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April 1996

  1. Politics and Ordinary Language: A Defense of Expressivist Rhetorics
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ce19969047
  2. Politics and Ordinary Language: A Defense of Expressivist Rhetorics
    Abstract

    ... the fact that their philosophical procedures are designed bring us a consciousness of the words we must have, and hence of the lives we must have, represents for me a recognizable version of the wish to establish the truth of this world. But then wherever there really is a love of wisdom-or call it the passion for truth-it is inherently, if usually ineffectively, revolutionary; because it is the same as hatred of the falseness in one's character and of the needless and unnatural promises in one's institutions. Stanley Cavell, An Audience for Philosophy

    doi:10.2307/378853

March 1996

  1. Review essays
    Abstract

    Alan W. France. Composition As a Cultural Practice. Westport, CN: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. 171 pages. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps, editors. Composition in Four Keys: An Inquiry into the Field. Mountain Valley, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995. 608 pages. A. L. Becker. Beyond Translation: Essays in Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press, 1995. 431 + ix pages. Sherrie L. Grandin. Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995. 166 pages. Mike Rose. Possible Lives. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 454 pages. $24.95. Richard McKeon. On Knowing—The Natural Sciences. Compiled by David B. Owen. Edited by David B. Owen and Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 405 pages. $65.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper. Jasper Neel. Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory and Writing in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 259 pages. $24.95.

    doi:10.1080/07350199609389074

November 1995

  1. A Comment on "Community in the Expressivist Classroom"
    doi:10.2307/378410

October 1995

  1. Constructing Writers: Barrett Wendell's Pedagogy at Harvard
    Abstract

    arrett Wendell, a composition teacher at Harvard in the late-19th century, is often associated with product-oriented currenttraditional rhetoric by Berlin, Kitzhaber and other historians of the field. Yet Wendell's relationship to current-traditional rhetoric is not so clear cut. Archival holdings indicate that many pedagogical techniques associated with modern writing pedagogy are ones Wendell used at Harvard one hundred years ago. Wendell, as Katherine Adams and John Adams have said about him, recognized the effectiveness of peer editing and conferencing-he knew that students needed an audience (429). Further, Wendell wrote an unpublished critique of the modes of discourse that predates those of James Kinneavy and James Britton and his associates, which Thomas Newkirk has described in a recent Rhetoric Review article. These

    doi:10.2307/358709

June 1995

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Humanistic Aspects of Technical Communication. Ed. Paul M. Dombrowski. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1994. 239 pp. Part of Baywood's Technical Communication Series, Jay R. Gould, ed. Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Sidney I. Dobrin. Albany: State University of New York. 1994. 360 pp. Publications Management: Essays for Professional Communicators. Ed. O. Jane Allen and Lynn H. Deming. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1994. 251 pp. Designing and Writing Online Documentation: Hypermedia for Self‐Supporting Products, 2nd ed. William Horton. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994. 439 pp. with index. On‐the‐Job Learning in the Software Industry: Corporate Culture and the Acquisition of Knowledge. Marc Sacks. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1994. 216 pp.

    doi:10.1080/10572259509364603

May 1995

  1. Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism: (Inter)Views
    Abstract

    Gary A. Olson presents six in-depth interviews with internationally prominent scholars outside of the discipline and twelve response essays written by noted rhetoric and composition scholars on subjects related to language, rhetoric, writing, philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. The interviews are with philosopher of language Donald Davidson, literary critic and critical legal studies scholar Stanley Fish, cultural studies and African American studies scholar bell hooks, internationally renowned deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller, feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins, and British logician and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism. Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary. This book is a follow-up to the editor s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.

    doi:10.2307/358444
  2. Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom
    doi:10.2307/358443

March 1995

  1. Peter Elbow's rhetoric of reading
    Abstract

    in the student's hands, Elbow's approach the teaching of writing appears be revolutionary and freeing. Using such techniques as freewriting, open-ended writing, and other forms of private writing, Elbow encourages students tap their own experience as a source for their writing and elevates the student's own resources over those of the academic community. Elbow's focus on the psychological and physical drives of the writer, the desire be loved (Sharing and Responding) and the compulsion write (Embracing 73), makes writing something that the teacher can share, but apparently not control or appropriate. Recently, however, composition theorists have been critical of the conservative political implications of Elbow's pedagogy, arguing that Elbow's rhetoric, defined variously as Romantic expressivism or expressionistic, fails empower students effect change through language. These critics argue that Elbow's theory hides the social of language (Faigley 531) and teaches students how to assert a private vision, a vision which, despite its uniqueness, finally represents humankind's best nature (Berlin 487). Notably though, those who criticize Elbow for being antisocial focus only on what Elbow has say about writers and writing. In doing so, they overlook what Elbow has say about the most social aspect of writing-the role of the reader and the exchange between writer and reader. In this essay I will examine Elbow's rhetoric of reading in order suggest that these taxonomic critiques oversimplify his theoretical and pedagogical position within the field of composition studies. In fact, a closer examination of Elbow's rhetoric of reading reveals that the problem is not so much that he ignores the social, it's that he tries control it. Like those who criticize him, Elbow would like help students demystify the social processes of the Academy, balance the power between writer and reader within the social space of the composition classroom. In his attempt control the transaction between writer and reader, however, Elbow reproduces the same hierarchy he wishes dismantle. I will suggest, nonetheless, that there is a means by which the more liberating aspects of Elbow's rhetoric of reading might be kept intact.

    doi:10.1080/07350199509359190

January 1995

  1. Community in the Expressivist Classroom: Juggling Liberal and Communitarian Visions
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ce19959149

September 1994

  1. Toward a pedagogy of the enthymeme: The roles of dialogue, intention, and function in shaping argument
    Abstract

    teach composition using an enthymematic approach. Or I might say, teach composition from the or the enthymeme. Unfortunately, the word enthymeme is more likely to alienate composition teachers than to attract their interest and attention, despite growing body of scholarship that positions the enthymeme at the very heart of the composing process. According to the viewpoint that emerges from this scholarship, enthymematic reasoning is fundamental to cognition and discourse, and hence to writing. If so, then talking about the enthymeme ought to be an essential and powerful way of talking about the composing process, and of it (Grimaldi, Gage, Green, Walker, Porter, Hood, Emmel, among others). Part of the difficulty of explaining what is meant by teaching enthymematically resides in the word enthymeme itself, which, unlike more familiar composition terminology (thesis, evidence, conclusion), lacks common and shared meaning, even recognition, for both students and teachers alike. As one of my students complained, couldn't even find it in the dictionary! Other students have been perturbed when their other teachers do not recognize the word. As means of understanding and discussing composition, the term enthymeme is still in the process of gaining definition and application-that is, of becoming grounded in composition theory, apart from the realms of formal logic and classical rhetorical theory. The age-old tendency to reduce the enthymeme to a truncated syllogism, or to mere figure of speech with little rhetorical potential beyond the moment of utterance, robs it of the fullness from which its pedagogical potential derives (see, for example, Conley's and Poster's surveys of ancient and modem interpretations of the enthymeme). Yet the enthymeme is not just logical paradigm (statement 1 is true because statement 2 is true) but also conceptualization of rich set of relationships with the potential of being expressed in multitude of ways, of which the enthymematic and syllogistic paradigms are only the most schematic and thesis-like. A successful essay is no less enthymematic for not being

    doi:10.1080/07350199409359178

February 1994

  1. Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process
    doi:10.2307/358592
  2. Review: Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ccc19948801

October 1993

  1. Rule-Governed Approaches to Language and Composition
    Abstract

    Composition theory generally has ignored grammar over the past 15 years, focusing instead on what has been described as “classifications of texts and relations among writers, readers, and subject matter.” Nevertheless, composition has been and continues to be strongly influenced by the model of language that is implicit in modern grammar. This model proposes that language is rule governed and, as a result, is deterministic. Transformational-generative grammar is the most well-known articulation of the model among composition specialists. This article describes the general features of the model and discusses some of the ways it has influenced composition. After assessing the various weaknesses of the rule-governed model, the article outlines a new model of language that is being developed in cognitive science by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and others working in parallel distributed processing. This alternative model is associational and probabilistic and is grounded in connectionist theory and research. An association model of language provides composition specialists new perspectives on writers, research, and theory. The article concludes by suggesting possible ways to reconsider the act of composing and related theories.

    doi:10.1177/0741088393010004003

September 1993

  1. Two Comments on "Is Expressivism Dead?"
    doi:10.2307/378597

May 1993

  1. Condillac and the History of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract: Four decades after the publication of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (5th ed.), a French text appeared which attempted to revise and perfect Lockean theory. This text, the 1746Essay on the Origin of Human Understanding by Etienne Bonnot, Abbéde Condillac (1714r–80), and several later works by the same author add to Lockean theory what Locke himself suggests but never fully carries out, a developmental account of understanding. But Condillac's developmentalism results in dual rhetorics—an aesthetic, expressive rhetoric and an empirical, referential rhetoric. This article discusses aesthetic expressivism in Condillac in relation to his speculations about the origins of language, with that discussion linked to the familiar opposition of referential scientific and expressive literary language.

    doi:10.1525/rh.1993.11.2.135

January 1993

  1. Power Relations, Technical Writing Theory, and Workplace Writing
    Abstract

    Technical writing theory and research about communication in large organizations mostly ignore from-the-top control of rhetoric. The usual emphasis on an individual writer negotiating with a known audience and generally free to decide on matters of style, organization, and so on can hide the ways that power relations often silently control internal rhetoric. Conclusions are based on two case studies: In the later Middle Ages, professional letters had to conform to a rhetorical format that necessarily foregrounded unequal power relations. In a contemporary nuclear power station, similar power relations purposely obscure writer and audience while procedures dictate format and content.

    doi:10.1177/1050651993007001006
  2. Aristotle's Rhetoric, Hitler's Program, and the Ideological Problem of Praxis, Power, and Professional Discourse
    Abstract

    Technical-professional communication as praxis, or social action, is extended beyond skill or amoral art into the realm of phronesis, concerned with reasoning about ends rather than means. However, praxis and phronesis are sociologically constructed and, like social-epistemic rhetoric, ideologically defined in the political context by the ethic of expediency enabling deliberative rhetoric. Hitler's use of propaganda to construct praxis and define phronesis in Nazi Germany is examined in terms of the rational but open-ended nature of Aristotle's political-ethical thought, and the implications for our understanding of Aristotelian praxis is discussed. Finally, the failure of professional discourse surrounding the siting of a low-level nuclear waste facility to create a persuasive reality and yet ideologically construct praxis is examined, raising questions concerning the possibility of a deliberative technical rhetoric in U.S. democracy.

    doi:10.1177/1050651993007001003

October 1992

  1. Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and Its Relation to Social Constructionism
    Abstract

    under attack, and social constructionism-the view that good writers must master the accepted practices of a discourse community-was widely adopted as an alternative. The purpose of this article is to defend expressivism against this attack, particularly against two charges. First, responding to the charge that expressivism, following the romantics, is tied to the ideal of the isolated writer, Steve Fishman argues on historical grounds that it was the social reform dimension of German romanticism that inspired expressivism. Second, Lucille McCarthy responds to the charge that expressivism disempowers students because it does not help them learn disciplinary and professional languages. She presents Fishman's class as one which is committed both to the mastery of philosophic method and to the development of student voices, committed, that is, to achieving social constructionist goals within an expressivist environment. Part I presents a theoretical perspective on expressivism; Part II shows the practical implementation of that theory in the classroom.

    doi:10.2307/377772
  2. Is Expressivism Dead?
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ce19929364

July 1992

  1. The Case for Oral Evidence in Composition Historiography
    Abstract

    The almost exclusive reliance on evidence developed from documentary analyses, specifically analyses of textbooks, in composition historiography has resulted in an agonistic, heroes-and-villains image of the history of writing instruction, whereby modern composition scholars have defined themselves in terms of their opposition to what has come to be called “current-traditional rhetoric.” This article promotes the use of oral evidence in composition historiography to guard against overgeneralization and simplistic reduction of composition history to binary oppositions. Oral interviews also can serve as a way of collecting information that would otherwise be lost, of exploring the thoughts, motivations, feelings, and values of informants, and of giving voice to those marginalized politically, socially, and professionally. This article also defends oral data against positivistic attacks on its reliability as evidence and argues that the evidentiary value of any piece of historical data depends not on some abstract ranking of different kinds of evidence but on the historian's understanding of the rhetorical context informing the production of that data.

    doi:10.1177/0741088392009003002

March 1992

  1. Literature and composition theory: Joyce Carol Oates' journal stories
    doi:10.1080/07350199209388974

December 1990

  1. Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Paradigmatic Diversity
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ccc19908950

November 1990

  1. Structuring argumentation in a social constructivist framework: A pedagogy with computer support
    doi:10.1007/bf00184766

October 1990

  1. Grammar and Technical Writing
    Abstract

    Harris argues that linguistic theory is useful for solving certain problems encountered in technical writing theory and pedagogy [1]. However, he undermines his purpose by introducing irrelevant distinctions between competing syntactic theories (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar) and by failing to exploit the full potential of the few applications he mentions. The passive rule is a case in point. It not only constitutes an operational test for identifying passive sentences, it also contributes to the flow of discourse by rearranging both thematic roles (e.g. agent and patient) and given/new information. The passive rule is only one of a class of noun phrase-moving operations that technical writing specialists may find useful.

    doi:10.2190/gvc1-jfbh-y72r-92n8

May 1990

  1. Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer
    Abstract

    When it was first published in 1989, Susan Miller s Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric the Writer established a landmark pedagogical approach to composition based the importance of the writer the act of writing in the history of rhetoric. Widely used as an introduction to rhetoric composition theory for graduate students, the volume was the first winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award from JAC and is still one of the most frequently cited books in the field.This first paperback edition includes a new introductory chapter in which Miller addresses changes in the field since the first edition, outlines new research, surveys positions she no longer supports. A new foreword by Thomas P. Miller assesses the proven impact of Rescuing the Subject on the field of rhetoric composition.Situating modern composition theory in the historical context of rhetoric, Miller notes that throughout the eighteenth century, rhetoric referred to oral, not written, discourse. By contrast, her history of rhetoric contends oral written discourse were related from the beginning. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, she shows how actual acts of writing comment both rhetoric composition. Miller also asserts that contemporary composition study is the necessary cultural outcome of changing conditions for producing discourse, describing the history of rhetoric as the gradual unstable relocation of discourse in conventions that only written language can create. She maintains teachers historians of rhetoric must recognize that the contemporary writing they analyze teach demands their attention to a textual rhetoric that allows theorizing the writer as always symbolically a student of situated meanings.

    doi:10.2307/358166

January 1989

  1. The course in classical rhetoric: Definition, development, direction
    Abstract

    Chapman/Tate descriptive survey of 38 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition has given us valuable information about these programs, which, for the most part, have sprung up only within the last ten years. survey, published in the Spring 1987 Review (124-86), revealed our programs' deep structure; it also has raised some questions about the definition, development and direction of our doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition. Few of the 38 programs that sent written materials for the survey listed classical rhetoric as core requirement, and almost half listed no history of rhetoric courses. However, 35 of the 38 programs listed theories of composition course. Because the availability of, as well as the teaching approach to, classical rhetoric can show the foundations on which our programs are built and the theoretical directions they may be taking, I prepared questionnaire on the classical rhetoric course offered in English departments, mailed it to 41 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition, and eventually received 37 completed questionnaires. survey results not only reveal some foundations and direction of our programs in rhetoric and composition but also point out areas for further study. Does the program offer course in classical rhetoric and, if so, is the course part of the core requirement were two of the primary survey questions. Twenty-eight out of the 37 programs (76%) that sent written materials reported they offer course either in classical rhetoric or wherein substantial part is devoted to classical Eight (23%) do not offer the course, but in six of these eight the course is offered in Speech Communication. Two programs reported that the course is listed but not taught. And two programs reported the course is not offered at all. Four programs reported that the course offered in the English Department is also offered in Speech Communication. 76 percent of programs offering the course differ from the Chapman/Tate percentages because some of the 28 programs defined theirs as course in classical rhetoric where only one-third, about five weeks, or less, is devoted to classical These courses are, in the words of one respondent, a rush through rhetoric. Some courses, titled Rhetoric and (or Composition and Rhetoric), are actually topic courses that can take any focus. In one program it depends on who teaches the course whether it is history of rhetoric or the teaching of composition. Course names are quite varied. Only six are called History of Rhetoric, and two are named History and Theories. (The naming of one course title, survey respondent told me, has long and hilarious story. In 1976 the course had been The of Rhetoric, but that's the title of Richards' book, so the title was changed to Philosophy of Composition, which became the title of Hirsch's book, so the program changed it to its present title, The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Composition, at which point Knoblauch and Brannon appeared.) Other course titles are Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern Discourse, Major Rhetorical Texts, Historical Studies, Rhetoric of Written Discourse. I was somewhat surprised that more of the course names didn't have the word written in the title to distinguish the course from the one offered in Speech for the last 75 years. Perhaps crossing departmental lines in the teaching of rhetoric is not the problem it was in the 70's. This subject itself would make an interesting study. classical rhetoric course is core requirement in 50 percent of the programs in contrast to the 91 percent of programs requiring composition theory. (In one program classical rhetoric is required, but it's offered only in Speech Communication.) These percentages suggest that we cannot assume the study of classical rhetoric as foundational for composition studies in our doctoral programs. In fact, it is possible for student to have Ph.D. specialty in rhetoric and composition without having had course in classical question here for further study is, then, how are we to define the rhetoric/composition speialist? next series of survey questions I asked focused on the frequency of the course offering, length of time it has been offered in the program, qualifications of the faculty who teach it, average enrollment and area of stuident specialty. In the majority of programs, the course is offered every other year and has been offered only within the last ten years. Usually, only one person teaches the course, faculty

    doi:10.1080/02773948909390833

September 1987

  1. Prolegomena to a rhetoric of tropes
    Abstract

    In his essay The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time, J. Hillis Miller remarks: the recognition that all language, even language that seems purely referential or conceptual, is figurative language and an exploration of the consequences of that view for the interpretation of literature represent, it seems to me, one of the major frontiers of literary study today (13). This view of language also represents one of the major frontiers of composition study. To connect this view of language to the study of composition, I propose that a theory of can be a means of relating composition theory to literary theory. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the four metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - can provide a conceptual framework for the composing process and a guide to critical reading. Tropes have developed into an explanatory power in a great many disciplines, including rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy, history, and literary theory. Rhetoricians have catalogued and defined a large number of these tropes, four of which - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - have been considered the most important. Kenneth Burke labeled these the master tropes

    doi:10.1080/07350198709359151
  2. Critical sub/versions of the history of philosophical rhetoric
    Abstract

    I think that, as rhetoricians and writing teachers, we will come of age and become autonomous professionals with a discipline of our own only if we can make a psychological break with the literary critics who today dominate the profession of English studies... [Already] we've left home in many ways, but we haven't cut the cord.... For example: We keep trying to find ways to join contemporary literary theory with composition theory. -Maxine Hairston, Breaking Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections, CCC 36 (1985): 273-74.

    doi:10.1080/07350198709359152

February 1986

  1. Social Cognitive Ability as a Predictor of the Quality of Expository and Persuasive Writing Among College Freshmen
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.58680/rte198615619

January 1986

  1. On the possibility of a unified theory of composition and literature
    Abstract

    Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the

    doi:10.1080/07350198609359121

January 1985

  1. Changing the Technical Writing Paradigm
    Abstract

    Although teachers of technical writing have long considered themselves as the vanguard, they too have shown considerable resistance to change, despite recent theoretical advances in composition theory. This author proposes that the technical writing community review its traditional views and attitudes toward the teaching of writing to incorporate insight derived from cross-disciplinary research.

    doi:10.2190/dlrk-hc1t-jn3g-kqpl
  2. Language and the Healing Arts: Some Recent Texts on Medical Writing
    Abstract

    Medical and scientific writing have traditionally occasioned debate. The earliest critics of scientific language were harsh because they were promoting a plain style of writing free from rhetorical embellishment, not because they questioned the writing ability of those they censured. Writing and language were central parts of scientific inquiry. Modern critics are likewise frequently harsh and derisive, but they have lost sight of the integrated approach to language and science that their predecessors had. This article examines three texts published within the last ten years that seem to reverse some trends in medical writing. Tapping non-scientific fields from philology to aesthetics to composition theory, these texts suggest ways in which the humanities can be reintegrated with the study of medical and scientific writing.

    doi:10.2190/acbm-ppev-tmej-ml7p
  3. The evolution of invention in current‐traditional rhetoric: 1850–1970
    Abstract

    In its classical formulation, invention is the canon that provides a rhetorician with more or less systematic procedures for finding argu- ments appropriate to the rhetorical occasion that faces her. In most of the composition textbooks written by influential nineteenth-century teachers of writing, however, invention is either greatly transformed from its classical guise or is slighted altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century most popular composition textbooks written in the vein now described as current-traditional treat invention as a means of systematically delimiting an area of thought in order that the writer may handle its exposition in discourse with maximum clarity. 1 In what follows I trace the evolution-or better, devolution-of the inventional procedure recommended by influential composition texts written during the last half of the nineteenth century, and follow its course into our own century. The term evolution is of course metaphorical; however the continuity and development of the inventional tradition I am tracing is remarkably homogeneous. The first-generation authors in the tradition-Alexander Jamieson, Samuel Newman, H. N. Day, and Alex- ander Bain are among the best known-cite and use the work of British rhetoricians George Campbell or Hugh Blair, while members of the second generation-John Franklin Genung, Adams Sherman Hill, Bar- rett Wendell, Fred Newton Scott, and Joseph V. Denney-generally acknowledge at least Bain, Genung, and Day. And after 1900 until about 1940, Wendell and Scott and Denney are the authoritative names in the tradition; they are as routinely cited in early twentieth-century textbooks as were Blair and Campbell in nineteenth-century works. Early nineteenth-century American school rhetoric is an amalgam of classical and eighteenth-century discourse theory. No American rhetoric text had yet succeeded in creating a satisfactory blend of the epistemological rhetoric formulated by George Campbell in his influen- tial Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and the Ciceronian rhetoric imparted by such popular works as John Ward's System of Oratory (1759).2 Alexander Jamieson's popular Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Litera- ture (1818) nicely represents the confusion of traditions which obtained in the early part of the century.3 Jamieson opens his treatise with a discussion of language which is an imitation of Hugh Blair's treatment of 146

    doi:10.1080/07350198509359089
  4. Dialectics of Coherence: Toward An Integrative Theory
    Abstract

    In Philosophy in a New Key Susanne Langer writes of the great generative ideas that periodically arise to transform our intellectual enterprises by changing the very terms in which we frame our questions and conceive our purposes. When one of these concepts bursts into consciousness, we cannot at first view it critically, because it is the nature of a key change to possess us with its compelling new vision of the world. For some time afterwards we are absorbed in exploiting the energizing, fertilizing power of the new idea, which seems limitless in its implications and applications. Only later, as a paradigm matures, can we begin to refine and correct its key concept and to achieve the critical distance necessary to recognize its bounds. We are approaching this moment in composition, which has taken process as its generative theme for over a decade. By keying composition studies to writers' thought processes and the relations between cognition and language, this theme has restored to the field what was lost with the decline of rhetoric: a genuinely rich, humanly significant, and inexhaustible object of inquiry. In the next stage of our development as a discipline, we need to take up a more critical attitude toward process theory, to probe its limits and to articulate and address some of the conceptual problems it leaves unresolved. I would like to make a contribution to that work in this essay. My starting point is the difficulty of handling textual issues-for example, matters of style or discourse form-within the process framework. That framework has no principled way to account for the role of texts in discourse events because it was constituted initially by a contrastive opposition between composing (dynamic process) and texts (inert product). Texts were therefore rejected as proper objects of inquiry in composition. I suggest we might resolve this problem and work toward a more comprehensive theory of discourse by developing concepts on the principle of integrating text and process at all levels of analysis.

    doi:10.2307/377350

May 1984

  1. Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/35/2/collegecompositionandcommunication14879-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc198414879

April 1984

  1. Social Cognition and Written Communication
    Abstract

    Considerations of audience awareness are receiving increased attention in composition theory and pedagogy. Sensitivity to audience characteristics exerts demonstrable effects on composing processes and products. Audience awareness is often conceived as a unitary, global construct, however. In fact, the distinctly identifiable dimensions of social cognition include (1) subskills, (2) coordination of perspectives, (3) content domain, (4) content stability, and (5) audience determinateness. These dimensions and their components are discussed along with their interaction with composing processes. This multidimensional conception of social cognition provides a framework for further composition research and teaching.

    doi:10.1177/0741088384001002003

May 1983

  1. Response to Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing"
    doi:10.2307/357411

March 1982

  1. Quintilian's value for modern composition theory and teaching1
    Abstract

    (1982). Quintilian's value for modern composition theory and teaching. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 95-104.

    doi:10.1080/02773948209390637
  2. Alexander Bain's Contributions to Discourse Theory
    Abstract

    In 1977 Donald Stewart startled his audience at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention by giving them a test.1 Not at all to his surprise, Professor Stewart found that although the teachers assembled devoted forty-five percent of their working time to teaching composition, hardly any of them recognized the names of twenty prominent rhetoricians or titles of works by those rhetoricians. Professor Stewart did not include Alexander Bain on his list, but had he done so very few of the writing teachers in his audience would have heard of Bain. Almost certainly, none would have read his books on composition and rhetoric. That such should be the case seems remarkable, for a great deal of what has been taught in traditional composition courses derives directly or indirectly from Bain's work. In an historical study of the paragraph written at the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Lewis describes Bain's influence as formative. Indeed, Lewis claims that Bain's analysis of the paragraph was presented and defended with the same acuteness and grasp that made him perhaps the ablest writer on rhetoric since Aristotle.2 Bain's stock, however, has plunged since Lewis wrote those words. The revival of interest in rhetoric occurring during the last three decades has led us to call into question what Richard Young calls the current-traditional in the teaching of composition.3 For those challenging this paradigm and attempting to improve or replace it, Bain has become a popular whipping boy, identified with a rigidly prescriptive, product-centered system. Exactly who was Alexander Bain, and has his influence on our discipline been, on the whole, salutary or detrimental? When Bain died at the age of eighty-six in 1903, major newspapers throughout Britain and North America carried the news. The headline in the New York

    doi:10.2307/377019

February 1982

  1. The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook
    Abstract

    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

    doi:10.2307/357852

December 1981

  1. A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing
    Abstract

    Preview this article: A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/32/4/collegecompositionandcommunication15885-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc198115885

March 1981

  1. John Genung and contemporary composition theory: The triumph of the eighteenth century
    doi:10.1080/02773948109390600

October 1980

  1. Developing a Technical Writing Theory and Pedagogy Course in an English Department
    Abstract

    As technical writing programs grow, English departments may alleviate the problems of the unprepared instructor by offering technical writing theory and pedagogy courses. Such courses should combine theory and pedagogy with assignments that are practical and introduce graduate students to the theoretical issues in the field. This article provides a syllabus and the reactions of students who completed such a course.

    doi:10.2190/29mu-e3k1-qmnd-8d1y

September 1980

  1. Richard Whately and Current-Traditional Rhetoric
    doi:10.58680/ce198013871

October 1978

  1. Literary Criticism and Composition Theory
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Literary Criticism and Composition Theory, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/29/3/collegecompositionandcommunication16310-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc197816310

May 1976

  1. Composing: A Cognitive Process Theory
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Composing: A Cognitive Process Theory, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/27/2/collegecompositionandcommunication16588-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc197616588

October 1953

  1. Writing as Process
    doi:10.2307/371599