Controversy and Consensus in Freshman Writing:
An Overview of the Field

Karen Spear

Freshman writing, or English A as it was called, became a required course at Harvard College in 1900. Harvard was the first college in the nation to require a writing course, and freshman writing was for many years the only required course in the curriculum. The requirement resulted from Harvard president Charles Eliot's declaration in his 1869 inaugural address that there was a literacy crisis among entering Harvard students caused by "the prevailing neglect of the systematic study of the English language." In 1872 Adams Sherman Hill, a journalist, taught the first collegiate composition course. His goal was to offset the university's growing emphasis on "cramming without training" students, and he saw the course as preparation for university study. He taught the course by asking students to write about what they knew. By 1879 Eliot wrote, "I may as well abruptly avow, as a result of my reading and observation in the matter of education, that I recognized but one mental acquisition as an essential part of the education of a lady or a gentleman--namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother [End Page 319] tongue" (qtd. in Russell 1991, pp. 49-50). Harvard's English A became the model for composition courses around the country.

Since then, as Ohmann (1976) points out, American higher education has never been able to make sense of the freshman writing course. It is surrounded by mixed ideologies and philosophies, laden with multiple tasks and often contradictory expectations, and taught from oversimplified, uninformed, debased, truncated, and unexamined notions of rhetoric. The origins and history of the freshman writing course help to illuminate why so much confusion surrounds it.

The Development of the Freshman Writing Course

Until the mid-19th century, rhetoric was at the center of secondary and higher learning in the Western world; but as a distinct entity, the freshman writing course arose out of Eliot's introduction of the elective system into American higher education. The elective system replaced the uniform classical curriculum studied by all students and taught, by and large, by all faculty. Eliot believed that students ought to be able to make choices about what they would study because he recognized the emergence of an array of professional occupations that college graduates were facing in the marketplace. No longer were universities preparing students solely for the ministry, the bar, or the gentry.

Equally important, though, the British tradition of the liberal arts college was beginning to give way in America to an educational model based on the German research institute. With the explosion of knowledge, the proliferation of accessible printed texts, and the multiplication of academic specialties, faculty felt considerable interest in pursuing more specific fields of inquiry than the classical curriculum allowed. For faculty, professional communication through the printed text had replaced face-to-face oral communication. Correspondingly, for students, oral examinations gave way to written examinations. Russell (1991) characterizes the changes this way:

Writing was now embedded in a whole array of complex and highly differentiated social practices. . . . The new professionals increasingly wrote not for a general reader but rather for specialized audiences of colleagues who were united not primarily by ties of class but by shared activities, the goals--and this is crucial--the unique written conventions of a profession or discipline. . . . In the new print-centered compartmentalized secondary and higher education system, writing was no longer a single, generalizable skill learned once and for all at an early age; rather it was a complex and continuously developing response to specialized text-based discourse communities, highly embedded in the differentiated practices of those communities. (pp. 4-5)

As academic study became more specialized for students and faculty alike, a chorus of complaints arose from faculty about their students' inability to [End Page 320] use language acceptably. Meanwhile, by the late l9th century, Harvard had begun to broaden its admissions policy; and while it still recruited the best young men it could find, these students came from more diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. In other words, so long as there was a fixed curriculum taught to a very homogeneous student body by a very homogeneous faculty, there was no literacy crisis. The concept of universal literacy made sense when the universe was relatively narrow. When new students came together with new forms of academic knowledge--each with its own perspective about what constitutes literate practice, the old agreements about what literacy meant--and who got to participate in making those agreements--began to unravel. Interestingly, each successive literacy crisis in American higher education parallels the infusion of large numbers of new kinds of students into colleges and universities: the town and farm children of the post Civil War period, returning soldiers in both post World War periods, children of immigrants in the 1930s, the first wave of inner-city students in the 1960s, and the current wave of multicultural students.

Thus, freshman writing really began as an anomaly: it was supposed to reintroduce a standard of universal literacy in an environment where there was no longer agreement about what the concept meant. Writing instruction worked from assumptions about standards of literacy as fixed, universal, acontextual, and generalizable; from assumptions about content, which exists in subject areas, as distinct from expression, which is the realm of writing instruction; and from assumptions that students will have already learned the generalizable, elementary skill of correct and well-organized writing by the time they get to content courses which, in turn, are assumed to be the real meat of higher education. None of these assumptions is tenable.

From its very beginning, freshman writing instruction was marginalized as a remedial activity, long before courses were officially designated as such. The beginning writing course was conceived to "fix" students whose language practices signaled that they did not belong in the discourse communities they aspired to join and that the faculty represented. As the study of literature became professionalized along with academic study in other disciplines, writing became further marginalized within the university because professional status and research dollars were not associated with this sort of applied, remedial work. By 1892, colleges and universities around the country faced the first of many crises about staffing--who should teach writing and how much institutional energy should be devoted to it. The "Committee of Ten," a national blue-ribbon task force chaired by Charles Eliot, concluded that only 30% of English courses should be in writing and that these should be focused on writing about literature.

Instruction in the "research paper" started appearing in the 1930s, again in response to the demands from faculty in other disciplines and always regarded as a service to them, not as an integral function of the English [End Page 321] Department's version of writing instruction. Even today, when the research paper is taught generically, outside of a disciplinary context, the emphasis almost invariably is on forms and formats, not on helping students enter the discourse of the field. As a discipline, composition studies emerged from the literacy crisis of the 1940s in its first manifestation as the "communications movement." By the 1960s, colleges and universities had begun to relax traditional admissions requirements to admit a host of new students in recognition of the economic and social importance of having a college degree, and another "literacy crisis" ensued. By the early 1970s, composition studies had begun to secure an independent place among the academic disciplines. Currently, there are over 70 doctoral programs nationally in composition and rhetoric.

But the rhetorical and pedagogical models for the new writing courses were derived from the older practices for spoken rhetoric which were so central to classical university education. Whether appropriate or not, these models have continued to exert considerable influence on how writing is both conceptualized and taught. Prior to the mid-19th century, university education was largely oral. Rhetoric, derived from Greek and Roman traditions and augmented by the renaissance humanists, was therefore at the center of the curriculum. Young men were expected to learn to read, speak, and write classical languages through recitation, oral drill, and public performance. Much of this language study involved the memorization and recitation of classic texts. These texts provided a store of knowledge that would be reworked for public oratory in the junior and senior years. The study of classical languages promoted considerable linguistic homogeneity among the educated class because the languages were relatively fixed compared with the ongoing changes in the spoken, vernacular language. And knowledge of these languages was quite deliberately used as a badge of distinction to separate members of the educated elite--white, male, and relatively wealthy--from the uneducated.

Writing was viewed as a tool to prepare oneself for both classroom recitations and for oral performance. Students wrote to prepare for the "rhetoricals"--formal oratorical performances in which they were to elaborate on fixed stores of quotations, stories, etc. Working with these received ideas, they were not expected to show what we would define today as independent, creative, or critical thinking; they were not expected to present the outcomes of exhaustive research, to share new truths, or to develop a personal voice. What was important was the demonstration of their ability to work within established rhetorical conventions; their "originality" was judged by how well they reworked material from existing sources (not unlike what students today do when they perform poorly on research paper exercises). The classical rhetorical modes--narration, description, analysis, and argument--were taught as organizational devices to help students arrange the [End Page 322] received knowledge that they would incorporate into their performance. Interestingly, the rhetoricals were linked in a number of ways with requirements for religious observations. Often, faculty trained in the ministry directed students' preparation, and the rhetoricals were often performed in conjunction with chapel. It's worth speculating whether the moralistic attitudes that many people today, both in the academy and among the general public, hold toward matters of correctness derived from these early associations between rhetorical practice and the moral and religious development of college students.

It was through the extra-curriculum--the literary societies, the public lectures and readings, the debate clubs--that the kinds of literacy events associated with creativity, originality, and new ideas that we prize today were found. But in 20th-century classrooms, the oral roots of writing instruction have continued to dominate conceptions of writing. Writing instruction came into the curriculum as ancillary to speaking and thus as a transparent medium through which thoughts are translated into oral presentation. The devotion of process-oriented writing teachers to helping students find their "voice" is one such manifestation of the oral roots of writing instruction.

Although the contexts for writing and the demands placed upon writers are quite different today, the formalist conventions of these early oral presentations are still very much with us. They can be seen in the many programs that still teach students to write "the narrative" and the "argument paper," and in teachers' compulsive editing of student writing to make it correspond with standards of correctness, both grammatical and mechanical. What seems clear in the story of freshman writing is that, in the evolution from face-to-face to written communication, the intellectually rich traditions of oral rhetoric have been shrunken--and perhaps even "debased" as Ohmann contends. What has emerged, seemingly impervious to volumes of both empirical research and contemporary theorizing, is a host of pedagogical practices anchored in a conception of writing as the transcription of ideas, properly organized, clearly expressed, and correctly annotated for a general reader. Inevitably, writing instruction emerges as a remedial enterprise. Missing from most freshman writing programs and from the instruction they sponsor is a self-consciousness about classical conceptions of rhetoric as a meta-discipline that subsumes epistemology, ethics, and even psychology by demanding an examination of how ideas are known, how they are organized into language, how they work on a reader or listener, and how a writer or speaker makes ethical decisions about how to engage with an audience. ¹ [End Page 323]

Rhetoric and Rhetorics

As a discipline, rhetoric is highly diverse. "Rhetorics" might be a more appropriate label. Rhetorics vary according to different epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules that are seen to govern discovery and communication. As conceptions of reality vary--historically, politically, and socially--so, too, do theories of rhetoric. Current understandings of rhetoric show how closely tied it is to ideology--not ideology in the sense of indoctrination, but ideology in its most descriptive sense of "the pluralistic conceptions of social and political arrangements that are present in a society at any given time" (Berlin, 1985, p. 4). Berlin notes:

In teaching writing, we are providing students with guidance in seeing and structuring their experience, with a set of tacit rules about distinguishing truth from falsity, reality from illusion. A way of seeing, after all, is a way of not seeing, and as we instruct students in attending to particular orders of evidence--sense impression, for example, in the injunction to "be concrete"--we are simultaneously discouraging them from seeing other orders of evidence--in the present example, the evidence of private vision or of social arrangements. (p. 7)

To understand the possibilities for freshman writing instruction, it is therefore useful to look briefly at contemporary rhetorics and how they have evolved one from the other in recent decades.

The dominant rhetoric of American colleges for the last 150 years has been called "current-traditional." For many teachers even today, there is no other conception of rhetoric and, hence, no other conception of reality. Current-traditional rhetoric is rooted in positivism and gained its foothold in American universities because of its close affiliation with the scientific method. Exhortations to students to "be concrete" derive from the notion that only that which is empirically verifiable is real. Truth is arrived at inductively, through collecting sensory data and reaching generalizations about it. Language is viewed, ideally, as a transparent medium for bridging the distance between the material world and written descriptions about it. Set patterns of organization--the rhetorical modes of description, narration, exposition, and argumentation--are heavily featured in current traditional rhetoric because they aid the writer in making language use precise, interfering as little as possible in the objective transmission of the material world. "Finally," as Berlin (1985) points out, "since language is to demonstrate the individual's qualifications as a reputable observer worthy of attention, it must conform to certain standards of usage" (p. 9). Writing instruction in current-traditional rhetoric is oriented toward the production of proper written products, with readings used to model proper writing style and responses [End Page 324] to papers geared to making students' work more closely correspond to those models. This is a rhetoric that is highly familiar to anyone who has assigned student writing.

Cognitive rhetoric grew out of current-traditional rhetoric in the 1970s in an effort to shift attention from the written product to the writer. Cognitive rhetoric emphasizes writing as a process; but given its roots in the scientific study of writing, the process is viewed rather mechanistically. Stage models of the composing process seek to teach students the steps involved in assembling ideas for writing, drafting, revising, and editing. Cognitive rhetoric explores how writers write, evolves models for the writing process, and presents writing as a problem-solving activity. In "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class," an essay that has become part of the canon for graduate students in composition studies, Berlin (1988) characterizes the ideological implications of both current-traditional and cognitive rhetorics this way:

This entire scheme can be seen as analogous to the instrumental method of the modern corporation, the place where members of the meritocratic middle class, the twenty percent or so of the work force of certified college graduates make a handsome living managing a capitalist economy. . . . The purpose of writing is to create a commodified text that belongs to the individual and has exchange value. . . . The class system is thus validated since it is clear that the rationality of the universe is more readily detected by a certain group of individuals. (p. 483)

Contemporary expressionistic rhetoric in turn grew out of cognitive approaches. Though expressionism is primarily a subjective theory of rhetoric, it is quite compatible with its cognitivist forebears. Expressionistic rhetoric centers on the self as originator and conveyor of meaning. It has its intellectual roots in the liberal, humanist culture of the 19th century and in romanticism; it finds a welcome home in American individualism. It emphasizes the self as the source of knowledge, self-discovery through writing, and, to some extent, self-liberation. Good writing is writing that is authentic to the self, writing that has a unique voice. Tacitly, at least, expressionistic writing is anti-establishment writing: the self seeks truths that society masks. Expressionistic writing appears in many psychotherapies and self-help books; it is also the dominant rhetorical theory in many secondary school writing programs. Despite its many strengths, expressionistic rhetoric is open to criticism for its tendency to reduce writing to privatized, indeed solipsistic, experience, for isolating writers from political, social, and economic matters, and for its relatively minor concern with writing for an audience. Expressionistic rhetoric reinforces students' desire to believe that all opinions are equally valid. Berlin (1988) elaborates on these criticisms: [End Page 325]

Expressionistic rhetoric is inherently and debilitatingly divisive of political protest, suggesting that effective resistance can only be offered by individuals, each acting alone. . . . It is indeed not too much to say that the ruling elites in business, industry, and government are those most likely to nod in assent to the ideology inscribed in expressionistic rhetoric. The members of this class see their lives as embodying the creative realization of the self, exploiting the material, social, and political conditions of the world in order to assert a private vision, a vision which, despite its uniqueness, finally represents humankind's best nature. . . . Even those most constrained by their positions in the class structure may support the ideology found in expressionistic rhetoric in some form. This is most commonly done by divorcing the self from the alienation of work, separating work experience from other experience so that self discovery and fulfillment take place away from the job. (p. 487)

A fourth (and most recent) rhetoric is social-epistemic rhetoric, which is a contemporary version of older theories that can be grouped together as "transactional" rhetorics. It has strong intellectual ties with work in cultural studies and with social constructionism. Many scholars today find social-epistemic rhetoric a more satisfying and persuasive theory, particularly in the ways it supports the goals of liberal arts education. Social-epistemic rhetoric incorporates definitions of the self as the creation of a particular historical and cultural moment (thus reflecting a more fluid understanding of the self) and of knowledge as dialectical, historically bound, and socially fabricated rather than eternal, material, and invariable. Writing is viewed as part of the negotiation of knowledge, what Bruffee (1984) called in another landmark essay, "the conversation of mankind." Collaborative learning theory is deeply implicated in this view of rhetoric. Also out of this conception of rhetoric come current understandings of discourse communities and formulations of writing instruction as a means of helping students enter those communities. The goal here is not to socialize students uncritically into these communities of knowledge but to help them attain the critical distance on discourse conventions necessary for making informed choices.

The goal of exposing the tacit assumptions in a given discourse may help to explain the self-conscious political tone of social-epistemic approaches, even though to many within and outside of composition studies the political orientation and its language can be offputting. Berlin (1988) acknowledges that social-epistemic rhetoric "offers an explicit critique of economic, political, and social arrangements, the counterparts of the implicit critique found in expressionistic rhetoric" (p. 490). Bizzell, among others, shows why this is such an important element of liberal arts education for today's diverse student body:

Indeed it seems to me that basic writing students clearly are victims--of institutionalized social injustice. What they need from their education is not therapy but the critical training to trace their victimization to social forces [End Page 326] rather than to "fate," and hence to work toward control of their own destinies. . . . It is to attain this sort of critical understanding that politically oppressed students need to master academic discourse. They need composition instruction that exposes and demystifies the institutional structure of knowledge, rather than that which covertly reintroduces discriminatory practices while cloaking the force of convention in concessions to the "personal" [e.g., students' views of the professor's grading practices as purely idiosyncratic] (Bizzell, 1982/1992, pp. 112-113).

Pedagogy, itself a rhetorical process, is never innocent. The point here is to recognize that any approach to teaching writing is embedded in a host of rhetorical and ideological assumptions and that the more recent formulations attempt, more self-consciously than ever before, to foreground those assumptions for students and faculty alike.

Critiques of Freshman English

The fact that serious proposals to change or abolish the freshman writing course have been prevalent for as long as the course has existed ought to provoke more serious thinking about the problem and more deliberate efforts to align practice with scholarship. What has passed for careful thinking about teaching writing has really been a reworking of many of the assumptions put into practice at Harvard in 1872. Even the two most recent "revolutions" in writing instruction--the process movement of the 1970s and the writing-across-the-curriculum movement of the 1980s--failed to open up or dislodge many core assumptions about the nature of writing.

There are numerous critiques of the freshman course, but Richard Ohmann's (1976) chapter in English in America, "Freshman Composition and Administered Thought," remains one of the most significant, more so today perhaps because the issues he raised nearly 20 years ago still remain unexamined. Ohmann bases his critique on an analysis of 15 of the most frequently used freshman writing texts as well as his career-long experience as a text consultant to several major publishing houses and his many years as editor of College English, published by the National Council of Teachers of English. Ohmann centers his critique on how freshman writing instruction focuses exclusively on the writer as individual and not as part of a rhetorical situation. This tendency has been much reinforced by the process movement that was beginning to secure a strong foothold in writing pedagogy at about the time Ohmann was writing. Much writing instruction begins, as Hill did at Harvard, with writing about personal experience because of its presumed accessibility to the student. The traditional emphasis on narrative, Ohmann maintains, pushes students into themselves, asking writers to cultivate their individual uniqueness and undercutting a more rhetorically informed understanding of the relation of the self to others. [End Page 327]

When writing courses move from narration to argument, as they usually do, students are taught that argument is a purely rational process, void of concerns about the relations of reader and writer that inform all real-world writing--concerns about power relations, timeliness, what constitutes a reason or a question within a particular community, what can be left unsaid, what questions are excluded, and how one might use language and ideas to gain entry into that community. Freshman writing works, says Ohmann (1976), "from a crippled theory of where ideas come from and how they take hold" (p. 155). This approach to argument derives, like so much writing instruction, from oral practices--in this case, academic debate. What is missing is any vital consideration of the influence of power, money, social conflict, social class, gender, ethnicity, history, or any consideration of what is at stake, why people believe what they do, or what the writer has available beyond facts as tools of persuasion. Likewise, the student writer is treated as if she exists outside of time and space--undifferentiated, abstract, and decontextualized--like the arguments she is asked to advance.

Ohmann is deeply suspicious that freshman writing instruction, while posing as a means of helping students get ahead in the world, really keeps students in their place, hence the title of his chapter "administered thought," or what he refers to later as "the same old lies." For example, by teaching students the dispassionate, highly abstract, carefully mediated rationalistic language of the academy, students are reinforced in their desire to believe that the world can be divided into facts (which are true) and opinions (which are not). The world as it is represented by writing texts looks deceptively harmonious because it is "adrift from social process" (p. 159). This view of writing masks the influence of power and privilege. It also masks conflict by contending that all disagreement is ultimately rational and is based on misunderstandings of objective information or errors in interpretation. When students leave college and find that the world doesn't work this way at all, they conclude that college has little to do with the real world, employers are angry that students don't know how to write, legislators demand more basics, and the whole cycle starts again.

Finally, Ohmann decries the ways in which writing assignments have been constructed to meet the bureaucratic requirements of the course itself and not to teach students genuine communication. Students are given time-honored advice about selecting and limiting their topic, advice on how to find something to say, heuristics for deriving a thesis from their topic, and so on:

Every book that systematically addresses the question of acquiring something to say tells the student first to find a topic and then derive the thesis. So natural is this order to a situation in which people write at other people's bidding, that its oddity only appears when you widen the context. But do so, [End Page 328] and the priority vanishes. People have concerns, needs, impulses to celebrate or condemn, to compact with others or to draw battle lines against them, to explain, appeal, exhort, justify, criticize. Such concerns, needs, and impulses are what lead people to write (and to speak), when they are not writing to measure. And such concerns are much more like theses than topics. Unalienated writing begins in the feeling and belief that rise out of one's life and tries to concentrate them--perhaps by "narrowing the topic," among many other ways. Textbook writing begins in the nowhere of the assignment, moves into the unbordered regions of the student's accumulated experiences, settles on one region--the topic--and then looks around for feelings and beliefs to affix to that topic, with supporting details to be added afterward. (p. 153)

Later critiques of writing instruction have extended Ohmann's ideas. Miller (1991) argues that the teaching of writing solely as process has placed students in "an infantile and solipsistic relation to the results of writing" (p. 100) because this approach teaches students that they are "'independent' and 'free' to choose within the controls the society establishes" (p. 89). More recently, Faigley (1994) illustrates how freshman writing instruction creates a unique student identity which is carefully nurtured and rewarded through our evaluation processes. Students learn in their writing courses that the self they are supposed to be in college is rational, unitary, appropriately deferential, and able to subsume specifics into broad-based abstractions that override particularity. He observes that "a major source of contradictions in writing pedagogy results from the dogmatic teaching of a truncated coherence [as in the conventional thesis/support paper] which supports bureaucratic rationality where reason is restricted to narrow channels of expertise and questions of ethics are suppressed" (p. 133). Echoing these analyses of the field as a whole is McCormick's (1992) analysis of that stalwart of freshman writing instruction, the research paper.

Like Ohmann (1976), Miller (1991), Gerald Graff (1992), Bizzell (1982/1992, 1992), Bartholomae (1983, 1993), and any number of other current scholars in both composition and the humanities, Faigley is concerned that writing instruction must push students to uncover and explore contradictions, both in the uses of language and in the topics they explore. This, he argues, is what is really meant by the much-used term "critical thinking"; but textbook paradigms of writing based on "clarity" and conventional patterns of organization push students to make facile resolutions of contradictions, to overlook difference, and to achieve an illusion of coherence. As Bizzell (1992) asserts:

The persuasiveness of academic discourse does not rely on absolute truth or perfect logic. Rather, academic discourse is persuasive when it employs conventions and rituals that are "seductive to an academic audience." Beginning writers cannot succeed in academic disputation merely by being "clear" [End Page 329] and "logical." Shaughnessey urges teachers to help students gain the power to initiate themselves into the discursive practices of academia. The conventions governing academic discourse are bound to the social context that constitutes the rhetorical situation of academic discourse. (p. 71)

Some reform efforts have concentrated on developing courses around topics. The argument has been that a topic gives students something to write about, presumably something they will be interested in. With an interesting topic, the course can avoid the problems of conventional writing courses in which the teacher must dummy up assignments and reasons to write them. More recent work has emphasized, though, that topics do not exist in isolation; they are defined by particular academic disciplines or interest groups; "discourse community" has become the standard term. Bizzell (1992) defines the concept simply as "a group of people who share language-using practices" (p. 222). These practices, adds Bizzell, are conventionalized both by the stylistic conventions that regulate social interactions and by the canonical knowledge that shapes the world view of the group, influencing how they interpret experience.

David Bartholomae at the University of Pittsburgh is in the forefront of those taking this view of writing. He (1983) challenges dominant conceptions of writing as an act of discovering something within by arguing that if knowledge is something that exists outside us, then writing works more like this:

If . . . we take knowledge to be something that is outside the writer, something inscribed in a discourse--the commonplaces, the texts, the gestures and jargon, the interpretive schemes of a group from which the writer is excluded, then the paradox must be read differently. To discover or to learn, the student must, by writing, become like us--English teachers, adults, intellectuals, academics. He must become someone he is not. He must know what we know, talk [as] we talk; he must locate himself convincingly in a language that is not his own. He must invent the university when he sits down to write. (p. 300)

Even personal writing, the argument goes, does not come unmediated. There are appropriate ways to talk about the most personal experiences in public discourse that have been shaped by a host of tacit agreements that have developed over time, are exercised by current practitioners, and are expected by readers.

Topic-centered writing courses, then, must go beyond baiting students into writing by ensnaring them in an interesting topic. Through their writing, students need to understand that they are, in essence, inventing a discourse; they must link their created discourse community with the academic conventions that govern other disciplines. Russell's (1991) work on writing in the academy shows forcefully how grounded writing is in disciplinary frameworks: [End Page 330]

Conscientious writing instruction forces a teacher to explain (and to some extent conceptualize) the rhetorical conventions of her discipline and--more difficult still--to describe how the conventions she requires for, say, a history paper, are different from the conventions a student is wrestling with for a chemistry or literature paper in another class. Ignoring writing instruction in the disciplines made it much easier for higher education to proceed in neat compartments, without confronting messy questions about the relationships between disciplines or, messier still, questions about the ways students should be capable of using language when they enter the broader society. Because faculty rarely asked their students to struggle with the complexities of entering a specific discourse community through writing, they could more easily maintain the illusion that the university was still one discourse community, that such terms as reason, the generally educated person, or the humanities referred to single, unitary concepts, independent of the new organization of knowledge and the new mass society that created it. (p. 24) ²

Another important critique of freshman writing takes up the conventional treatment of writing as a skill. Rose (1985) acknowledges that conceptions of writing as a skill, usually a "basic" skill, are commonplace. Yet this designation separates writing from the complexity and vitality of real thought--what is practiced in courses that are not skills courses. Since skills are so fundamental, they occupy the bottom in a hierarchical theory of learning that makes writing preparatory for higher-order activities. "To view writing as a skill in the university context," Rose argues, "reduces the possibility of perceiving it as a complex ability that is continually developing as one engages in new tasks with new materials for new audiences" (p. 348).

The reductive connotations of "skill" suggest that it can be broken down into subskills and taught piecemeal. Hence teachers so often concern themselves with sentence elements, patterns of organization, paragraphing, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Inevitably, the teaching of writing, shaped as it is in faculty minds with cultivating skills, shades off into "remediation," fixing students who aren't quite right before they can move into real academic work. Remediation carries associations with disease, defect, or disability, serving "to exclude from the academic community those who are so labelled. They sit in scholastic quarantine until their disease can be diagnosed and remedied" (Rose, 1985, p. 352).

In traditional faculty parlance, the disease to be remedied is "illiteracy"--a loaded judgment about students' work that encompasses not just their performance but their minds and their morals. Connotations of sloth and other deadly sins are part of the label. Expressions of alarm about student illiteracy have become one of those discourse conventions through which members of the academic community validate themselves in the eyes of [End Page 331] their peers. "It affirms the faculty's membership in the society of the literate," observes Rose (1985), while giving expression to "the frustration and disappointment in teaching students who do not share one's passions" (p. 354). Although such terms as skill, remediation, and illiterate do much to sustain mutually sympathetic relations among the faculty, they forestall careful analysis of students' writing performance and deny the possibility of conceiving of freshman writing as a legitimate collegiate enterprise or of beginning students as having a legitimate place, even as novices, within the community. Rose concludes his analysis by arguing that writing has a "richer epistemology and demands fuller participation" throughout undergraduate education than it is accorded:

It requires a complete, active, struggling engagement with the facts and principles of a discipline, an encounter with the discipline's texts and the incorporation of them into one's own work, the framing of one's knowledge within the myriad conventions that help define a discipline, the persuading of other investigators that one's knowledge is legitimate. . . . But wide-ranging change will occur only if the academy redefines writing for itself, changes the terms of the argument, sees instruction in writing as one of its central concerns. (p. 359)

Writing-across-the-Curriculum

Writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) began in the 1970s as a response to the open-admissions literacy crisis and as part of the 1970s revival of general education--itself a response to the overemphasis on research and narrow scholarship in American universities which the public increasingly saw as working against good undergraduate education. In other words, however contradictory, WAC began on the one hand as an extension of remediation efforts and on the other as a general education movement. By 1987, one national survey identified 427 WAC programs. They took nearly that many forms: some were peer tutoring programs; some were writing-intensive courses; some were the result of extensive faculty summer workshops that helped faculty learn how to use writing as a pedagogical tool to promote learning; some were reworkings of the freshman writing course. Beaver College, Michigan Tech, University of Michigan, and Carleton College were among the early sites for WAC.

The new WAC programs also represented an array of educational philosophies, theoretical underpinnings, and institutional politics. Theoretically, WAC was influenced by Jerome Bruner's work on the process of education and his analysis of the role of language in learning. WAC was closely aligned with the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey and was spurred in this country by the publication of James Britton's influential 1976 study, The Development of Writing Abilities, 11-18, in Great Britain. [End Page 332] Britton's work, like Applebee's (1981) study in this country, documented the rare occurrence of writing in secondary schools. But it went further to offer a theory of how writing abilities develop, arguing that students need many opportunities for what he called "expressive" writing (informal, personal) and "poetic" (creative) writing to be able to write effective "transactional" prose (writing directed to a specific audience, for a specific purpose, and structured according to the discursive conventions of a particular readership). Russell (1991) characterizes WAC as more of a pedagogical reform effort than a curricular one:

A central theme of many versions of WAC today is the transformation of faculty attitudes toward writing and an emphasis on the intrinsic motivation of more successful, satisfying teaching. The WAC movement . . . attempts to reform pedagogy more than curriculum. . . . It asks for a fundamental commitment to a radically different way of teaching, a way that requires personal sacrifices, given the structure of American education, and offers personal rather than institutional rewards. (p. 295)

These pedagogical goals are largely expressed in helping faculty learn how to make use of writing to promote learning. Informal writing, particularly through journals or learning logs or through spontaneous in-class writing, was the hallmark of early WAC faculty development efforts. Nevertheless, as early as 1983, Knoblauch and Brannon called attention to

the predominantly negative quality of discussion [in WAC workshops], its preoccupation with declining verbal abilities, it prescriptivist character, and its grimly resolute, "back to basics" tone. We note, especially, the limited and contingent role that writing is expected to play outside composition courses, a signal that instructors are resigned to do[ing] their bit for literacy but have not considered the relevance of writing to their classwork. (p. 465)

Indeed, as some programs moved away from writing-as-pedagogy and toward more formal writing instruction, political resistance began to surface because faculty felt they were being asked--inappropriately and unfairly--to shoulder the burden of the English Department. And, in fact, they did allow themselves to be coopted by the English Department, whose members defined the issues and structured the dialogue about writing according to current-traditional rhetoric. Knoblauch and Brannon (1983) go on to describe many programs as

"grammar-across-the curriculum" in which English teachers counsel their colleagues in other departments about deviations from "standard written English" so that history and biology teachers can learn to "correct" student writing with the same reverence for prose decorum displayed in the English department. (p. 465)

[End Page 333]

While faculty resistance is understandable in view of the present structure of higher education, the history of writing presented here should suggest why it is also ill informed from nearly every perspective. What often got lost was the progressive spirit of empowering students to use language for personal and intellectual cultivation and for social betterment, and what has never really been found is an acknowledgement that disciplines other than English have particular and worthwhile claims to make upon the writing students produce for them.

Only recently have compositionists and their colleagues in other disciplines undertaken serious and genuinely collaborative efforts to truly understand the discourse conventions of the disciplines and thus to understand how the disciplines are inscribed in their discourse. Russell (1991) concludes his history of WAC on an ambivalent note:

Until individual disciplines accept the responsibility of studying and teaching the writing of their community to students, WAC programs will continue to be marginalized, subject to the vagaries of existence in an institutional no-man's land. Writing will continue to be transparent and the myth of transience powerful among those who do not understand or acknowledge the relationship between writing and the creation and acquisition of knowledge. (p. 298)

Writing Instruction and Mechanical Correctness

The issue of mechanical correctness remains perhaps the most problematic in writing instruction because what seems so obvious masks a host of epistemological, linguistic, sociological, and ideological debates. The role of mechanical correctness has dominated writing instruction since writing was first taught in American colleges in the 1870s, although composition theory remains marginally concerned with the matter. Understanding something of the cultural and pedagogical history of correctness is somewhat helpful in sorting out when and how much the issue matters, although as suggested previously, this is a much more complex matter than conventional practice acknowledges.

In 1873, Harvard started requiring an essay as part of its admission procedures. Grammatical and mechanical correctness were the only criteria for evaluation. More than half the students failed the exam; and predictably, the faculty was outraged. Connors (1985) observes:

Grammar began to be introduced to college students in the 1870s in the hope that somehow a theoretical knowledge of the structure of English would act as a prophylaxis against errors in writing. College teachers turned to grammar out of the idea that somehow students' elementary grammar instruction [End Page 334] had not "taken," and that it needed to be repeated until it did somehow take hold. This was an essentially incorrect idea. Students failed the Harvard examinations because they had never been asked to do much writing, not because they had failed to grasp their elementary grammar lessons. But once the grammar-based college pedagogy became enshrined in textbooks there was no escaping it. (p. 66)

Although remedial English is often viewed as the product of the 1960s move to open admissions in American higher education, it entered the curriculum in the 1870s and 1880s, the period of the first literacy crisis. Entering Harvard students of the 1870s were, in this respect, not much different from entering college students today. A national study of writing in the secondary schools published in 1981 reported that high school students spend less than 3% of their schooling (both in and out of class) writing anything paragraph-length or longer (Applebee, 1981). Most observers agree that the contemporary back-to-basics movement, initiated in elementary and secondary English curriculum because of observed deficiencies in student writing, actually reduced the time students had previously spent writing, as more time was devoted to skill-and-drill workbook exercises and accountability bookkeeping.

Connors's historical account of "Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction," published in 1985, helps to explain why American educational institutions--and indeed American society itself--became so preoccupied with error hunting. He begins his analysis with this rhetorical question:

What could the forces have been which turned "rhetoric" into "composition," transformed instruction in wide-ranging techniques of persuasion and analysis into a narrow concern for convention on the most basic levels, [and] transmogrified the noble discipline of Aristotle, Cicero, Campbell, into a stultifying error-hunt? (Connors 1985, 61).

The answer begins, he asserts, in the 1840s and 1850s with a growing "linguistic anxiety" that sprang from a reaction within the Eastern establishment against the crudeness and roughness of the American frontier and from the desire for self-improvement that was so much a part of mid-19th-century America. Following Harvard's lead under Adams Sherman Hill, writing courses between 1865 and 1895 increasingly displaced traditional rhetorical concerns to enforce correctness in grammar and mechanical usage. Kitzhaber (1953) describes the sort of correctness as "superficial and mechanical" (p. 312); and indeed, the definition of "correct" changed between 1870 and 1910 from "socially acceptable" to "formally acceptable." The emphasis on formal correctness spread beyond grammar and mechanics and can still be seen today. Writing instruction was reduced to the study and [End Page 335] application of explicable rules--rules about paragraph structure, rules about developing ideas according to the classical rhetorical modes, and rules about unity, coherence, and emphasis, as well as rules about sentence structure.

The "rules" approach to writing gradually ossified into handbooks, and writing instruction by the turn of the century had been shifted to graduate students who knew little more about writing than what was contained in the handbooks. Predictably, writing instruction became centered on following the handbook, despite the fact that handbooks then were written for much the same purpose as they are today: as reference tools, not as the course itself. Readers may recall their own freshman writing courses in which their instructors marked their papers with strange annotations like AWK or COH or even P5 that were taken directly from the error coding system inscribed in the particular handbook associated with their course. In many universities today, little has changed. Furthermore, though we look today at our own heavy teaching assignments and long for that time in the past when teachers were able to work more closely with fewer students, writing teachers during this period taught their courses in large lecture sections of 140 to 200 students. It was not uncommon to grade more than 3,000 themes a year. Given their lack of knowledge about writing and confronted with the necessity to do something with all those papers, writing teachers began scanning for errors instead of doing full readings. "Skill in writing," says Connors (1983), "which had traditionally meant the ability to manipulate a complex hierarchy of content-based, organizational, and stylistic goals, came to mean but one thing: avoidance of error" (p. 67).

Connors concludes his study by asserting:

The enforcement of standards is not, I think, a tradition that can--or should--die out of composition instruction. . . . But it is not all or even a major part of our work. . . . We cannot escape the fact that in a written text any question of mechanics is also a rhetorical question, and as a discipline we are still trying to understand the meaning of that conjunction. (p. 71)

By the 1890s, rhetoric as a discipline had become dormant within composition. It lingered in speech departments but did not begin to find its way back into writing instruction until 1944, when the first communications courses were taught at the University of Iowa. The Conference on College Composition and Communication was organized shortly thereafter and remains the disciplinary home of composition scholars. Following the Second World War (for reasons that should now be apparent), courses in "communications skills" quickly spread throughout American higher education. Concerned with all four "communications skills"--reading, writing, speaking, and listening--these courses began to revitalize rhetoric although they have not yet found a comfortable reconciliation with their heritage of error-hunting. Teachers still spend much of their time marking errors, and [End Page 336] study after study (beginning in the early 1900s) still shows that this activity has little or no effect on student performance and may do more harm than good. In her seminal study of the composing process, Emig (1971) concludes:

Much of the teaching of composition in American high schools is essentially a neurotic activity. There is little evidence, for example, that the persistent pointing out of specific errors in student themes leads to the elimination of these errors, yet teachers expend much of their energy in this futile and unrewarding exercise. Another index of neurosis is the systematic confusion of accidents and essences. Even the student who, because of the health of his private writing life, stays somewhat whole is enervated by worries over peripherals--spelling, punctuation, length. (p. 99)

The reasons why the discipline has not come to terms with the relationship of correctness to larger issues of writing have to do in part with the faculty's and the general public's preoccupation with these standards as a precondition to writing ability. The insistence that students must first be able to write an acceptable English sentence before anything else can be examined in their writing has aborted more fully formed understandings of writing. Ever since the Conference on College Composition and Communication adopted its official policy on Students' Right to Their Own Language in 1974, there has been something of an unacknowledged standoff between many composition scholars and their faculty colleagues and general public. As the basis for its policy statement, the CCCC committee posed this question: "Shall we place our emphasis on what the vocal elements of the public think it wants or on what the actual available linguistic evidence indicates we should emphasize?" Like Emig, the committee questioned whether "the most serious difficulty facing 'non-standard' dialect speakers in developing writing ability derives from their exaggerated concern for the least serious aspects of writing." The policy statement reads:

We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language--the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.

Its framers were fully aware that this position is both highly controversial and highly problematic. However, in the 1990s, with increasing globalism [End Page 337] and increasing participation in American higher education by nonstandard speakers of English, the issues this statement raised have become even more difficult. On one hand, the history of freshman writing certainly does show the extent to which the preservation of language purity has consistently been a last bastion of defense against the Other and that the history of literacy crises in this country is laced with classism, racism, and elitism. There is something not quite right in a nation committed to democracy and equal opportunity being so heavily concerned with upholding rather artificial language standards to the neglect of teaching more powerful understandings of how language is used as well as being more broadly accepting of variations in written English. From its beginnings, rhetoric has always been heavily concerned with ethics and the use of language to demonstrate and affect ethical behavior. The mid-1970s, during which the Students' Right statement was adopted, was a period of particularly heightened concern among composition scholars regarding issues of social justice. Many scholars then and now believe that society would be better served by trying to create an environment more hospitable to multiple forms of English usage than to coerce language users into standards that all linguistic evidence shows are highly relative, constantly changing, and often employed to exclude.

On the other hand, however, is the very practical argument that nonstandard uses of English brand the user as one of the great unwashed. Thus, not holding all students to the same standards of correctness and denies them the very access to equal opportunity to which the educational establishment is committed. There is also the argument that national unity begins to fray when members are not held together by a common language; this is the argument that ostensibly drives the "English only" movement.

American education is caught in the middle of this dilemma. It has conflicting missions. It exists not just to prepare students to live and work successfully in their society but also to fulfill its long tradition, particularly in liberal arts institutions, of preparing students to be critics of social practice and agents of social change.

There is no easy answer to this dilemma, except perhaps the empirical one--that so much of our practice in responding to student papers is wasted time and energy. Instead, as Mina Shaughnessy taught in her award-winning 1977 book, Errors and Expectations, to teach writing rather than circle errors is to understand the logic of students' mistakes; it is to interpret students' work in ways that can guide them to participate in the conventions of the communities we represent. In the end, the question may not be one of either/or, or even of how much. It may be a question of when and how. Bizzell (1982) notes:

In my experience, students are more interested in mastering the conventions of Standard English after they have become engaged in college intellectual [End Page 338] work and see the social necessity of such mastery for further pursuit of their intellectual interests. (p. 114)

The Current State of Freshman Writing

What, then, does all this suggest about appropriate approaches for beginning writing? Composition, like other disciplines within the humanities, is in the midst of considerable self-examination and an explosion of theory. It is a dynamic and vital discipline, with the same sorts of factions and feuds--some trivial, some fundamental, some profound--that characterize other academic pursuits. North (1987) provides a useful account of the various ways of conceptualizing writing.

As this narrative has suggested, there are also substantial divisions among composition scholars, composition teachers, and members of the general public about writing. Despite the impressive growth in doctoral programs in composition, composition PhDs are still relatively few in number compared with all of the writing instruction that is delivered, and they tend to be appointed to administrative positions as composition directors where they supervise the graduate students--many of whom are in literature programs--and the part-time faculty who still deliver the bulk of writing instruction. Thus, at one extreme, some writing programs around the country are conducted without reference to any composition scholarship. They proceed according to what North calls the accumulated "lore" of generations of practitioners. At the other extreme, writing programs in universities supporting PhD programs in composition tend to be more self-consciously rooted in scholarship. Even these programs, however, are characterized to varying degrees by budgetary and political compromises that reflect higher education's historical ambivalence over whether teaching writing is a real academic activity, its refusal to pay properly for such instruction, and its confusion over who owns the writing program and thus who decides what its mission is. Staffing and staff preparation pose a perpetual conundrum unknown in other disciplines in higher education: the more self-consciously composition defines itself as a discpline, rooted in theory and scholarship, the more limited becomes the pool of potential writing teachers.

Nevertheless, some common threads have emerged that seem to have some staying power. One approach has been to take very seriously the literature on discourse communities and to disband the freshman composition course altogether. Some schools, like the University of Maryland, have instituted a junior-level writing requirement that is anchored in an academic discipline, while others, like the University of Wisconsin, offer lower-division writing courses but do not require them, relying instead on a required competency "exam" that students must pass to graduate. The senior [End Page 339] seminar in liberal education is often used to have students synthesize their academic work in writing and present it to a broadly conceived audience, what Geisler (1994) calls "disciplinary amateurs . . . lovers of the truth pursued in the academic professions, but not members of the professions themselves" (p. 254). On the other hand, the senior seminar in the major is sometimes used to help students consolidate their learning in the context of professional writing.

The rationale for these approaches is probably clear from the preceding narrative: (a) the beginning writing course cannot make sense when it is burdened by too many, sometimes competing expectations and when it operates in a theoretical void; (b) the evidence is not strongly compelling that the general faculty is satisfied with students' writing as a result of the freshman course; (c) there are good reasons for acknowledging that writing develops within disciplinary contexts with a fully developed knowledge base; and (d) there are serious questions about when, in their educational and intellectual development, students are ready to write for a more generalized audience.

Nevertheless, calls to terminate the beginning writing course have not had widespread impact. Though the introduction of the freshman writing course had overtones of remediation, writing instruction has always been a central concern of the college curriculum, and perhaps the central concern when only the most well-prepared students attended school. Instead, colleges are trying to locate writing instruction at sites in the curriculum where it can have the most impact and to define introductory writing instruction in theoretically sensible and defensible ways. A new program at Northern Arizona University, for example, has uncoupled the traditional two-term writing requirement in favor of a single freshman course, taken after students have completed their first semester. This approach frees up instructional resources that enable graduate students, part-time faculty, or writing program lecturers to help faculty in other disciplines incorporate writing in their teaching at points beyond the freshman year. Other schools have scaled back to a single beginning course to introduce numerous variations on writing in the disciplines.

Where schools have retained freshman writing courses (and they are still very much in the majority) and where there is an interest in developing courses that reflect composition scholarship, both students and writing are being defined differently. Rather than working from a deficit model of student development, writing programs are trying to define beginning students in more sociological terms, as novice or apprentice intellectuals, and the writing course as a means of acculturating students into the intellectual practices of the academy. One begins, then, not with recriminations about what students don't know how to do but with definitions about what sorts of literacy practices are required in the academy and propositions about [End Page 340] what the writing program can do to introduce students to these practices. The role of the beginning writing course as an introductory college-level course is critical in that it helps to remove expectations that the course will remediate deficiencies once and for all, particularly those that should have been taken care of in high school. Rather, like other introductory courses in the college curriculum, freshman writing will sketch in some practices and ideas that will be refined in subsequent coursework. Specific adaptations of these literacy practices must occur within the disciplines.

Defining academic literacy practices becomes a much more interesting problem intellectually than fretting about how to make up for what students didn't get the last time. Though there is a great deal more to be known about the tacit conventions that define literacy, these are some of the introductory practices that are finding their way into some beginning writing courses:

1. Greater emphasis on reading to help students understand the posture toward texts that seasoned academics assume. This emphasis requires a carefully chosen group of primary and secondary texts--hard texts, texts that students would probably call boring, but texts that will sustain a line of inquiry into a complicated problem--and a defined set of questions to ask about them, through which, in Bartholomae's (1985) words, students learn to "invent a discipline." The discipline includes more than the subject matter of the inquiry. It encompasses the whole rhetoric of a discipline: the conventions that govern how it is represented, how the writer positions herself as a participant through her writing, the intertextual character of the conversation through which academic knowledge is discovered and communicated, and so on. A number of beginning courses, including the new work at Fort Lewis College, are being retitled "Introduction to College Reading and Writing."

2. Greater emphasis on the development of argument--not just asserting a thesis and providing examples, but learning how academic arguments are constituted. Penticoff and Brodkey (1992) explain: "When the conversation shifts from thesis statement to claim, we become less concerned about the position as a position and more interested in where an argument for it would position us--in relation to both other people and other arguments." Embedding a model of argument in the course structure "offers students and teachers alike a view of argumentation as a prologue to further inquiry, which we see as an antidote to viewing arguments as debates, performances that invariably end with winners and losers and, ultimately, silence" (p. 132).

3. Greater emphasis on the writing course as a defined institutional program with specific goals, readings, assignments, and expectations rather than as the private preserve of the individual instructor. There are obviously many good ways to construct a writing course, even with a commonly agreed upon body of scholarship as a base. The emphasis of the writing course as a coherent institutional program has helped to move writing [End Page 341] courses away from a smorgasbord of every conceivable goal of liberal education to a specific set of achievable, coherent goals that are consistent with institutional priorities.

4. A series of elaborated, carefully constructed assignments that engage students in working in a sustained way with the texts they read. This is another reason why writing courses are becoming increasingly focused, increasingly "programmatic." Appropriate texts are hard to find. Good assignments take time to develop. A series of tightly linked reading and writing assignments takes even more time and effort. They should be the course. This is a very different enterprise from creating a collection of engaging but only weakly related writing activities or readings. Bartholomae (1993) explains:

Writers work differently if they are working on single, discrete weekly exercises than if they are working on longer, academic projects. We think of our course as a project course; and we want our students, as writers, to see and pace their work for the long haul. This requirement is not just a matter of endurance, although endurance counts. Students need to learn that the subjects that matter aren't quickly exhausted, that the best ideas come when you think there is nothing else to say, that it is important to turn from the security of newfound conclusions to consider alternative points of view. Students also learn to imagine drafts and revisions differently when they are in [the] service of a longer project. In particular, they learn to imagine revision as a way of opening up an issue rather than finishing it, closing it down, getting it out of the way. We want to teach our students to imagine intellectual life differently than they have imagined it before. (p. 17)

A series of assignments also gives faculty a point of reference and a way to understand students' writing and thereby continue developing the course. And the course, not the individual instructor and highly variable standards of the faculty, should form the basis of evaluation.

5. Definitions of writing as the self-conscious and social construction of knowledge. This definition involves the exploration of contradictions, problematizing the topic, not just transmitting information. It involves the use of student texts alongside professional texts, "in conversation and contention with each other" (Penticoff & Brodkey, 1992, p. 131), not only to interrupt the authority of published texts but also to examine the rhetoric of each. It also involves extensive use of writing groups, in part to displace the traditional role of the teacher as the "writing police" and in part to validate expectations of the role students are to play at the center of the inquiry.

In the end, there is no perfect writing curriculum. There are no empirical studies that will tell the vigilant researcher the right ways or the wrong ways to do it. In this sense, composition and rhetoric as a field of study is no different from other academic disciplines: theory and empirical findings wait to be crafted into practice. There is a considerable stream of scholarship [End Page 342] that should serve to warn faculty away from some practices and some preconceptions while it opens up more informed understandings of what writing is and isn't, of what makes sense pedagogically and what is appropriate to expect of both students and writing courses. There is also an evolution in theory that is informed by diverse disciplines such as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, literary criticism, anthropology, and rhetoric. Finally, there are various institutional missions that suggest one kind of practice at one school, another kind somewhere else. And there are the ever-present constraints of budget and personnel. It is within this arena of scholarship, philosophy, and institutional reality that composition programs are always hammered out.

Karen Spear, is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Sciences, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado. She is a former President of the Association for General and Liberal Studies and has published widely on composition, collaborative learning, and liberal education. This present essay was written to initiate what became a successful revision of the writing program at Fort Lewis College. She thanks members of the Composition Reform Task Force for their suggestions and observations throughout the many revisions of this essay.

Notes

1. For further reading in the history of American collegiate composition instruction, see asterisked works in the References.

2. For three recent and helpful treatments on how disciplinary conventions define writing, see Bartholomae (1986), Geisler (1994), and Bazerman (1988).

References

Note: Asterisked works are particularly useful readings in the history of American collegiate composition instruction.

Applebee, A. (1981). Writing in the secondary schools. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Bartholomae, D. (1983). "Writing assignments: Where writing begins." In P. Stock (Ed.), Forum: Essays on theory and practice in the teaching of writing (pp. 300-311). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Bartholomae, D. (1985). "Inventing the university." In M. Rose (Ed.), When a writer can't write: Studies in writer's block and other composing-process problems (pp. 134-165). New York: Guilford, 1985

Bartholomae, D. (1993). Ways of reading: Resources for teaching. New York: St. Martins Press.

Berlin, J. (1988, September). Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. College English, 50, 477-494.

*Berlin, J. (1987). Rhetoric and reality: Writing instruction in American colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

*Berlin, J. (1984). Writing instruction in nineteenth-century American colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bizzell, P. (1982/1992). College composition: Initiation into the academic discourse community. Curriculum Inquiry, 12, 191-207. Rpt. in P. Bizzell (Ed.), Academic discourse and critical consciousness (pp. 105-128). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Bizzell, P. (1992). What is a discourse community? In P. Bizzell (Ed.), Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (pp. 222-237). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

*Brereton, J. C. (1995). The origins of composition studies in the American college, 1985-1925. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Britton, J. (1975). The development of writing abilities, 11-18. London: Macmillan Education.

Bruffee, K. (1984). Collaborative learning and the "conversation of mankind." College English, 46, 635-52.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. (1974, Fall). Students' right to their own language. College Composition and Communication, 25 (Fall 1974): 1-32.

Connors, R. (1985, February). Mechanical correctness as a focus in composition instruction. College Composition and Communication, 36, 61-72.

*Connors, R. (1986). Grammar in American college composition: An historical overview. In D. McQuade (Ed.), The Territory of language: Linguistics, stylistics, and the teaching of composition (pp. 3-22). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

*Connors, R. (1991). Writing the history of our discipline. In E. Lindemann & G. Tate (Eds.), An introduction to composition studies (pp. 49-71). New York: Oxford University Press.

Emig, J. (1971). The composing processes of twelfth graders. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Faigley, L. (1994). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Geisler, C. (1994). Academic literacy and the nature of expertise: Reading, writing, and knowing in academic philosophy. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Graff, G. (1992). Beyond the culture wars: How teaching the conflicts can revitalize American education. New York: Norton.

Kitzhaber, A. (1953). Rhetoric in American colleges, 1850-1900. Ph.D. diss, University of Washington.

Knoblauch, C. H., & Brannon, L. (1983, September). Writing as learning through the curriculum. College English, 45, 465-474.

*Knoblauch, C. H., & Brannon, L. (1984). Rhetorical traditions and the teaching of writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

McCormack, K. (1992). Using cultural theory to critique and reconceptualize the research paper. In J. Berlin & M. Vivion (Eds.), Cultural studies in the English classroom (pp. 211-230). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Miller, S. (1991). Textual carnivals: The politics of composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

North, S. (1987). The making of knowledge in composition: Portrait of an emerging field. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, Boynton/Cook.

Ohmann, R. (1976). English in America: A radical view of the profession. New York: Oxford University Press.

Penticoff, R., & Brodkey, L. (1992). Writing about difference: Hard cases for cultural studies. In J. Berlin & M. Vivion (Eds.), Cultural studies in the English classroom (pp. 123-144). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

*Riley, W. P. (1988). Where do English departments come from? In G. Tate & E. Corbett (Eds.), The writing teacher's sourcebook (2nd ed., pp. 3-15). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rose, M. (1985, April). The language of exclusion: Writing instruction at the university. College English, 47, 341-359.

Russell, D. (1991). Writing in the academic disciplines, 1870-1990: A curricular history. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Shaughnessy, M. (1977). Errors and expectations: A guide for the teacher of basic writing. New York: Oxford University Press.

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