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