This special issue features articles that can help composition instructors think about ways to assess student products that are delivered in a variety of media. Although the topic of assessment is a common one, challenges arise as we apply—and adapt—our traditional assessment strategies to the features and components of compositions produced using new media. It is our hope that by engaging with the experiences of the authors of the articles in this special issue, readers of this issue will begin a conversation—among themselves, with their students—that leads them to articulate, reflect upon, and continually refine the criteria that are essential to both formative and summative assessment.

Computer technology is expanding our profession’s conception of composing, allowing visual information to play a substantial role in an increasing variety of composition assignments. This expansion, however, creates a major problem: How does one assess student work on these assignments? Current work in assessment provides only partial answers to this question. Consequently, this article will review current theory and practice in assessment, noting its limitations as well as its strengths. The article will then draw on work in both verbal and visual communication to explain an integrative approach to assessment, one that allows instructors to consider students’ work with visuals without losing sight of conventional goals of a “writing” course. The article concludes by illustrating this approach with an analysis of an unconventional student text “a T-shirt”that students submitted as the final assignment for a relatively conventional writing course.

This is the first book to provide a careful treatment of issues that underlie composition teaching, theory, and research.Lee Odell and his contributors believe that composition professionals in the classroom must approach their work with what Peter Elbow calls a theoretical stance. Teachers of writing need to take an active role in composing the theories that underlie efforts to teach their students to write. Behind everything that composition teachers do are fundamental assumptions about knowledge and the processes of teaching and learning, about the goals of education, and about the role of writing in people s lives.Odell s introduction examines the basic relationships between theory and practice. To explore specific sets of assumptions about knowledge, education, and writing, he has gathered together a group of major composition scholars, including Shirley Brice Heath, Jim W. Corder, and Anne J. Herrington. Although each author addresses a different issue, they all invite the reader to join them in the process of identifying and shaping the theories that make up the profession.

A few years ago I attended the Technical Writing Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (that's TWIRP, unfortunately) which runs concurrently with the Technical Writing Institute for Teachers (TWIT, to double the ignominy). Although the Institutes share a foyer and a few major speakers, they have different directors (one of whom is Lee Odell, co-editor of the anthology above), and for the most part their respective attendees participate in separate sessions. When the coffee break is over, it's TWITs to the left, TWIRPs to the right.

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Although speech and writing constitute different modes of communication and make different demands on a communicator, there is some reason to think that the act of speaking may directly assist the act of writing. Tovatt and Miller (1967) have reported results of an experimental composition program in which each student was taught to test the patterns he writes against his ingrained oral pattern (p. 7) . Citing Alexander Pope's line The must seem an echo to the sense, Tovatt and Miller claimed that reading a passage aloud can help writers examine their work for inept phrasing or lack of clarity. Robert Zoellner (1969) and Terry Radcliffe (1972) have argued that students are often able to say aloud that which they are not able to write. Both writers suggest that speaking aloud to another student can help students discover and clarify ideas they will subsequently write about. We accept those scholars' basic claim: spoken language may help writers formulate or clarify the message they wish to communicate in writing. But we wonder if speech and writing may be related in still another way. Both of us occasionally find ourselves thinking of our writing as recorded speech, wondering how a passage will to a reader, what voice qualities volume, timbre, speed, inflection are suggested by our written language. Both of us can think of times when we were very concerned with how a written piece (one intended for a journal, not for oral presentation to a group) would be performed, how it would if delivered to a live audience. We were concerned not with sound as echo to the sense but whether the implied in writing was appropriate for the speaker-audience relationship we were trying to establish. Given our assumption that spoken language and written

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