By understanding the verbal and nonverbal manifestations of autism as a rhetorical imperative “a perspective that involves applying Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening” scholars can do much to dissolve the idea of otherness that appears in discussions of this topic.

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Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

Using Bakhtin’s comparison of the two basic kinds of medieval festivals - official feasts and carnivals - as seen in “Rabelais and His World,” Heilker identifies two ways to teach the ritual of writing. First, students are trained to practice only one kind of writing - the official feast of thesis and support writing. But there is also an opposing and complementary public writing ritual - the carnival - that allows for liberation from accepted conventions and the freedom for students to reinvent themselves and their worlds. Students should be prepared not only to practice the official feast, Heilker says, but also to engage in carnivalesque writing as well.

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Keywords in Composition Studies is the first systematic inquiry into the vocabulary of writing teachers and theorists. In brief yet heavily researched essays, contributors explore the development of and interconnections among fifty-five of the most consequential words in the field. It is with these critical terms that the contemporary field of composition has been composed, and in this sense, Keywords in Composition Studies is an introduction to the principal ideas and ideals of compositionists. Yet this book is neither dictionary nor an encyclopedia; it does not attempt to capture the established knowledge of unified discipline through its vocabulary but rather explores the multiple layers of meaning inhabiting the words writing teachers and theorists have depended and continue to depend on most. Each essay begins with the assumption that its central term is important precisely because its meaning is open, overdetermined. The purpose of each essay is to foreground range of meaning signified by its central term rather than to pinpoint a meaning. In this sense, Keywords in Composition Studies is practical model for reading the texts of an expanding and unsettled field.

Over twenty years ago, Robert Zoellner argued that our post hoc, artifactual approach to writing instruction, our teaching students by commenting on final drafts, is an especially inefficient system. In his College English monograph, Zoellner notes that in directing both our and our students' attention to characteristics of their written artifacts rather than to characteristics of the scribal act which produced those artifacts, we are dealing with effects only and thus adroitly avoiding the problem of cause altogether (272). In trying to teach writing by commenting on student papers, we are, he says, confusing texts with people, written words with the act of writing, the lever with the laboratory rat (280), history with behavior, the past with the present (283). In our confusion we end up trying to teach the page rather than the person, the product rather than the process, which, he notes, is patently hopeless endeavor (280). In other words, Zoellner implies, we are confusing declarative knowledge with procedural knowledge and thus teaching the what of writing rather than the how of writing. Four years ago in a lecture at Colorado State University, Zoellner was still voicing this same critique. In a telling analogy, he said: