Analyzes the institutionality and intractability of the "close reading" assignment. Maintains that the close reading assignment functions as an index to English in the academy. (RS)

Were it not for readers and writers, the ideas of truth and openness might have disappeared behind the Iron Curtain forever. We read and write, not to ensure employers of a competent work force, but to know each other's responses, to connect ourselves more fully with the human world, and to strengthen the truth-telling habit among us. (MLH)

Presents an interview with Jacques Derrida, discussing rhetoric and composition. Describes Derrida's growth as a writer, proposes a model of composition instruction, discusses problems compositionists should avoid, and comments on a range of other topics, including liberatory learning, social constructionism, logocentrism, and feminism. (SR)

Argues that just as rhetoric and composition began to free themselves from a positivist/linguistics, they found themselves enthralled by its counterpart, post-structuralist mysticism. Sketches how philosophy can help in thinking about personal knowledge and the "social construction of knowledge." Includes three responses and a…

Suggests that excellence in writing, as in many things, will flourish in a climate that is open to it, wherever and however it may express itself. Argues that a fundamental skill that writing teachers must teach their students is to identify and describe the things that drive writing for them at any given time. (RS)

Reprints a 1979 article from this journal in which the author recounts his impressions as a reader for the College Board's English Achievement Test, an experience that left him asking questions about this type of assessment. Updates the article with an Afterword commenting on the earlier piece. (SR)

Characterizes the extent to which--and the ways in which--Hugh Blair's "Sermons" are pathetic or emotional, in light of criticisms that maintain his work is passionless. Examines the closely related matter of Blair's moral philosophy, in which the passions play an important role as subject matter. (TB)

Presents an article about Richard Sterling, the new leader of the National Writing Project. Describes his educational background, how he got started in the New York area (where he founded the New York City Writing Project as well as the Urban Sites Network and the Institute for Literacy), and his plans for the National Writing Project. (SR)

Reflects on the origins and development of the author's thinking about the nature of writing and the relationship between writing and cognition. Recounts efforts to understand the effects of writing on cognition. Revises an earlier contention that literacy represents a form of cultural progress in favor of a more cautious view of writing as an…

Proposes that writing pedagogies focused on models of audience analysis stultify invention and in doing so compromise the epistemic dimension of the writing they influence. Claims that classical audience analysis assumes a determinism that the separation of reader and writer denies. (HB)

Suggests the usefulness of investigating the conjunctures at which discourses and practices in the field of composition studies are linked to discourses and practices outside of it. Examines how the narrativity of an individual life in Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary" is articulated to wider cultural narratives. (PRA)

Relates the real-life experiences that prompted the author, the 1992 Newbery medalist, to write the novel "Shiloh." (PRA)

Demonstrates how theory can alter as it "travels" from another region of inquiry into composition by examining Elaine Maimon's essay "Knowledge, Acknowledgment, and Writing across the Curriculum: Toward an Educated Community." Discusses how Maimon changes Stanley Fish's theory of "interpretive communities." (PRA)

Offers a poet's reflections on writing and his schooling. (PRA)

Argues that Plato considers his philosophical doctrines unwritable and shows how this assumption can be mobilized as the dominant trope for interpreting Plato. Suggests that Platonic texts deploy language in dramatically rhetorical fashion to control the reader and lead her analogically to a vision of an extralinguistic reality. (RS)