(1989). Disciplines and communities, “armies” and “monasteries,” and the teaching of composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 137-146.

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Ellen Strenski, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 36, No. 2, Writing in the Academic and Professional Disciplines: Bibliography Theory Practice Preparation of Faculty (May, 1985), pp. 247-248

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IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise: