Reviewed are Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location, by Lisa Ede; Self-Development and College Writing, by Nick Tingle; and The End of Composition Studies, by David W. Smit.

This critically acclaimed text surveys the major research, theories, and methodologies of teaching writing and examines the effectiveness of this material based on empirical studies.

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Composition theory generally has ignored grammar over the past 15 years, focusing instead on what has been described as “classifications of texts and relations among writers, readers, and subject matter.” Nevertheless, composition has been and continues to be strongly influenced by the model of language that is implicit in modern grammar. This model proposes that language is rule governed and, as a result, is deterministic. Transformational-generative grammar is the most well-known articulation of the model among composition specialists. This article describes the general features of the model and discusses some of the ways it has influenced composition. After assessing the various weaknesses of the rule-governed model, the article outlines a new model of language that is being developed in cognitive science by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and others working in parallel distributed processing. This alternative model is associational and probabilistic and is grounded in connectionist theory and research. An association model of language provides composition specialists new perspectives on writers, research, and theory. The article concludes by suggesting possible ways to reconsider the act of composing and related theories.

This book is a critically informed challenge to the traditional histories of rhetoric to the current emphasis on Aristotle Plato as the most significant classical voices in rhetoric. In it, Susan C. Jarratt argues that the first sophistsa diverse group of traveling intellectuals in the fifth century B.C.should be given a more prominent place in the study of rhetoric composition. Rereading the ancient sophists, she creates a new lens through which to see contemporary social issues, including the orality/literacy debate, feminist writing, deconstruction, writing pedagogy.The sophists pleasure in the play of language, their focus on historical contin-gency, the centrality of their teaching for democratic practice were sufficiently threatening to their successors Plato Aristotle that both sought to bury the sophists under philosophical theories of language. The censure of Plato Aris-totle set a pattern for historical views of the sophists for centuries. Following Hegel Nietzsche, Jarratt breaks the pattern, finding in the sophists a more progressive charter for teachers scholars of reading writing, as well as for those in the adjacent disciplines of literary criticism theory, education, speech communication, ancient history.In tracing the historical interpretations of sophistic rhetoric, Jarratt suggests that the sophists themselves provide the outlines of an alternative to history-writing as the discovery recounting of a set of stable facts. She sees sophistic use of narrative in argument as a challenge to a simple division between orality literacy, current discussions of which virtually ignore the sophists. Outlining similarities between ecriture feminine and sophistic style, Jarratt shows that contemporary feminisms have more in common with sophists than just a style; they share a rhetorical basis for deployment of theory in political action. In her final chapter, Jarratt takes issue with accounts of sophistic pedagogy focusing on technique the development of the individual. She argues that, despite its employment by powerful demagogues, sophistic pedagogy offers a resource for today s teachers interested in encouraging minority voices of resistance through language study as the practice of democracy.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the covert linguistic behavior of two groups of subjects, one classified as above-average users of language, the other as below-average users. It was hypothesized that the remedial group would manifest higher levels of subvocal motor activity than the above-average group during stimulated tasks, but that during pausing episodes that occur during writing the remedial group would manifest lower levels of subvocal activity than its counterpart. During each task, covert linguistic behavior was measured continuously by three electromyographs and was analyzed to determine physiological changes. The results confirm the hypotheses and suggest a lower level of cognitive activity on the part of the remedial group. Given that pausing episodes have come to be recognized as important periods of discourse planning, failure to utilize pauses for planning might account for qualitative differences in the writing of the two groups.

The primary hypothesis was that field independent subjects would produce discourse that would be judged more coherent than the discourse of field dependent subjects. A total of 44 subjects in their first term of college composition were selected from a group of 60 volunteers from two universities and a community college. Each subject was administered the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, and the Group Embedded Figures Test. There were five research conditions: Three evoked oral responses, and one evoked a written response. A group of readers unaware of the nature of the research evaluated each response holistically, rating it in terms of a coherence scale. Coherence scores were then analyzed in relation to cognitive style classification. The primary hypothesis was supported by the data. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated significant cognitive style effect, F(6,25) = 4.82, p &lt;.0001. The correlation between cognitive style and coherence was significant, r(32) = .54, p &lt;.002. The results suggest that cognitive style is a significant variable in explaining differences between good writers and poor ones.