English-- not the language, but the activity that takes place in English departments at American universities--has long ceased to be anything resembling a single discipline, if in fact it ever was. It is a collection of disparate activities with multiple objects of inquiry, vaguely articulated methodologies, and diverse notions of proof. With new essays by Gerald Graff, Paul Lauter, Louie Crew, George Garrett, Thomas Dabbs, Walter L. Reed, Phyllis Frus, Stanley Corkin, Tilly Warnock, and Stanley Fish, this volume does not attempt to define the discipline. Instead, as Graff observes in the opening chapter, it enacts it, sometimes with a passion verging on violence, each essayist defending interests that are threatened by the others. It is English as theater. The essays can be read in any order; the arguments among them will out. The conflicts rage on even after the curtain falls. But the issues are clarified: What's at stake, not just for English but for society at large, is the tenuous boundary between conversation and chaos.

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In a style that combines scholarly care with remarkable readability, North examines the development of the field of composition in a way it has not been examined before. Rather than focusing on what people claim to know about teaching writing, he concerns himself primarily with how they claim to know it. Eight groups of knowledge-makers are treated in separate chapters: Practitioners, Historians, Philosophers, Critics, Experimentalists, Clinicians, Formalists, and Ethnographers. Each of these chapters orients the reader by tracing the mode's first uses in the field and listing its best known and most important adherents; then goes on to explain how the mode of inquiry works, illustrating key points with painstaking analysis of well-known studies. In his final three chapters, North turns from these individual modes to consider the field as a whole: How have these different ways of making knowledge come together? What is Composition now, and what is it likely to become?

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Nineteen years ago, Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer compared research in written composition to chemical research as it emerged from period of alchemy,1 an image that continues to haunt us, leading us to expect research in composition to evolve as a discipline, like each of sciences, with universally accepted methods and neat boundaries around its subject. Since that time a great deal of important research has occurred, much of it supported by methods and insights imported from social and behavioral sciences. But evolution suggested by image has not occurred. In particular, we certainly know more about evaluation than we did twenty years ago; but what we know is not definitive, nor is it an orderly and systematic corpus. It may be described as a growing list of terms and techniques, such as the general impression scales a system used by ETS;2 and analytic scales, guided scoring procedure developed by Paul Diederich;3 and Primary Trait Scoring, system developed by Richard Lloyd-Jones for National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP);4 and T-unit analysis, measure of syntactic fluency invented by Kellogg Hunt;5 and holistic scoring, a generic term that, as Charles Cooper defines it, includes a variety of guided scoring methods;6 and relative readability, focus of measurement proposed by E. D. Hirsch in The Philosophy of Composition.7 What is remarkable about this list is that it would make as much sense to study it in alphabetical order as chronological. Each of items is so thoroughly independent of others that not even order of their invention is logical or necessary. To items I have mentioned might be added others so disparate in what they purport to measure as to suggest that we have not even agreed on what it is we are trying to evaluate--whether it is mastery of editorial skills, or indices of cognitive development, or success in communicating a semantic intention. In evaluation of writing, old systems survive invention of new ones; nothing supersedes or replaces anything else. There are a few gains in precision, but always at expense of

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(1980). Media transforming media: Implications of Walter Ong's stages of literacy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 56-61.

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