Susan H. McLeod

The Second Stage in Writing across the Curriculum

Writing across the curriculum (WAC) is on one hand practical composition pedagogy and on the other an adventure into the uses of written language outside the primrose paths of belles lettres where we were so willingly led by Hugh Blair and George Campbell, who promised us class mobility and respectable cultivation. As was the case with Blair and Campbell, the pedagogic motive of WAC comes first, but the success of the pedagogic task in the long run depends on the success of the scholarly, critical task. The four books under review here mark the end of the first stage of WAC, driven by the missionary zeal of composition and the institutional designs of administrators looking for broad structural fixes, and the beginning of the next stage, based on a realistic assessment of the roles written language actually takes in disciplines and disciplinary classrooms. As essay after essay in the useful volume Strengthening Programs for Writing Across the Curriculum attests, familiar assumptions about composition have been challenged by the realities of classrooms across the curriculum and the in-

Cultural Literacy, Curricular Reform, and Freshman Composition.

(1990). Cultural literacy, curricular reform, and freshman composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 270-278.