Abstract

The last twenty years have seen a great expansion, as well as considerable shift of emphasis and focus, in publication about English composition. On even a cursory count, there are now over two dozen journals regularly publishing material in the field, not to mention books, course texts, research reports, or ERIC documents. However, as active composition researchers well know, there is no single bibliographic resource giving both full and focussed annual coverage of this output, nor any very certain means of identifying and retrieving the items previously published on a given composition topic.' There are available, of course, many orientatory bibliographies and research guides to composition, and these have real usefulness, but one needs to make a clear conceptual distinction between the selective or interpretive bibliographical guidance such guides offer and the more basic bibliographical control we increasingly need-on-going, systematic, non-judgmental coverage of activity in the field. Part of the problem with orientatory guides is their rapid obsolescence: as Edward Corbett has noted, Nothing-not even last year's hemline-dates as quickly as a published bibliography.2 But in addition to being dated, discursive and orientatory guides pose other problems: nearly all the existing guides are avowedly selective in their coverage, most of them are silent about the kinds of searching from which they were compiled, they are often biased one way or another in their selection of material, and, most fundamental of all, there are disturbing gaps in the chronological coverage they provide. The research consequences of current problems in composition bibliography have not been widely understood, and in this paper I want to explore four special features of the composition field that have made bibliographic control difficult. It is only when researchers, teachers, graduate students, librarians, and bibliographers recognize the special nature of composition re-