Abstract
What do we want students to know, what do we want them to have after completing a series of courses in college English? College English ought to provide students with certain communicative that enable them to ana lyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Especially exciting is the expanding body of knowledge centered on visual, aural, and silent texts. Within the past five years, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of silence, and the rhetoric of listening have joined guides to analysis and production of printed texts (see, e.g., Faigley et al.; Glenn; Ratcliffe). This trend signals increasing recognition of the need to develop nondiscursive communication skills, that college English should engage itself in perfecting. I use the term skills unapologetically. Although many in English studies are uncomfortable with the idea that we should teach skills?claiming instead that we teach texts or au thors?I think it is just the right word. Ultimately what students remember about