If proper placement is a matter of guiding students into the course that is best suited to their educational background and current writing ability, directed self-placement may be the most valid procedure we can use. (Royer and Gilles 69-70).

Many theorists have found it helpful to examine the presuppositions of current rhetorical theories in an effort to discover, in critical fashion, our roots, the tacit tradition, and lay claim to the discipline's intellectual heritage. To unearth the intellectual ancestors of modem rhetoric is certainly a prolegomenon to any future claim the field of composition might make to being a discipline, but for now this effort is beset with difficulties.