Drawing upon their longitudinal study of four undergraduate writers and focusing on the progress of one of them, the authors question assumptions that confuse skills assessment with the measurement of academic and personal development. They argue for a broader view of writing development and a teaching approach that fosters it.

Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch, The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 41-62

This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

hen in 1968 Ellis Page and Dieter Paulus published The Analysis of Essays by Computer, they saw a promising future for programs that could evaluate both the aesthetic traits of essays and their substantive content (191). Now, more than thirty years later, the future that Page and Paulus envisaged seems to have arrived: computer power has increased exponentially, textand content-analysis programs have become more plausible as replacements for human readers, and our administrators are now the targets of heavy marketing from companies that offer to read and evaluate student writing quickly and cheaply. E-rater, developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), is today used as one reader for evaluating the essay portion of the Graduate Management Admissions Test-a human is still the other reader. Intellimetric, developed by Vantage Technologies, is used for evaluating writing in a range of applications, K through college. WritePlacer Plus, developed by Vantage for the College Board, is being marketed as a cheap and reliable placement instrument. The Intelligent Essay Assessor, developed by Landauer, Laham, and Foltz at the University of Colorado, is now being marketed through their company, Knowledge Analysis Technologies, to evaluate essay exams for college courses across disciplines. The firms that are marketing the machine scoring of student writing all explicitly or implicitly define the task of reading, evaluating, and responding to student writing not as a complex, demanding, and rewarding aspect of our teaching, but as a burden that should be lifted from our shoulders. The current scene in American postsecondary

Begins with a quick history of the English profession’s response to the prospect/specter of the computer as reader of student writing. Describes two programs that are now being heavily marketed and publicized nationally. Sketches out some of the implications of these programs for members of the profession of English in America.

Recent Surveys indicate that writing-in-the-disciplines programs have been established or projected by more than one-third of the colleges and universities in the United States. The fourteen essays in this volume chart the history of this interdisciplinary development in both the United States and Great Britain and examine the wide range of forms that writing-in-the-disciplines programs have taken in American higher education. The collection outlines the social, intellectual, and political forces that have shaped the movement; presents perspectives on the programs from disciplines outside English studies; describes the relations among writing, reaching, and learning; and considers the future of the movement.This work is perhaps the only book-length treatment of the subject to explore the historical roots before turning to the practitioners (a number of whom helped invent the field).... Recommended. Choice