Assessment, including writing assessment, is a form of social action. Because standardized tests can be used to reify the social order, local assessments that take into account specific contexts are more likely to yield useful information about student writers. This essay describes one such study, a multiple-measure comparison of accelerated summer courses with nonaccelerated courses. We began with the assumption that the accelerated courses would probably not be as effective as the longer courses;but our assessment found that assumption largely to be incorrect. Contextual information made it clear that students were taking summer accelerated courses strategically, for reasons we had been unaware of and in ways that forced us to reinterpret their writing and our courses.

This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals, compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an academic discipline.

This investigation sought normative longitudinal change in student writing during college. It used a random sample of students (N= 64), each of whom had produced essays at two points in their undergraduate careers, matriculation and junior year. Measures were writing features showing undergraduate change toward competent, working-world performance. From a principal-components factoring of variables used in a previous study, nine measures were selected as good representatives of nine factors—factors of independent and bound ideas, idea elaboration and substantiation, local cohesion, establishment of logical boundaries, free modification, fluency, and vocabulary. When applied to the 1st-year and junior-year writing, eight of the nine measures, including a holistic rating, recorded statistically significant change, all in the direction of workplace performance. Directions for further research are discussed.

The two volumes under review make strange companions in many ways, but they share a concern for this perennial student who thinks of “course simply as credit.” They both deplore the mercenary and the expedient in higher education, particularly in writing instruction. They both are for learning, foremost and last. But their remedies to the credit syndrome are quite different, even antithetical. In part this is because their frames of reference are so different, the one never looking beyond course itself, the other holding to a longer view. This difference in frame of reference deserves some thought.

The authors twice replicated C. Haas and L. Flower's 1988 think-aloud reading study, which found that graduate students used “rhetorical” reading strategies to interpret a passage, whereas first-year college students used such strategies hardly at all. Rhetorical reading strategies use suppositions about the social, cultural, and historical context of the writing. The main intent of the replications was to see whether different outcomes might be found if the passage read dealt with a topic more familiar to first-year students. With the original passage, the results roughly supported Haas and Flower. But with the more familiar topic, the undergraduates generated substantially more rhetorical comments than they did with the Haas and Flower passage. Personal narrative and value-laden commentary were also measured, with older students far outproducing first-year students. The caution for researchers and teachers is to avoid hasty assumptions about underlying language competence without considering contextual factors.

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Theoretically, the persistence of surface error in student writing may be understood, at least in part, as a normal side effect of development in writing skill. Language tactics newly attempted by a writer increase the likelihood that new mistakes will be made, or old mistakes made anew. This theory, that the context of writing improvement helps explain writing error, is tested by comparing the impromptu essay performance of college freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and of postcollege employees. Eight surface errors were measured: misinformation of possessives, faulty predication, faulty pronoun reference, faulty syntactic parallelism, mispunctuation of final free modifiers, sentence fragments, comma splices, and misspellings. For each, four error rates were constructed in order to compare different ways of visualizing the relation of error to other aspects of writing. Generally, the findings support the theory: The college students here do measurably improve their writing and do continue making mistakes at about the same rate, but mistakes allied to the improvement. An implication is that undue efforts by teachers to prevent the mistakes may hinder the improvement.

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Findings from a comparison of undergraduate and on-the-job writers recommend some changes in traditional methods of teaching technical writing in college. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and “competent” writers in business and industry were given the same composing task. The writing of the employees showed telling and sometimes unexpected differences in a wide variety of areas, in length, vocabulary, organization, specificity, coherence, sentence formation, and surface error. Implied is increased attention to several general writing skills: compression of meaning, fluency of expression, efficiency in techniques of coherence, expandability of organization and syntax, and rhetorical maneuverability and adaptability.

According to a recent survey, top and mid-level managers admit that one of the four main difficulties that beset them in their writing is to organize content. Yet another survey reports that of weaknesses found by college teachers of composition in freshman writing, inability to organize essays falls sixteenth, after, for instance, failure to proofread and over-use of the passive. 1 This gap between what students will need to be able to do on the job and what teachers think students need appears even more serious when one looks at how the teachers worded this sixteenth weakness: Students are aware of only one organizational pattern-the five-paragraph theme. Five paragraphs, of course, are not necessarily a pattern of organization at all, but rather a stylistic uniform. As we shall see, college freshmen, even writing impromptu on the second day of class, actually generate a variety of good organizational patterns. The implication is that writing teachers do not distinguish extended patterns in student writing very readily. This is an ungenerous conclusion, though later I will offer more support for it, and I hasten to say that college students often make their organization hard to see. Researchers, too, have not helped teachers here, and not one piece of research can be found even naming the sorts of organization that students do use for whole essays. Basic information seems called for. Such, at least, is all my essay here pretends to offer. First I will describe a classification of organizational patterns for whole essays and a method by which both teachers and researchers may use it to analyze student essays. Then I will report the results of such an analysis applied to a controlled study of underclass writing. Since this study distinguishes freshman, sophomore, junior, and competent adult levels of achievement, I can conclude with recommendations for teachers that are not wholly intuitive.