This is a written version of the acceptance speech the Mike Rose gave at the CCCC Convention in St. Louis on March 22, 2012.

The author discusses graduate courses he has taught that help students turn their academic prose into publically accessible opinion writing.

Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices—Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

We live in a time of the celebration of high technology and symbolic analysis, even predictions of the end of common work, yet physical work, work of body and hand, surrounds us, makes everyday life possible. For about six years now, I have been involved in a research project exploring the thought it takes to do physical work, the cognitive processes involved in various blue collar and service occupations like waitressing, hairstyling, plumbing, welding, industrial assembly, and the like. The study has led me to consider the way we categorize occupations, define intelligence, and think about learning and schooling. Of particular interest to readers of RTE will be my findings in the realm of literacy and numeracy. A number of people have already done important research on job-related literacy. What follows is in line with their research, though I would like to use it to help us reconsider some of the traditional ways we define and discuss written language, numbers, and graphics.

Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay M. Losey, Marisa Castellano, Reply by Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay M. Losey, and Marisa Castellano, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 588-589

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Each year a large number of students enter American higher education unprepared for the reading and writing tasks they encounter. Labeled “remedial,”“nontraditional,”“developmental,”“underprepared,”“nonmainstream,” these students take special courses and participate in special programs designed to qualify them to do academic work. Yet, we do not know very much about what it is that cognitively and socially defines such students as remedial. This article describes a research project on remediation at the community college, state college, and university levels designed to provide such information. We focus on a piece of writing produced by a student in an urban community college, examining it in the context of the student's past experiences with schooling, her ideas about reading and writing, the literacy instruction she was receiving, and her plans and goals for the future. Our analyses suggest that the student's writing, though flawed according to many standards, demonstrates a fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—how human beings continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define themselves in new ways.

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You don t know what it is, wrote Flaubert, to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Writer s block is more than a mere matter of discomfort and missed deadlines; sustained experiences of writer s block may influence career choices. Writers in the business world, professional writers, and students all have known this most common and least studied dysfunction of the composition process. Rose, however, sees it as a limitable problem that can be precisely analyzed and remedied through instruction and tutorial programs. Rose defines writer s block as an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of skill or commitment, which is measured by passage of time with limited functional/ productive involvement in the writing task. He applies the information processing models of cognitive psychology to reveal dimensions of the problem never before examined.In his three-faceted approach, Rose develops and administers a questionnaire to identify blockers and nonblockers; through simulated recall, he selects and examines writers experiencing both high and low degrees of blocking; and he proposes a cognitive conceptualization of writer s block and of the composition process.In drawing up his model, Rose delineates many cognitive errors that cause blocking, such as inflexible or conflicting planning strategies. He also discusses the practice and strategies that promote effective composition.

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A tremendous amount of energy goes into the contracting, developing, marketing, and revising of composition textbooks. And a significant amount of energy goes into criticizing them.2 More than we critics would like to admit, editors-good editors anyway-try to respond to this criticism. Thus we are seeing a new generation of textbooks that incorporate current work in rhetoric, psychoand sociolinguistics, the composing process, and writing across the curriculum. But the surprising thing is that such innovation goes on in the absence of fundamental research into what happens when students read current or traditional textbooks. True, some authors conduct field tests, but, for reasons that I hope will become clear in this essay, field testing provides limited answers to basic questions. We need more basic research than we now have into the interaction of reader and text when the text is one intended to teach a complex process. Without such research, we will never know whether or not our improvements--our attempts to revise and revitalize textbooks-are really contributing to growth in composing. But is such research really necessary, or would it simply be a desirable but ultimately academic exercise? Won't textbooks continue to become more effective as our knowledge about composing increases? Not necessarily, for we have good reason to suspect that knowledge of any complex process-like knowledge about composing-cannot be adequately conveyed via static print. As soon as such knowledge hits the page of a text, its rich possibilities are narrowed and sometimes rigidified. While I certainly don't want to suggest that no student learns from composition textbooks, I do want to raise the possibility that students learn about the process of writing from a textbook less frequently and less effectively than many of us think. To argue the legitimacy of the foregoing assertion, I'll begin with general speculation on the value of textbook discussions of writing and move toward more specific consideration of problem-solving in the act of composing. Though I will state

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In a now-famous critique, Richard Ohmann took composition textbook authors to task for envisioning student writing ahistorically and for administering rather than liberating the composing process (Freshman Composition and Administered Thought, in English in America [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976], pp. 133-171). A few years earlier, Richard Lanham had gleefully ripped into the condescension and vague precepts in the writing texts that lined his shelf (Style: An Anti-Textbook [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974]).1 Their criticism implied that better textbooks could be written. But I have come to believe that even if ahistoricity, coddling, and fingerwagging disappeared from composition texts, they would still be an ineffective way to teach writing. They are, by nature, static and insular approaches to a dynamic and highly context-oriented process, and thus are doomed to the realm of the Moderately Useful. Let me explain further by tracing the steps that led me to my conclusion.

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Ruth will labor over the first paragraph of an essay for hours. She'll write a sentence, then erase it. Try another, then scratch part of it out. Finally, as the evening winds on toward ten o'clock and Ruth, anxious about tomorrow's deadline, begins to wind into herself, she'll compose that first paragraph only to sit back and level her favorite exasperated interdiction at herself and her page: No. You can't say that. You'll bore them to death. Ruth is one of ten UCLA undergraduates with whom I discussed writer's block, that frustrating, self-defeating inability to generate the next line, the right phrase, the sentence that will release the flow of words once again. These ten people represented a fair cross-section of the UCLA student community: lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class backgrounds and high schools, third-world and Caucasian origins, biology to fine arts majors, C+ to Agrade point averages, enthusiastic to blase attitudes toward school. They were set off from the community by the twin facts that all ten could write competently, and all were currently enrolled in at least one course that required a significant amount of writing. They were set off among themselves by the fact that five of them wrote with relative to enviable ease while the other five experienced moderate to nearly immobilizing writer's block. This blocking usually resulted in rushed, often late papers and resultant grades that did not truly reflect these students' writing ability. And then, of course, there were other less measurable but probably more serious results: a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the composing process itself. What separated the five students who blocked from those who didn't? It wasn't skill; that was held fairly constant. The answer could have rested in the emotional realm-anxiety, fear of evaluation, insecurity, etc. Or perhaps blocking in some way resulted from variation in cognitive style. Perhaps, too, blocking originated in and typified a melding of emotion and cognition not unlike the relationship posited by Shapiro between neurotic feeling and

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