Early status reports on WAC call for engagement with the disciplines, robust research about writing, and a transformation from missionary work to a more wide-ranging model. A Taxonomy of WAC describes common characteristics of WAC programs as well as organizing those characteristics into a progression from initiation to change agency.

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This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

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If the tale we are about to tell sounds familiar, the reason lies in a familiar pattern. An awareness of the status quo arises from emerging dissatisfaction with an increasing number of features of that situation. A certain floundering around ensues, during which various factions propose various solutions. Finally, a new plan emerges and is put into place. Over time, that new plan becomes a new status quo; and the cycle continues. Robert Connors describes that cycle within the field of Rhetoric and Composition, but the pattern itself is hardly new. Thomas Carlyle described it in his 1831 essay “Characteristics. ” Thomas S. Kuhn documented similar cycles throughout the history of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a work that reads across disciplines to chart revolutionary shifts in accepted intellectual paradigms. Our story of WAC’s evolution at Carleton College chronicles two of these cycles, and what justifies the telling is the way the story parallels WAC’s evolution from a faculty development movement to a multi-disciplinary initiative, and finally into an era when demands for outcomes-based accountability extend what we believe are unprecedented opportunities for WAC programs, which are a nexus where several important dimensions of student learning come together. Our tale, then, chronicles an alliance between WAC and assessment, an alliance that we believe represents WAC’s third evolutionary stage. On the other hand, if the tale we are about to tell sounds new, the reason stems from that very alliance, from the fact that what we are chronicling is WAC on a new frontier. For a variety of reasons, the growing accountability movement has focused on Writing Across the Curriculum. Of course, WAC in its writing-in-the-disciplines mode brings together

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