Recent scholarship wrestles with the issue of creating a setting within centers that encourages genuine collaboration between those who seek advice (or input) and those who give it. Some scholarship suggests that too often the people who fund, administer, and use centers see the facilities as primarily remedial. Among problems, this attitude promotes the us-and-them mentality that Richard Leahy cautions against (45) • Lex Runciman, too, blames misconceptions about the meaning of tutor and tutoring for assumptions made by students, administrators, and tutors themselves that writing centers serve only bad (Defining 28) and are little more than emergency rooms for critically ill grammar. Both scholars urge us to create an environment which everyone is free to develop his or her own best processes (Leahy 45), where good writers go order to make enlightened decisions about context, organization, idea development, tone, and the (Runciman, Defining 33). To create such a place, Leahy urges us to foster a community of people who love and like to share their with each other (45). As a logical first step, Runciman suggests we abandon terms that carry remedial connotations (e.g. tutor a.nd tutoring and adopt terms that more accurately describe who we are and what we do. Although I agree that we need to encourage an enlightened, collaborative environment in centers, I believe we can achieve this goal (whether or not we rename ourselves and our work) through the intelligent and humane use of humor.

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing-center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise. In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others. In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4). Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).

Talk is central to what we do as writers and as humans. It is the collaborative activity that underlies most, if not all, individual acts of composing. Because of this, the work tutors do every day-talking about writing with writers-is valuable in uncountable ways. Writers compose through inner speech while walking, by speaking aloud at the word processor, when discussing a work-in-progress and drinking coffee with friends, or as they share ideas during conferences in writing centers and classrooms. But this talk is often suppressed, forgotten, or left out of the dominant story of learning. I plan to offer a

This article describes a dual grading process, initiated to expose students to collaborative evaluation and to verify instructor evaluation. Each group was assigned a case, with directions to print five copies of its response. I evaluated one copy, then distributed four blank copies to another group for evaluation. The group reviewed the paper and assigned a grade. I collected the graded responses, attached my graded copy, and returned the two graded copies to the composing group. Receiving feedback from both teacher and students reinforced the students' confidence in the evaluation process while teaching them important lessons on audience expectations.

Muriel Harris, Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 369-383

When we design a course in writing, we join that debate over whether we should see individual cognition or social and cultural context as motive force in literate (Flower 282). To remind us of this debate, Linda Flower recently asked, Can we... reconcile a commitment to nurturing a personal voice, individual purpose, or an inner, self-directed process of making meaning, with rhetoric's traditional assumption that both inquiry and purpose are responses to rhetorical situations, or with more recent assertions that inquiry in writing must start with social, cultural, or political awareness? (282). Those three commitments are not really incongruous. All three can be found reconciled in advanced composition course described below. As a course built by students around individualized projects, it encourages students to apply general principles to specialized tasks. Good writers, according to Richard M. Coe, know how to apply general principles of composition to particular writing tasks and contexts (412). With so many different projects resulting from this approach, students' divergent interests must be shared in an atmosphere of collaboration. John Trimbur has stated that one of goals of collaborative learning is to replace traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with practices of participatory democracy (6.11). Yet even collaborative models need to leave instructor with a certain authority. For example, James A. Reither and Douglas Vipond, whose teaching model is based on collaboration, suggest that the most powerful way to arrange this kind of situation is to organize a course so students collaboratively investigate a more or less original scholarly question or field. The teacher sets a research project or question for class, casting students as members of a research group (863). The final exam in my course acts as that long-range research project. This assignment, which is submitted to students on first day of class, summarizes

When I talk to graduate students and colleagues about their use of collaborative learning, I often hear stories about when it doesn't work. No one's version of collaborative pedagogy is universally rewarding, of course, but I have found some approaches consistently more successful than others. Often, peer criticism consists of oral or hastily written comments by students in a classroom group; sometimes students fill out a checklist or a form that resembles a short-answer test (for example Huff and Kline 122-23). In these cases, neither teacher nor student is taking peer criticism seriously as a writing exercise. Furthermore, much oral or checklist peer criticism is limited to students' evaluations of their peers' writing techniques, thus neglecting discussion of the substantive issues in the paper. Finally, much peer criticism focuses either on the subjective experience of the critic, such as Peter Elbow's movies of people's minds while they read your words (Writing without Teachers 77), or objectified standard criteria, such as his criterion-based feedback (Writing with Power 240-45). I would like to propose a melding of exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book Sharing and Responding with the series of written peer critiques Kenneth Bruffee describes in his text A Short Course in Writing. These two kinds of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom because together they capture the struggle between individual expression and social constraint that most of us experience as writers. Sharing and Responding can function on its own or as a companion piece to Elbow and Belanoff's A Community of Writers (second edition forthcoming), with which it was published. The exercises continue the tradition of readerbased responding that Elbow began in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, but with a twist. The exercises in Sharing and Responding have a more developed social framework than their earlier manifestations. Although the emphasis is still on the writer's making individual choices, the structure of group interaction is more clearly developed than in Elbow's earlier work. For instance, each exercise has sample reader responses followed by a section called What a Writer Might Think about This Feedback. These exercises (as well as other subjective or comment-based-rather than essay-length-peer criticism)

In a departure from the view that characterizes hypertext as a new writing paradigm based on old associationist ideas, Edward Barrett has proposed a model for hypertext that rejects cognitive and associationist language as both unnecessary and inaccurate. In this view, knowledge, reality, and even facts are community generated, “linguistic entities,” and hypertext supports the “social interface” rather than the “deep structure” of thought. This essay considers some of the premises of Barrett's proposal. A central issue is the rejection of the “authorial imperative” of structured information in favor of a view of writing as an open‐ended ever‐changing conversation in which readers and writers collaborate to discover—or generate—reality.

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

Previous research in computer-mediated communication in both the classroom and the workplace has found that patterns of interaction may differ between individuals communicating face-to-face versus communicating via a computer network. This present study, using a case study methodology, sought to analyze and compare the language of groups of business writing students as they communicated both face-to-face and on a real-time computer network. The study found that during network meetings, participation was more equal, responses tended to be more substantive and text specific, and students were more willing to offer direction than during face-to-face meetings. In addition, students reported a more positive evaluation of their network sessions.

Editing includes teaching authors how to write, but the traditional editor's task, like the teacher's, is complicated by the additional requirement of being a gatekeeper of an author's work. When teachers (like editors) see their primary task as judges or gatekeepers, they can become engaged in adversarial relationships that contradict their role as enablers/teachers. The author's editor, on the other hand, is an emerging model of the editor‐author relationship that focuses on helping authors meet the expectations of gatekeeping journal and book editors. Teachers can use the author's‐editor model in the professional writing classroom to minimize the current‐traditional emphasis on the product and emphasize the collaborative nature of the writing process.

This study evaluated a method for teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. The method, called reader-protocol teaching, involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and then providing them with detailed readers' responses (in the form of think-aloud protocol transcripts) to illustrate how readers construct an understanding of the text. Writers in five experimental classes critiqued a set of ten poorly written instructional texts and then analyzed the protocol transcripts of readers struggling to comprehend these texts. Writers in five control classes were taught to anticipate the reader's needs through a variety of audience-analysis heuristics and collaborative peer-response methods. Pretests and posttests were used to assess improvements in experimental and control writers' ability to anticipate and diagnose readers' comprehension problems. Pretest and posttest materials were expository science texts. Writers taught with the reader-protocol teaching method improved significantly more than did writers in control classes in the number of readers' problems they accurately predicted. In addition, in contrast to writers in control classes, writers taught with the reader-protocol method significantly increased in their ability to (a) diagnose readers' problems caused by textual omissions, (b) characterize problems from the reader's perspective, and (c) attend to global-text problems. Moreover, writers' knowledge of audience acquired in one domain (instructional text) transferred to another (expository science text).

Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 285 pp. Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. Michael Schrage. New York: Random House, 1990. 227pp. Collaborative Writing in Industry: Investigations in Theory and Practice. Ed. Mary M. Lay and William M. Karis. Amityville: Baywood, 1991. 284 pp. Cooperative Learning: Theory and Research. Ed. Shlomo Sharan. New York: Praeger, 1990. 314 pp. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current‐Traditional Rhetoric, Sharon Crowley. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 169 pp. Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher. Ed. Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley‐Meissner, and Chris Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 199 pp. Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom. Ed. Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 179 pp. Editing: The Design of Rhetoric, Sam Dragga and Gwendolyn Gong. Amityville: Baywood, 1989. 232 pp. Technical Editing, Carolyn D. Rude. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1991. 430 pp. Interviewing Practices for Technical Writers. Earl E. McDowell. Amityville: Baywood, 1991. 251pp. Internships in Technical Communication: A Guide for Students, Faculty Supervisors, and Internship Sponsors. Ed. Bege K. Bowers and Chuck Nelson. Washington, DC: Society for Technical Communication, 1991. 85 pp.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes First, we owe much to Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan for motivating us to write this paper. They may never fully realize how much they did. Second, we are grateful for the assistance of all the people—both living and dead—whom we list in the references. Third, we owe much to Jim Corder, who helped us to see that academic papers and personal essays are more alike than we know. Fourth, we thank all of the colleagues who have collaborated with us on books and articles: Gene L. Piche, Mike Graves, Wayne Slater, Ann Duin, Donna Johnson, Maureen Roen (two children, their journals, and a literary map), Patricia Hazeltine, Nicholas Karolides, Deborah Grunloh, Stuart Brown, Bob Mittan, Margaret Fleming, R. J. Willey, Kate Mangelsdorf, Vicki Taylor, Zita Ingham, Mike Rogers, Gesa Kirsch, Diane Clymer, Jan Swearingen, Marvin Diogenes, Clyde Moneyhun, Vicki Small, and Jim Nesci. Finally, we thank Theresa Enos and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

As more business writing instructors begin implementing collaborative writing and learning in their classrooms, few descriptions exist that show how collaboration might work in the context of an entire course. This article describes a course that integrates individual and collaborative group assignments while requiring students to work through multiple drafting processes involving teacher and peer intervention. The course was designed to encourage students to become self-reflective, flexible writers who can make themselves aware of their writing processes and then adapt them to both individual and collaborative writing tasks. Along with outlining specific assignments and the rationales behind them, we address issues such as establishing collaborative groups, analyzing group dynamics and writing processes, and the roles teachers might play in a collaborative classroom.

Writing instructors often assign collaborative writing activities as a way to foster reflective thinking; many assume that the very act of explaining and defending ideas in the presence of a responsive audience actually forces writers to take critical positions on their own ideas. This article questions this assumption by examining the role of critical reflection in one particular writing context—that of collaborative planning. The authors' observations address three questions: (a) When students collaborate on plans for a paper do they necessarily reflect critically on their own ideas and processes, as many advocates of collaboration might expect? (b) If and when students engage in reflection, does it make a qualitative difference in their writing plans? And finally, (c) how do student writers engage in and use reflection as they develop plans? Twenty-two college freshmen audio-taped themselves as they planned course papers with a peer. Transcripts were coded for reflective comments and were holistically rated for quality. The analysis revealed a significant correlation between amount of reflective conversation and the quality of students' plans. Students used reflection to identify problems, to search for and evaluate alternative plans, and to elaborate ideas through the process of justification. This problem solving was most effective when reflection was sustained over many conversational turns. Collaboration did not guarantee reflection, however. Some sessions contained no reflective comments and some students used collaboration in a way that undermined reflective thinking. This study suggests that how students represented collaboration and the writing assignment itself determined whether and how they reflected on their own ideas.

In our teaching and research in writing centers and classrooms, we need to identify and rhetorically analyze "collaboration" in its multiple forms. When we overuse this catch-all term to mean any kind of mutual help or working together, we not only demonstrate what Frederick Erickson calls our current "crush on collaboration" (43 1 ), but we also confuse people inside and outside the profession. When "collaboration" is bantered about in education, business, and politics, it is unabashedly unmodified, unclassified, demonstrating by its nakedness that it serves too many purposes and has too many referents, not to mention the historical ones such as Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling who "collaborated" with the enemy. As Andrea Lunsford notes, ". . . collaboration is hardly a monolith. Instead, it comes in a dizzying variety of modes about which we know almost nothing" (7).

This naturalistic study, coauthored by a composition specialist and a philosopher, explores the learning experiences of college students in an Introduction to Philosophy course and the learning experiences of the research collaborators themselves. The researchers identify conflicting ways of knowing in class discussion, student writing, and within their own interdisciplinary collaboration. They then ask questions about how these ways of knowing interact and with what effects. In order to answer these questions the researchers drew upon student data they collected in two consecutive semesters as well as the close records they kept of their own collaborative work. Four research methods were used: observation, interviews, composing-aloud protocols, and text analysis. Conclusions are drawn from the data regarding the benefits for students and researchers of juxtaposing multiple epistemological perspectives. Also presented are conclusions about the learning contexts that promote epistemic growth. The textual form of this study is “heteroglossic,” that is, certain sections are written by the researchers, certain sections by the teacher-researcher, and others are coauthored by both.

Modes of collaboration are gendered in the sense that they define power relationships among members of a group. In this study, the authors define three collaborative modes: dialogic, asymmetrical, and hierarchical. Dialogic and asymmetrical modes are emancipating and characterized by flexibility, open-ended inquiry, and concern for the growth and development of the individuals involved. Hierarchical modes are oppressive and are characterized by rigidity and suppression of the voices of others in the group. Two collaborative writing groups in a chemical engineering design course exemplify these modes. The first, composed of two women and two men, was primarily dialogic, and the second, composed of two women and three men, exhibited characteristics of all three modes.

To study the possible impact of feminist theory on technical communication, this article discusses six common characteristics of feminist theory: (a) celebration of difference, (b) impact on social change, (c) acknowledgment of scholars' backgrounds and values, (d) inclusion of women's experience, (e) study of gaps and silences in traditional scholarship, and (f) new female sources of knowledge. Three debates within feminist theory spring out of these common characteristics: whether to stress similarity or difference between the sexes, whether differences come from biological or social forces, and whether feminist scholars can avoid reinforcing binary opposition. The article then traces the impact of these characteristics of feminist theory and debates within feminist theory on the redefinition of technical communication in terms of the myth of scientific objectivity, the new interest in ethnographic studies of workplace communication, and the recent focus on collaborative writing.

Although the number of comprehensive studies that outline methods for incorporating collaborative writing into the professional writing classroom has increased, most studies discuss only one or two assignments throughout the term. This article describes an entire course focused on shared-document writing. Over a four-year period, students indicated that they valued the time allowed to coordinate groups and to understand and complete assignments. Structuring such a course necessitates assigning work that is related to a single topic and providing students with choices, including a voice in group formation and evaluation.

It is pointed out that veteran technical writers and editors sometimes suspect that the professors who teach technical writing and editing are too deeply immersed in their academic culture to translate effectively into the classroom the world of work culture in which technical writing and editing are practised. It is argued, however, that the two cultures are remarkably alike, sharing the same goal-to improve communication. Differences arise primarily in the approaches taken to achieve that common goal. Drawing on 25 years of experience as a visiting professor in a university writing program, the author discusses the different approaches that industry and academia take to such topics as grammar, rhetoric, audience, editing, artwork, decision-making, and collaborative writing.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Recent research suggests that pragmatic emphasis on writing proficiency alone does not produce a good technical communicator. Attention must also be given to the technical communicator as liberally educated generalist who writes well and feels an affinity for science or technology. To this end, technical communication needs to be studied in the larger context of evolving science and technology, developing trends in technical education, and the oratorical tradition of broad learning applied to the active life. Recent studies of the collaborative culture of the workplace should be supplemented by increased attention to humanistic questions of what a person needs to be and know in order to cooperate effectively as a practicing technical communicator.

With the advent of electronic networking, writing pedagogy has moved into the arena of computer-supported collaborative writing, using collaborative writing as an instructional means to promote a more social view of the writing process. Therefore, as business and technical communication researchers and instructors, we need to ask the following questions: What kinds of software have been developed to aid computer-supported collaborative writing in the workplace and in the writing classroom? What benefits and problems have resulted from the design and use of this software? What research issues should be addressed as we approach the next decade of computer-supported collaborative writing? In this article the author explores these questions, highlighting five computer-supported collaborative writing systems from the workplace and five such systems from the writing classroom.

On-line computer conferences have been of increasing interest to teachers of composition who hope to provide alternative forums for student-centered, collaborative writing that involve all members of their classes in active learning. Some expect them to provide sites for discourse that are more egalitarian and less constrained by power differentials based on gender and status than are face-to-face discussions. These expectations, however, are largely unsupported by systematic research. The article describes an exploratory study of gender and power relationships on Megabyte University, one particular on-line conference. While the results of the study are not definitive, they do suggest that gender and power are present to some extent even in on-line conferences. During the two 20-day periods studied, men and high-profile members of the community dominated conference communication. Neither this conference domination nor the communication styles of participants were affected by giving participants the option of using pseudonyms.

Why write together? the authors ask. They answer that question here, in the first book to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing.Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education.The authors urge a fundamental change in our institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work. They conclude with the injunction: Today and in the twenty-first century, our data suggest, writers must be able to work together. They must, in short, be able to collaborate.

Conversations on the WrittenWord: Essays on Language and Literacy, Jay L. Robinson John Schilb Expressive Discourse, Jeannette Harris Douglas Hesse The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg Theresa Enos Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 3rd ed., Edward P. J. Corbett Cheryl Glenn Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede John Trimbur Learning to Write in Our Nation’s Schools: Instruction and Achievement in 1988 at Grades 4, 8, and 12, Arthur N. Applebee et al. Paul W. Rea The Future of Doctoral Studies in English, Andrea Lunsford, Helen Moglen, and James F. Slevin Joseph J. Comprone

This article identifies problems in the computer-supported group writing of MBA students who are both novice strategic report writers and novice users of technology that supports group work. These problems consist of lack of attention to readers' needs, attitudes, and expectations; poor conflict management; leadership problems; genre confusion; shaky definition of the strategic problem; poor commitment and attitudes toward use of new technology; poor computer policies and practices; and conflicting hardware and software preferences. The article suggests several reasons for these problems, draws implications for instruction of computer-supported group writing, and suggests topics for further research.

This study examined the effects of computer network technologies on teacher-student and student-student interactions in a writing course emphasizing multiple drafts and collaboration. Two sections used traditional modes of communication (face-to-face, paper, and phone); two other sections, in addition to using traditional modes, used electronic modes (electronic mail, bulletin boards, and so on). Patterns of social interaction were measured at two times: 6 weeks into the semester and at the end of the semester. Results indicate that teachers in the networked sections interacted more with their students than did teachers in the regular sections. In addition, it was found that teachers communicated more electronically with less able students than with more able students and that less able students communicated more electronically with other students.

The triple focus of my title reflects some problems I've been concentrating on ás I thought about and prepared for the opportunity to speak last week at the Midwest Writing Centers Association meeting in St. Cloud, and here at the Pacific Coast/Inland Northwest Writing Centers meeting in Le Grande.Til try as I go along to illuminate -or at least to complicate -each of these foci, and I'll conclude by sketching in what I see as a particularly compelling idea of a writing center, one informed by collaboration and, I hope, attuned to diversity.

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Donald C. Stewart, Samuel Boothby, Kenneth A. Bruffee, Maxine C. Hairston, Comments on John Trimbur's "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning", College English, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Oct., 1990), pp. 689-696

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Researchers and teachers are joining in a movement to introduce more collaborative work in language arts classrooms. While collaborative learning and writing are valuable activities in any classroom, not enough is understood about what happens when collaborative activities are introduced into a traditional classroom discourse structure. This study analyzes a collaborative activity, both as a traditional classroom event and as a collaborative event. The results of the analysis suggest that, even when the activity is explicitly collaborative and students are experienced collaborators, patterns of traditional classroom discourse dominate their communicative choices.

It is pointed out that preparing people to work collaboratively allows them to experience some issues of professional ethics, cooperation, responsibility, and decisionmaking. A model for teaching people to work collaboratively is described. A teaching team, comprised of a technical communication professor and a clinical psychologist, explains group dynamics and the three phases of group development to students. The team then asks the members of a group to rehearse roles and discuss various issues that may arise in their groups. It is concluded that people experience and work through issues of collaboration and professional ethics before they begin to work as a group.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

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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-

(1990). Rhetoric in a new key: Women and collaboration. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 234-241.

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