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Though most freshmen may not believe it, there is life after freshman comp -and even some writing to be done. Although the first mission of a new writing lab is usually to supplement or to be integrated into the freshman writing course, labs have begun to respond as well to the needs of writers throughout their years at college. Labs have and should expand to meet these needs because they are uniquely capable of doing so.

LAST SPRING I VOLUNTEERED to teach an English graduate course entitled Teaching of Writing to Speakers of Dialect. Of course everyone speaks a dialect, but the graduate students were no fools. They knew that this verbose title was a euphemism for teaching students in remedial courses to write. After consenting to do the course, I panicked. I am and therefore thought by my department to know something about dialect problems. Of course I felt just about as much in the dark (forgive the racist imagery) on this matter as most of my colleagues, though I regularly taught the remedial, freshman English course which enrolls mostly and Spanish-speaking students. Now I was going to be unmasked as being as unenlightened and unexotic as my white colleagues. Heaven forbid! I scurried around to the graduate students who might take such a course and made them promise that they would not pre-register, hoping that the course would fold for lack of enrollment. But, alas, it didn't. So on the first day of class, I went to the assigned room, met my ten white English graduate students, confessed my ignorance, and began to teach what proved to be a fairly useful course, i.e., I learned a lot by teaching it. We began the course as all good graduate courses begin and end, with the students doing most of the work. We tried to make a complete annotated bibliography from 1964-77 on black dialect and from four journals which publish in this area: English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Florida Foreign Language Reporter. We dittoed our bibliographical finds each week and also starred and commented on the most interesting articles. The students murmured about the amount of time our comments took each week, but I found the practical ideas for teaching writing which came from these articles and the students' comments most helpful. The articles were also helpful, especially when compared with the readings in our three texts,' in eradicating the naivete with which some of the students began the course: they wanted me as a teacher of remedial composition to tell them how to teach dialect writers in twenty-five words or less, and if not in so few

IN A RECENT ARTICLE IN College and Communication, a graduate student just through a doctoral examination in History and Theories in describes his need keep myself in one theoretical piece. . ., to get my future in composition straight, get it to take on some shape or direction (Stephen North, Composition Now: Standing on One's Head, 29 [1978], 178). One of his examiners called his synthesis of history, theory, pedagogy a mishmash; he is now laboring to find sensible relations between theory and the teaching of freshman composition. In spite of a dutifully upbeat conclusion, the article conveys frustration and insecurity-a nagging fear that the whole enterprise has been in some fashion hollow and suspect: it's rather like lying on your back in the backyard on a clear summer night and calling that astronomy (180). The anxiety described and dramatized here strikes me as largely justified and likely to become common as graduate programs in the theory and teaching of composition proliferate. What composition studies now offer is a potpourri of theory, research, speculation, some of it close to pedagogy, some far removed, some of it speculative and contemplative, some scientifically and experimentally oriented, some of it jargon-ridden and pretentious, enough of it so provoking and stimulating that the pervading sense of excitement and challenge seems justified. What composition research does not offer is a shapely coherence that makes it definable as a discipline. On the contrary, the spirit of the moment calls for ranging across multiple

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IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise:

Composition in the schools has long been under a curse, and not without reason. It has lacked substance, vitality, enrichment. The stream has been so shallow that, in Ben Jonson's words, one could probe it with one's middle finger. There has been in composition teaching too much correcting of morbid English, too much metaphor mongering, too much vaporing about style, to permit it to rise to the dignity of a first-rate discipline. But now composition seems to be coming into its rights. The old superstition which made the composition teacher the Pariah of the public school system is surely passing. The time is at hand when the opportunities for scholarship and general culture in this branch of instruction will be generally recognized.

MY RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH STUDENTS-as well as everything responsible I have seen in print-confirms the steep decline in what, for want of a more discriminating term, is called language skills, particularly as manifest in cogent expository writing on the broad standard level of usage. Reading comprehension of sophisticated texts-a subtler, more complicated, if related matter-aside, college writing is the issue of our greatest concern. Competent writing is the most tangible mark of functional literacy, a nebulous term that I define simply as the verbal capability assuring academic and professional success. As the findings of my capsule experiment indicate, student writing may be substandard on grounds more basic than grammatical sufficiency or rhetorical effectiveness. Further, they show that the fundamental problem not only is collegiate, but is shared by professionals in educated society at large. There has been no end of speculation as to the imputed causes of writing deficiency these days. Most of it is inflamed polemic, squint-eyed and hobby-ridden. The general question has roused a furor during the past ten years. Critics, poets, novelists, editorialists, pedagogues, philologists, linguists, and historians keep firing off their partial-often contradictory-answers. There is seldom hard evidence in these broadsides, written indignantly, as Dorothy Parker said of a book, fear and without research. However, the accelerated decay of language, apparent in school and beyond, is more widely deplored than slum rot. Bureaucratic gobbledygook, journalese (Newspeak), law jargon, education school and social science Choctaw, the bafflegab lingo of criticism in the various arts-as well as every form of what Mary Renault called withitry-are insistently, incessantly denounced. To what effect? Actually, little. It seems to me, however, that so far as diction is concerned-and that is the topic I have fixed on-the most glaring aberrations do not involve jargoneering, whether derived from these or related sources. After all, cant terms, nonce words, and jargon (are they distinguishable?) are merely vacuous, pretentious, or dreary ephemera. They have always smogged the air we breathe. But though they impede, they do not utterly rupture communication. Lifestyle, establishment, identity crisis, vis-a-vis, stance, ghetto, paranoia, on-going, interface, low profile, meaningful, hermeneutic, into (for

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The decision to select one academic major over others is important for those enrolled in programs of higher education. Each of the approximately eleven million full-time college students currently involved in degree programs have made or will make such decisions. Future students, presently of high school age or even younger, will face the same issue at a later date. While such choices are made in some systematic fashion by students, the various psychological components involved are not well specified. Research which has explored academic choice-making typically falls back on schemes devised by scholars interested in occupational or vocational decision-making (Crites, 1969; Holland, 1966). Those models generally suggest the individual will select an occupation which he or she perceives can maximize available rewards and minimize associated negative consequences. Many suggest as well that optimal satisfaction with an occupation derives from a close psychological fit between individual characteristics and the inherent requirements of the job. Working within such frameworks scholars have found a number of personality variables predictive of major choice in the academic setting (Goldschmid, 1967; Morrow, 1971). Individual differences such as cognitive style (Osipow, 1969), flexibility (Sherrick, Davenport, & Colina, 1971), impulsiveness (Kipnis, Lane, & Berger, 1967), and achievement motivation (Isaacson, 1964; Malone, 1969; Wish & Hasazi, 1973) have been successfully utilized as discriminators of students' choice-making. An inherent requirement of any college major is a certain amount of writing. Beyond basic, across-the-board requirements, academic majors obviously vary in the amount demanded. Journalism or English majors might expect to write more in their collegiate career than Physics or Mathematics majors. And beyond classroom requirements, the particular academic area chosen foreshadows future vocational opportunities themselves differing in writing demands (Daly & Shamo, 1976). Given that academic majors differ in the amount of writing required, we might expect individual differences directly related to writing to play an important role in making decisions about majors. More specifically, an individual's level of writing apprehension should predict his or her evaluation and choice of majors given some specified or expected level of required writing.

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LOGICAL THINKING in freshman composition continues to be an essential need, but the increasing emphasis in many composition programs on reading skills and expository writing has led to the sacrifice of essentials in logic. Admittedly, composition teachers, untrained or little acquainted with formal logic or even the informal fallacies, feel ill-equipped to present these effectively; many feel better equipped to teach exposition than the argumentative essay. But few if any will argue about the need for logical thinking. The question is not whether to teach logical thinking and the argumentative essay but rather how these can be taught successfully to students of varying backgrounds and reading ability. My concern in this essay is with some essentials in logic. My experience at an open-enrollment urban university has been that some but not all matters of logic can be taught, and certainly not as fully as the student will be taught them in the Philosophy Department. The complex forms of deductive reasoning are best reserved for the course in formal logic. However, the elements of deductive and inductive logic can be presented simply and effectively to all students, in the context of rhetorical ideas-specifically audience, purpose, modes of persuasion. More than this, certain matters of rhetoric can be introduced effectively through logical thinking, which offers a better way to distinguish main from subordinate ideas than the usual breakdown from main to subordinate topics and headings associated with the familiar sentence outline.

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Much of today's CRT photocomposition is being processed through computer systems from typed OCR input or from magnetic tapes. Both approaches have some attraction for publishers who may have the capability of preparing such input within their own editorial offices, or from available computerized master files of data. Advantages of these procedures and some problems which have been encountered are discussed. The importance of personnel selection and training, attention to details of specifications, and equipment maintenance are emphasized. With careful programming, data files can frequently be converted into typesetting language, selecting and rearranging material to meet a publisher's needs.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, a small group of persons in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan began to meet to discuss some tentative approaches to long-range planning. impetus for these meetings came not from a single and isolated matter but rather from a complex of events and experiences, some of them shared by everyone involved in the Department's work (some, indeed, shared by everyone in the profession) and some of them growing out of individual experiences. Falling enrollments in the humanities, new courses and new approaches to teaching within a discipline that at one time seemed comfortably defined as historical and literary (and English), the changing job market for graduates in the humanities: these were some of the factors to which we were all responding. Individually, some members of the group had been responsible for innovative programs that had already shaped changes in a particular way. Tim Davies and Jay Robinson had been deeply committed to the Doctor of Arts in English program at Michigan. Hubert English had served as chairman of both Freshman English course and graduate program. He knew various constituencies and could chart the alterations in their needs and expectations perhaps better than anyone else in the Department. My interest grew out of experience in the University Long-Range Planning Committee and out of a personal conviction that we needed to look ahead for ourselves to see if, in Curt Gowdy's memorable phrase, our future was still ahead of us. If we did not, it seemed altogether possible that others would look for us and make decisions based on criteria that we might find unacceptable. After a good deal of debate about the methods we might use and the purposes any sort of planning might serve, we settled on the creation of a descriptor questionnaire of a type that had been used by Claude Eggertsen of the Education School at Michigan in an attempt to define The Future Environment of the University of Michigan.' Our aims, of course, were far more modest than his. We simply wanted to know how members of the Department of English Language and Literature saw their discipline and their efforts within that discipline,

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signed to teach composition, but few are trained to do it. Composition involves things like grammar, rhetoric, and logic, but often composition teachers have not formally studied those things. People applying for positions in composition programs sometimes submit transcripts listing English courses only in literature and literary criticism. If they are hired, they probably are very much at home, since often the people already teaching in those programs have similar backgrounds. Someone who has earned a degree in one of the programs created recently to train college English teachers, rather than to give traditional advanced degrees, is probably somewhat different. Those programs give some attention to composition teaching but often less than you might guess. Recently, there has been some resistance to the apparent excess of literature courses in the preparation of people who become composition teachers. Consequently, a real conflict between Lit and Comp has developed within the discipline of English. Because advocates of traditional literary training for all English teachers have long had command of the English profession, those in the relatively new resistance movement have had trouble

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THE CURRENT back to the basics hue and cry reminds me of the story in Honey in the Horn where an oldtimer, working at the local sawmill, cut his own pay from $1.50 to $1.00 a day. When asked why he would do such a fool thing, the old man replied, Fractions make my head hurt. The profession's reaction to the public outrage that students can't write reminds me of that old-timer. We, too, seem to be attempting to avoid complication by reverting to a simpler number. To illustrate what I mean: In 1974 the Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching gave the Modern Language Association a modest grant to finance a study of the state of the English undergraduate curriculum. Primarily, the officers of the foundation wished to know the answer to this question: How is the English profession responding to the students who are now going to college? One of the activities in the study was a national survey of the teaching of freshman composition. Four hundred thirty-six college and university teachers, directors of writing, and department chairmen from forty-nine states and Puerto Rico responded to MLA's inquiry and answered such questions as, What do you consider the main purpose of the course you teach? What is the average size of your freshman composition classes? How are the texts selected for the course?2 Quotations from this survey illustrate the divergent opinions and philosophies held about the college freshman English course.

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W. Earl Britton's and Merril D. Whitburn's views on freshman English and technical writing are not as much in conflict as the titles of their recent articles may suggest. The two courses are solutions to two different problems, namely the communicative skills required by undergraduates and by graduate engineers. Experience at the University of the Witwatersrand indicates that two courses, one given at the beginning of the undergraduate course and one at the end, would be an ideal solution. Where a crowded curriculum permits only one course, the compromise solution requires elements from both types of courses.

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THOSE OF US WHO FOLLOW a write-from-your-own-experience philosophy in teaching Freshman Composition consistently run into one problem: a batch of trivial narrative papers to read each week. Following the lead of Ken Macrorie, Donald M. Murray, and, more recently, Joseph Comprone, we take this approach to keep our students out of the depths of the library, where they would spend hours researching a boring subject to an artificial and boring paper, and at their desks engaged in the process of writing, where they belong. Freshman writers, we believe, are apprentices in a skilled trade-writing-and like carpenters' apprentices need material to practice their trade on. But novice carpenters are not sent to the lumber mill to pick up their own materials each day. They keep hammering and sawing and all the material they need is kept at their fingertips. Freshmen have all the material they need for writing at their fingertips, too: their own experiences. Too often, however, they fashion those experiences into a dull, firstperson narrative of What I Did. The genuine significance of what they did lies undiscovered and undeveloped. The challenge for writing teachers is to help the beginners examine their experiences critically and turn the corner from simple narration to wider meanings and truth in their writing. In my freshman English courses I shy away from relevant or significant assigned paper topics. In fact I make no assignments at all other than that writing teacher's cliche, write about what you know. When I do get a paper entitled Pollution or Inflation I ask the writer how much substantial information he has to pass along to his readers. Does he really know the ins and outs of economic theory, for example? The answer is invariably no. A budding John Maynard Keynes is rare these days. Then I have two options. I can send him to the library to research inflation, in short to pick up a quick course in economics. Then he can a research paper, that exercise in footnotes and boredom. Or I can tell him, Write about something you know more about, something you've had some experience with. the next week it's My First Day in College. After three weeks of revision it's a well-honed My First Day in College. Full of hard-hitting specific detail and crisp dialogue, it still makes me yawn. I find myself repeatedly asking, So what? Simple narration, I reasoned, is the mode for best presenting unique experiences

Your assignment for next week [furious scribble, shuffling of papers, semiaudible groans] is to write an essay of 1500 words on one of the following topics: (instructor lists three or four options). One week later, to the hour, the trembling hands of the acolyte usher forth pages of not so purple prose to the high priest of ENGLISH COMPOSITION, who bears them off to his lonely monastic cell. For all the average student knows, what is next performed is as mysterious as alchemy, as indecipherable as Celtic runes-the student never witnesses the isolated acts of the most holy of holies-,the grading of the essay.1 This is done as the priest moves to each essay, in turn, changing its often hoped-for gold into dross, making strange almost hieroglyphic-like markings in the margins-symbols like awk, / /, and dele., and finally consigning each to Heaven (A), or Hell (E), or Purgatory (any grade between). There is, usually, no appeal to the hierophant-his mark is low, his decision final. The last paragraph is only partially exaggerated; most students instantly recognize the process. Freshmen tend to take his-the evaluator's prescriptions a bit more seriously than world-weary seniors who, by dexterous sleight of hand, have managed to put off their composition requirements until the last possible moment. In both instances, however, the process of mystery remains-one hands in a paper, and at some later date, receives it back.2 If the student agrees with the grade, she tends to file the paper away with minimal attention. If she disagrees with the grade, our by now angry writer scrutinizes the evaluated paper intensely, looking not so much for her own mistakes, but for those, if any, of her instructor hoping against hope that she'll find one, (or at the very least, an ambiguity) which will help raise her grade-every little bit helps.3 Not the

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