Rebecca Moore Howard Council of Writing Program Administrators

"Selling Out the Writing Program" Park City, Utah, 11 July 2002

Selling Out the Writing Program

I'd like to begin today with two quotations from WPA-L. The first was posted on January 18 this year by Doug Downs, who said,

We all know about the difficulty of trying to get students, administrators, parents, and the general public to hear what *our* idea of composition (as a field of study) is, and what *we* mean by "writing." In terms of the hated but ascendant business model, we have a PR/marketing problem. Until we try to solve it in those terms, we'll make the same headway for the next few decades that we have for the last few.

And the second is from Andrea Lunsford, who posted on June 28:

On our own campuses, I believe we need to teach about writing where we can--and particularly teach those in upper administration. In practical terms, this means extending ourselves considerably: asking for meetings with upper administrators, volunteering to talk about our programs at every opportunity, seeking coverage in the campus news sources, and so on. This is a tiring, slow, and ongoing business--but it can eventually pay off with administrators and colleagues who know enough to question or dismiss claims like those Stanley [Fish] makes (or seems to make).

Having worked to teach these lessons to my own colleagues and administrators for almost 30 years, I . . . wonder if others have specific suggestions for how to educate those around us.

The task addressed by both of these WPA-L posts is the topic of my talk this evening. With Doug Downs and Andrea Lunsford, I ask, "How can we communicate our vision of ourselves to all those "others" in—and outside of—the academy? My answer: we can communicate that vision through multimedia rhetoric. And the consequence of that answer is that writing program administrators should consider adding another item to their administrative toolbox: the rhetorical deployment of multiple media.

The WPA's toolbox

In preparation for this presentation, I've been reviewing some of the scholarship of writing program administration, to see what is already recommended for the WPA toolbox—what categories of skills and knowledge are already considered part of successful writing program administration. The list (which I've included on the handout) is daunting. According to our own scholarly literature, WPAs need to have expertise in

1. Administrative identity, affect, & morale;

2. Advanced writing;

3. Archive maintenance;

4. Assessment of student writing;

5. Basic writing;

6. Budgets;

7. Collaboration;

8. Computer technology;

9. Curriculum design & development;

10. Ethics;

11. Feminist theory;

12. Institutional and public politics & discourses;

13. Leadership principles;

14. Legal issues;

15. Part-time faculty issues;

16. Placement;

17. Plagiarism;

18. Methods & politics of personal advancement;

19. Postmodern mapping;

20. Power;

21. Program assessment;

22. Reflection;

23. Relations with, within, and without English departments;

24. Research methods;

25. TA training;

26. Textbook selection;

27. Theory;

28. Unions;

29. WAC theory and methods;

30. WPA history; and

31. Writing centers.

Daunting this list may be, but anyone who reads the scholarship of writing program administration knows how incomplete it is. This list represents only a fraction of the important recent scholarship on writing program administration, and its taxonomy of administrative issues is far from comprehensive. None of us can be expert in all these areas, no matter how long we serve as WPAs, how hard we work at it, or how important it is.

Yet I want to add to the list a category that is new but urgent to the WPA: multimedia rhetoric. In some critical respects, this new category responds to the issues I've gathered under the heading "Institutional and public politics & discourses" (#12 on that list), because I am advocating multimedia rhetoric as an effective response to the WPA's perennial problem of public demands for "grammar," "basics," or whatever term is at the moment marking the current-traditionalism that persists in public notions of rhetoric. Within our writing programs, we have rich notions of writing and writing instruction, notions so rich that they come through even in a document as necessarily clipped as the WPA Outcomes Statement (reproduced on pp. 8-11 of the handout), which hopes that students in first-year comp will learn how to do things such as "understand how genres shape reading and writing," "understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power," and "use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences" (61-62). Outside writing programs, however, these are not the sorts of tasks that pop up on the shopping lists of "what the writing program should be doing." Outside writing programs, the primary concerns might be summarized as "write logically and correctly." Although Anne Ruggles Gere establishes that public notions of literacy and literacy instruction are anything but unified, it is my experience that when the public (including the "public" of university administrators and faculty across the disciplines) criticizes the writing program, it is usually with the charge that the composition courses are not teaching sentence-level correctness well. And as Victor Vitanza notes, our students themselves demand instruction in sentence-level correctness (157). Disabusing students of this concern is one of the issues addressed by the 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" document: "If we can convince our students that spelling, punctuation, and usage are less important than content, we have removed a major obstacle in their developing the ability to write" (Conference on College Composition and Communication 8). We can write students' demands for sentence-level instruction demand off as false consciousness; we can persuade the students in a composition class that they have more important instructional needs in writing; but next semester a whole new crop of students will appear in our classrooms, hoping to learn sentence-level correctness and fearful that they cannot.

Institutional debates familiar to WPAs

The current-traditionalist desire for sentence-level correctness may be a dead horse inside writing programs, but that horse is very much alive elsewhere. Hence the concerns expressed by both Lunsford and Downs: how can writing program administrators act as change agents?

The current-traditionalism with which WPAs must contend is associated with what Thomas P. Miller calls "the style of educated discourse" (239), which Sharon Crowley specifies as "explicit instruction in grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling" (Composition 96). On the basis of such instruction, writing programs are expected to serve a gatekeeping function in the university, selecting and tracking students, certifying who among them is fit for participation in the university (Russell, "Romantics" 144). The abolitionist response of David Russell and many others to this gatekeeping charge is to refuse to teach required composition at all, and Crowley enthusiastically details the ways in which WPAs would themselves benefit from such a change (Crowley, "How").

The gatekeeping mandate for writing programs is not one that scholarship in composition has successfully argued against. Despite all the research about and arguments against standards-based pedagogy, writing program administrators find themselves under constant pressure from the public, from their institutions, and from their students to deliver a first-year writing curriculum that conveys correct, transferable knowledge about sentence-level standards. The "Students' Right" document focused and directed a wave of anti-current-traditionalist sentiment in composition studies, but at the same time, a back-to-basics movement kept the public committed to the very textual values that the "Students' Right" document argued against with such eloquence. As Gere points out, just a year after the publication of "Students' Right," Newsweek's "Why Johnny Can't Write" (Sheils) blamed what the magazine described as a literacy crisis in part on the "Students' Right" document itself (Gere 267). All the discipline-internal success of "Students' Right" went by the discipline-external wayside in a culture enamored of the subsequent 1980s "conservative revolution" led in literacy studies by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (Gilyard 640-641). That conservative revolution in literacy studies had as its foundational document not CCCC's "Students' Right to Their Own Language" but Newsweek's "Why Johnny Can't Write" (Trimbur 277). As far as compositionists were concerned, scholarly research and social justice both demanded that correctness be de-emphasized in composition instruction. As far as the public was concerned, compositionists were thereby contributing to the literacy crisis (Gere 267). The print documents and scholarly conferences, in other words, were persuading the compositionists but not the public. The arguments that Patricia Bizzell made to the positions held by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., were wildly persuasive to compositionists but had little effect on a public (both general and academic) that for millennia has conceived of literacy in quantifiable terms of cultural and grammatical correctness. Although James Berlin observes that "the appearance of lower-class students" in nineteenth-century American colleges meant that grammar instruction began to be introduced in American college curricula (73), instruction in the socially privileged language forms—and the social subordination of those who deliver the instruction—dates back to the ancient world, where the instruction was accompanied by physical violence upon the students (Atherton).

In the weeks leading up to this august gathering in Park City, Utah, writing program administrators on the WPA-L list have been energetically arguing with Stanley Fish's declaration in the June 21 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Every dean should forthwith insist that all composition courses teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else" (Fish, "Say"). Ah, Dean Fish, you do have a knack for pushing the buttons of the nation's writing program administrators! If we were to take his demands seriously and accede to them, we would be in a pedagogical place very much akin to that of the grammarians of ancient Rome. As the British classicist Catherine Atherton describes them, these grammarians were of low social status. Language education in their era was prescriptive, "imposed, typically, by unpopular and socially inferior adults with everything to lose from their pupils' failure" (243). (Hmm. Does sound a little familiar, doesn't it?) "It has long been recognized," says Atherton, "that teachers both of basic literacy and numeracy and of broader literary culture tended to have humble, even unsavoury, reputations amongst the élite whom they served, most markedly under the early Empire" (219). This may be because they sold their services to the élite, or it may be because what they taught was considered relatively easy to acquire (220). But Atherton offers another possibility: "The source of the grammarian's low social position," she suggests, "was the very fact that he exercised his skills and his authority on children" (228). Children in the early Empire were closely identified with animals and were treated as such; like animals, when they transgressed, they were beaten. Corporal punishment was a standard feature of literacy education; one classicist refers to "senseless, stumbling repetitions punctuated by savage punishments" (224-225).

Well, few of us today are much given to beating our students. It's no wonder, therefore, that we're not terribly eager to base our writing programs on instruction in grammar. Most compositionists' real objection to instruction in grammar has less to do with the historical violence attached to it than with the historical degradation attached to it—not to mention the fact that composition research demonstrates that precious few transferable skills are acquired from decontextualized grammar instruction. As the WPA Outcomes Statement reproduced on the handout acknowledges, students need facility in editing (though the Outcomes Statement marks editing as a late-process activity). The Outcomes Statement also notes students' need for ability to "use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation" and to "adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality." But these sentence-level issues take up a small portion of a three-page list (61-63). Sentence-level correctness is only one component of the notion of writing as it is described by a high-profile committee charged by the Council of Writing Program Administrators to produce an outcomes statement adaptable to writing programs across the country.

Back to Dean Fish, who concludes his polemic with the promise that he will himself teach a grammar-only writing class. He is not joking—but he is stretching things a bit. As the University of Illinois-Chicago course listings demonstrate (University of Illinois at Chicago, "LAS"), Dean Fish (along with Chancellor Sylvia Manning, whose scholarly specialty is Victorian literature) indeed will offer a Fall 2002 course entitled "Grammar." (Chancellor Manning's section is more alluringly entitled, "Grammar: Writing and Speaking for Fun and Power.") A few minutes' prowling on the UIC website reveals, though, that what both Fish and Manning are teaching is not a composition course at all, but a one-credit, ten-week first-year seminar. These UIC seminars are billed as "Introduction to University Study." Certainly Fish's and Manning's topical choices portray their own ideas about what constitutes university study (grammar!), however much those ideas may be anathema to the authors of the WPA Outcomes Statement and to every composition scholar I can think of. The courses are, moreover, offered in addition to, not instead of or as part of, Illinois-Chicago's two-course composition requirement. Of the Freshman Seminar, the university's Undergraduate Catalog 2001-2003 says,

Freshman Seminar: Introduction to University Study (LAS 100) is mandatory for all first-semester freshmen except those who have been admitted to the Honors College and transfer students with fewer than 24 credit hours (for whom it is a recommended option). (University of Illinois at Chicago, "College")

This course is entirely separate from the two-course English composition requirement (Department of English). The Freshman Seminar is a special-topics requirement of students enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; other seminar topics range from "Amazing People in Chemistry" to "An Invitation to Explore the Beauty of Italy" to "Drugs in Our Life" (University of Illinois at Chicago, "LAS").

What would possess Stanley Fish to take the stand on grammar instruction that he has in the Chronicle of Higher Education; to teach this mini-course; and to allow his Chronicle readers to believe that it is an entire composition course devoted to the teaching of grammar? It's not as if Fish has never met a compositionist. Surely Gary Olson wasn't working undercover when he interviewed Fish for the 1992 JAC. Yet as Lee Odell observes, Fish has a publication record on the topic of composition instruction (Doing What Comes Naturally)—one in which he challenges the necessity of theory for composition instruction (Odell 1).

We've been fighting these same battles for millennia. The grammarians of ancient Rome were of low social status, associated as they were with the bestial children whom they taught. The authors of the 1974 Students' Right document were careful, eloquent scholars, but they themselves were, just one year later, held as culprits in a publicly perceived literacy crisis. The Students' Right document succeeded with its immediate audience of compositionists, but it did not change the public perception that sentence-level correctness, as measured by standardized tests, constitutes the primary and urgent agenda of a composition course. And today we have Dean Fish holding forth in the Chronicle of Higher Education, making an argument that will receive wide acclaim. We writing program administrators can inveigh against that argument on WPA-L all we like, but we all know that many of us will face Fish's authority being invoked in our institutions in the argument for a current-traditionalist writing curriculum. And all the richness of a carefully prepared Outcomes Statement published by our national professional organization will hold little truck with those swayed by Fish.

Multimedia rhetoric for WPAs

The problem with arguments like Newsweek's and Fish's is that they speak to deeply held cultural premises. Gere has neatly dissected the Newsweek document and found it full of internal contradictions. Would her analysis have any effect on the readers who endorsed Newsweek's account of a literacy crisis and based back-to-basics school reform on it? No, probably not. And the reason it would not is that public opinion on literacy issues is not formed by reasoned argument.

I believe we make a mistake, therefore, when writing program administrators try to convey our disciplinary visions of literacy instruction solely by means of reasoned arguments. Instead, I advocate the persuasive power of multimedia rhetoric. Let me show you a sample of what I'm talking about, and then explain why I think the ability to mount this sort of argument is essential to writing program administrators.

First, some background on what you are about to see. In September 2001 our dean invited the Writing Program to do a one-hour presentation to the college's Board of Visitors, a powerful alumni group involved in fund-raising for the college. As we planned our presentation, we considered the possibility of having a single speaker address the group; or several speakers; maybe handouts; perhaps some poster presentations—the usual suspects. But we wanted to reach these people. We wanted to fire their imaginations. So we decided that I would do a ten-minute introduction, overviewing the work of the Writing Program, and that we would then have three stations in the room, each with a computer running a video presentation of one aspect of the Writing Program's work. Human beings involved in that work would be at each station, talking, answering questions, schmoozing. Instead of handouts, we would have glossy one-page white papers.

The three areas of the Writing Program's work that we chose to highlight were technology, the Writing Center, and writing across the curriculum. We knew that these were aspects that our dean was particularly interested in, and we believed that these were aspects that were readily fundable.

I'd like to show you one of these presentations, the Writing Center video.

Show video

The reception of our one-hour presentation to the Board of Visitors was overwhelming. After my ten-minute introduction, we invited the alumni to move from station to station, pursuing their own interests. Some went to all three stations; others settled at one and stayed there for the remaining 45 minutes, talking with the Writing Program representatives, watching the video, and talking with other alumni at that station. We gave them each a folder with the glossy white papers on the Writing Center, technology, and writing across the curriculum. And each folder contained a CD-ROM with copies of the PowerPoint video.

Significantly, the associate deans of our college were at the presentation, too. They were remarkably enthusiastic. Afterwards they told us that this was one of the best presentations the Board of Visitors had ever had: it had involved them in an active way in the presentation. More important, the deans said things like "Now I understand what your program is doing." They had been in innumerable meetings with directors of the Writing Program. But three five-minute videos made them feel that they understood the Writing Program.

As our dean warned us in advance, it will be some time before we will know whether our presentation to the Board of Visitors will result in outside funding for the Writing Program. But the unanticipated benefits of our presentation were immediate. Not only did we affect our deans' understanding of our work, but they asked that we make copies of the white papers and CD-ROMs for others in the university. We were asked to repeat the presentation for a faculty teaching circle.

What makes the videos so persuasive, I believe, is the rhetorical skills that the Writing Program contributors brought to the project. As you saw in the Writing Center video, we knew that we should avoid overpackaging our presentation. The people talking were unrehearsed and did not speak from a script. There was no background music. No one was doing a hard sell. Sometimes the camera jumped, the lighting was far from perfect, the peer consultants weren't attired exactly as I might have liked, and sometimes the sound wasn't the greatest, either. The video was, in other words, genuine.

And the result is that we have found a way of affecting people's assumptions about the teaching of writing. To return to the tasks that Andrea Lunsford and Doug Downs articulated: how can writing program administrators affect others' notions of the Writing Program? My answer is, "In many ways." We can conduct writing-across-the-curriculum workshops; we can sponsor colloquia; we can join committees and clubs; we can produce newsletters. These are all tried-and-true, valuable methods of spreading the Writing Program Word near and far. Yet we're still rasslin' with a whole cadre of Dean Fishes.

WPAs as change agents

Hence my recommendation that we add multimedia rhetoric to the mix. It will not "win" the debate, but it will give us a more persuasive voice in it.

It is my belief that multimedia rhetoric is effective because it is not a reasoned argument. That may seem a shocking statement for a compositionist to make. Reasoned argument is what we're all about. It's what we teach in our classes. But it is no longer the case that it's all we're teaching in our classes; we're also teaching multimedia rhetoric, which does not operate in the reasoned, linear, logical ways that traditional humanism has represented as the only ethical form of argument. Instead, multimedia rhetoric speaks to the emotions.

Our Board of Visitors presentation was above all visual. The videos did make some explicit arguments, but their biggest argument—that Writing Program work far exceeds notions of student obedience to standards of correctness and that it should exceed them—was never stated. Instead, the videos endeavored to use emotion, metaphor, and association to reach viewers' assumptions—their premises—about literacy instruction. Our intended audience was the alumni on the Board of Visitors. Our bonus audience was our associate deans: responsible, experienced administrators who know the Writing Program well and have paid careful attention to its rhetoric over the years, yet whose appreciation of the Writing Program was substantially improved by the three five-minute videos.

Italian rhetorician Ernesto Grassi explains that the great success of rhetoric is its ability to reach the audience's emotions; moreover, he says, it is on emotional bases that we establish the premises of our beliefs. Contrasting rhetoric and dialectic, Grassi says that dialectic manipulates and arranges the premises that are provided by rhetoric. Working primarily from logos—from logic—dialectic figures out the various combinations and interactions of the premises that have been established through the emotional appeals of rhetoric.

Transporting Grassi's analyses to the tasks of today's writing program administrators, I would assert that all the print documents of writing program administration—the annual reports, memoranda, and curriculum proposals—are part of the logic of dialectic. These documents are more successful in negotiating the consequences of the community's established beliefs about literacy instruction than they are in changing those beliefs. In all their logical splendor, these print documents address—but have little transformative effect upon—the university audience's deeply held premises.

Compositionists' beliefs about writing instruction are, of course, changeable and multiple rather than stable and unitary. Within the writing program, writing instruction was for a time often characterized as a way of helping writers find their authentic voices (see Bowden); then as an initiation into academic discourse (see, for example, Boyd). Now it is more typically seen as an instrument of social change (see, for example, Kennedy). But all these visions and more endure in today's writing programs, competing with each other.

As Anne Ruggles Gere has demonstrated, the views outside the writing program are also multiple and changeable. But like those inside the writing program, public perceptions can be characterized and typified. The dominant program-external vision of writing instruction was and is focused on sentence-level correctness (see Parks 53; Harris 85). Catherine Atherton describes the concern with linguistic correctness that endorsed grammatical instruction in ancient Rome; Thomas Miller traces the importance of linguistic correctness among the provincials who rose to teach rhetoric in eighteenth-century Scottish universities; James Berlin and Robert Connors have ably documented the increasing importance of grammatical correctness in nineteenth-century American pedagogy; and Stanley Fish attests to the enduring dominance of current-traditionalism in public notions of the "right" thing for writing programs to teach. Sharon Crowley details the consequences for writing program administrators who promote more nuanced visions of composition instruction:

When composition directors or teachers attempt to design syllabi for the required course that are not distasteful to students, they inevitably jettison or downplay the pedagogy of formal correctness. However, a case can be made that such attempts will fail to the extent that faculty outside composition, or the public at large, become aware of them. (Composition 255)

And all the annual reports, memoranda, committee meetings, and curriculum proposals haven't changed that, nor will they. Even the old anti-foundationalist himself, Stanley Fish, is going to teach what he wants us to believe is a grammar-only composition class this fall.

So the task I'm adding to my writing program administrator's toolbox is the task of multimedia rhetoric, a rhetoric that works in the realm of pathos rather than logos, a rhetoric that can reach to the very premises that the academic public holds about the true mission of writing programs, a rhetoric that can affect those premises.

Is our life at Syracuse University radically different because of the Board of Visitors videos? No, not radically—but it is changing. I am not proposing multimedia rhetoric as a solution to the public relations problems of writing program administrators; I am, however, proposing it as an effective means of engaging a dialectic about writing at one's institution. Visual media reach people at the level of fundamental belief; having done that, the writing program administrator is better positioned to engage in the dialectic of annual reports, memoranda, committee meetings, and curriculum proposals, so that the dialectic involves premises about literacy instruction that are less in conflict with each other.

Consequences for WPAs

This is no easy proposal I'm making, as I'm sure you're all aware. Who knows how to do something like the video I've just shown you? I certainly don't. What you've seen is the result of a highly collaborative effort led by George Rhinehart, the technology manager in our program; by Collin Brooke, an assistant professor specializing in writing and technology, information architecture, and humanistic informatics; and Paul Bender, an advanced doctoral student writing a dissertation on technology in writing program administration. They were assisted by many others, including me. Producing the three videos consumed well over 100 work hours. Solving the problems of the circulation of the videos has required additional work: we used PowerPoint for the presentation to the Board of Visitors but have found it quirky when transported via CD-ROM to other machines. For today's presentation, we tried burning a DVD but found that, for inexplicable reasons, the DVD would only play on a machine that itself had a DVD burner. So you're seeing it today in a QuickTime movie. Not the greatest resolution in the image, and we also had problems with the sound levels.

In other words, multimedia rhetoric is difficult, and it requires collaborative effort. It's not that the WPA must know how to "do it" herself; it's that she must be able to envision the project and lead the effort to accomplish it. She has to hire the people who can and will want to participate. She has to deploy program resources to make it happen. And most of all, she has to act as a rhetorician, restraining any impulse to do something just because it's technologically cool to do it, restraining any impulse to resort to hucksterism in the representation of the writing program, but being willing to engage in a kind of rhetoric that has long been held in suspicion by rhetoricians themselves, those who, working in a tradition as various as Plato and Toulmin, endorse only logical academic inquiry and shrink from the specter of persuasion.

In 1997, Sherrie Gradin said, "The standard workload for WPAs is almost always unbearable but also almost always fairly routine. The channels for the work of the WPA are reasonably well in place" (63). Um—not any more. I think those channels are changing; I think they will be anything but routine; but I already know from my own experience that the work is fresh and rewarding. WPAs today need to sell their programs, and they need to do so through contemporary rhetorical means.

If we writing program administrators are going to be in a position to participate fully in the crucial conversations about our own curricula, helping our colleagues understand what it is our programs do and why it is valuable, we need new tools. We need to sell our own vision of our programs, so that those visions become part of the university's discussions about the goals of and possibilities for writing instruction.

Works Cited

Atherton, Catherine. "Children, Animals, Slaves and Grammar." Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. Ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 214-244.

Berlin, James A. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Arguing about Literacy." College English 50.2 (February 1988): 141-153. Rpt. Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. U Pittsburgh P, 1992. 238-255.

Bowden, Darsie. The Mythology of Voice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 1999.

Boyd, Richard. "Imitate Me; Don't Imitate Me: Mimeticism in David Bartholomae's 'Inventing the University.'" JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition 11.2 (1991): 335-45.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. Students' Right to Their Own Language. Special Issue. College Composition and Communication 25 (1974).

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. U Pittsburgh P, 1997.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. U Pittsburgh P, 1998.

----------. "How the Professional Lives of WPAs Would Change If FYC Were Elective." The Writing Program Administrator's Handbook: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Change and Practice. Ed. Stuart C. Brown, Theresa Enos, and Catherine Chaput. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. 219-232.

Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago. "Complete English Department Course Listing: Undergraduate." <http://www.uic.edu/depts/engl/course/ucomplete.html>. 6 July 2002.

Downs, Doug. "Re: inventing FYC." Online posting. 18 January 2002. WPA-L. 30 June 2002. <http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0201&L=wpa-l&D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=26473>.

Elbow, Peter. "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process." College English 45.4 (April 1983): 327-39.

Fish, Stanley E. "Say It Ain't So." The Chronicle of Higher Education (21 June 2002). < http://chronicle.com/jobs/2002/06/2002062101c.htm>. 27 June 2002.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. "Public Opinion and Teaching Writing." The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, and Charles Schuster. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. 263-276.

Gilyard, Keith. "African American Contributions to Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 626-644.

Gradin, Sherrie. "What Happens to the Writing Program Administrator When the Writing Requirements Go Away?" WPA: Writing Program Administration 21.1 (Fall 1997): 55-66.

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition. Trans. John Michael Krois and Azizeh Azodi. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001.

Hesse, Douglas. "Composition as Pedagogy or Scholarship, Students as Writers or Workers." Composition Studies 29.2 (Fall 2001): 121-132.

Hirsch, E.D., Jr. "Cultural Literacy." The American Scholar 52 (1983): 159-169.

----------. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

----------. "Culture and Literacy." Journal of Basic Writing 3.1 (Fall/Winter 1980): 27-35.

Hirsch, E.D., Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Kaufer, David, and Richard Young. "Writing in the Content Areas: Some Theoretical Complexities." Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Ed. Lee Odell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 71-104.

Kennedy, Alan. "Politics, Writing, Writing Instruction, Public Space, and the English Language." Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy. Ed. Karen Fitts and Alan W. France. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 17-38.

Lunsford, Andrea A. "Re: Short people and compositionists, was fishy writing tales." Online posting. 28 June 2002. WPA-L. 30 June 2002. <http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0206&L=wpa-l&D=1&O=D&P=35275>.

McLeod, Susan H., and Elaine Maimon. "Clearing the Air: WAC Myths and Realities." College English 62.5 (May 2000): 573-583.

McLeod, Susan, and Eric Miraglia. "Writing Across the Curriculum in a Time of Change." WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-The-Curriculum-Programs. Ed. Susan H. McLeod, et al. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. 1-27.

Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1998.

Odell, Lee. "Theory and Practice." Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Ed. Lee Odell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 1-8.

O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller, eds. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. 4^th ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Olson, Gary A. "Fish Tales: A Conversation with 'The Contemporary Sophist.'" Journal of Advanced Composition 12 (1992): 253-277.

Park, Douglas B. "Theories and Expectations: On Conceiving Composition and Rhetoric as a Discipline." College English 41 (1979): 47-56.

Russell, David R. "Romantics on Writing: Liberal Culture and the Abolition of Composition Courses." Rhetoric Review 6 (Spring 1988): 132-48.

----------. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Sheils, Merrill. "Why Johnny Can't Write." Newsweek 92 (8 December 1975): 58-65.

Trimbur, John. "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis." The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, and Charles Schuster. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. 277-295.

University of Illinois at Chicago. "LAS—Fall 2002." <http://www.uic.edu/classes/timetable/VF02LAS.html>. 6 July 2002.

----------. "College of Liberal Arts and Sciences." Undergraduate Catalog 2001-2003. <http://www.uic.edu/ucat/catalog/LA.html#LAENGLCOMP>. 6 July 2002.

Vitanza, Victor J. "Three Countertheses: Or, A Critical In(ter)vention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies." Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. 139-172.

"The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition." WPA: Writing Program Administration 23.1-2 (Fall/Winter 1999): 59-66. <http://www.cas.ilstu.edu/English/Hesse/outcomes.html>. Rpt. College English 63.3 (January 2001): 321-25. Rpt. The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. Ed. Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter. New York: Addison Wesley, 2002. 357-359.