to denigrate any of them. I cite them simply as illustrations of my point. Driven by the necessity to evaluate writing, theorists have avoided examination of the nature of evaluation itself and have moved directly to devising means (and rationales for these means) for accomplishing this difficult task. In this article I wish to propose a more general theory of evaluation and to suggest how it might be worked out in practical terms. This theory grows out of a philosophical and linguistic debate on the question of meaning. The debate, best summarized by P. F. Strawson's distinction between

MY PURPOSE IN THIS PAPER IS THREEFOLD-hiStoriCal, descriptive, and also, alas, nowadays contentious. After a brief historical excursus on the changed relation between composition and literature teaching, I want to describe what is, for the 1980s, a rather unusual kind of freshman writing program, one that combines intensive work in composition with an old-fashioned literary survey. Through this description I shall argue that modern, professionalized writing specialists have become unnecessarily suspicious of traditional literary reading assignments; that the educational functions of reading assignments have often been misunderstood; and that those functions can, at least for some students, better be fulfilled by traditional, substantive literary texts, than by the more commonly used collections of modern controversial, expressive, and affective prose. Finally, I hope to suggest, from our experience at the University of South Carolina with a special traditionally-oriented freshman program, that the ideas of freshman rhetoric can help in designing useful reading and writing assignments in other undergraduate literature courses. When the first-ever professorship of English was established, by the patronage of

WHERE DO ENGLISH TEACHERS GET THE AUTHORITY to teach writing to students from other departments? We know-and our non-English colleagues know-that the English major is basically an English and American literature major and that graduate programs in English are more of the same, only intensified. How then are we equipped to teach students whose present and future writing tasks are very far from the literature we study? At times in my career as an English teacher I've felt myself beset by people from other departments who understandably want an answer to that question. Now that I teach technical writing rather than Freshman English in my department's composition program, I feel myself more frequently under siege. Maybe Freshman English, the question goes, but technical writing? How dare I presume to teach chemical engineers, or astrophysicists, or biochemists how to write? Technical writing taught by English teachers is the acid test of our authority; in spirit as well as subject it seems to be at the farthest remove from nearly everyone's idea of literature. Three members of the Department of Humanities, College of Engineering, at the University of Michigan have launched an especially pointed attack on English departments' teaching technical writing. J. C. Mathes, Dwight W. Stevenson, and Peter Klaver list three reasons for their doubts about letting someone from the English department teach technical writing. The first and second reasons appear to me indistinguishable, but come down to these two passages: