Options for the Teaching of English: Freshman Composition (Jasper Neel)

In the 1970s the search for a workable composition program has been unusually intense, and the essays in this book indicate the wide variety of composition programs currently in operation at all types of colleges--two-year, four-year, rural, urban, public, private, graduate, undergraduate. If there is anything that distinguishes the 1970s from other periods in the history of American college composition programs, it is that teachers and administrators have begun to see the teaching of composition as an end in itself, not a temporary assignment on the way to bigger and better things. (v)

The points on which the writers disagree, however, are not nearly as important art he points on which they agree. All agree that composition teachers must base their teaching on some theory of how writing is learned and how it can be taught. All agree that composition teachers must respect their work and themselves, that composition cannot be taught well by teachers who see it as drudge-work and who receive second-rate professional and financial rewards for their efforts. All agree that every college must design a program that motivates students to learn to write, that students must see some connection between their personal aspirations and their ability to write. Finally, all agree that the only way anyone learned to write is by writing a great deal for a clearly defined audience. (v)

...at all but one of the Ph.D.-granting institutions represented in this book...more than eighty-five percent of the composition courses were taught by graduate students. Even so, almost every composition program accounts for a substantial percentage, usually about fifty percent, of the total effort of the department that houses the program. (v)

The eighteen [writing programs] represented in this book were chosen not because they are the "best" but because they offer an overview of the ways different institutions deal with the teaching of writing. (vii)