Richard H. Haswell

NCTE/CCCC’s Recent War on Scholarship

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 Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship.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

Documenting Improvement in College Writing: A Longitudinal Approach

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

Error and Change in College Student Writing.

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

Gender Bias and Critique of Student Writing.

Abstract The main purpose of this empirical investigation into gender and writing instruction is to locate ways that the critique of readers may be affected by their foreknowledge of the student writers sex. Thirty-two teachers and 32 students evaluated and diagnosed two student essays, neither overtly marked as to the sex of the writer. Independent variables controlled for were sex of reader, sex of the interviewer who prompted response during the taped session, professional status of participant (student or teacher), and knowledge of authors biological sex by participant (prior knowledge or no prior knowledge). Statistical analysis found gender interacting with all these variables. Among other associations, readers spontaneously constructed the authors sex even when they had not been informed of it; they rated the essays lower when they knew the writer was of their own sex, as measured by holistic rating and percentage of positive critique; they showed an anti-male bias as measured by holistic rating, and an anti-feminine bias as measured by attribution of agency to the writing; and they tended to suppress gender, as measured by the amount of agency that they passivized or made neutral. In sum, the study found evidence for the active presence of gender effects, especially via polarized gender stereotypes, as students and teachers appraise student writing.

Context and Rhetorical Reading Strategies: Haas and Flower (1988) Revisited.

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

Toward Competent Writing in the Workplace

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