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Оглавление1 Directions to the Parlor: The Need for a Guide to Scholarship in Composition Studies
The publisher of this book, Parlor Press, derives its name from a frequently quoted passage by theorist Kenneth Burke, a passage especially relevant to this text’s mission of guiding readers to a discipline’s scholarship:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110–11)
Although Burke used this metaphor to describe the drama of human existence—you enter the parlor at your birth, mature to participate in the “unending conversation” of civilization, and then exit the parlor upon your death—the passage is sometimes quoted in composition scholarship as an apt description of how knowledge is constructed in an academic discipline. When a student or other newcomer first encounters a discipline, she finds its scholars engaged in an intense conversation that has been evolving since the discipline’s inception. If the student is intrigued by the conversation taking place, she listens—she studies it—until she is informed enough to join the conversation herself as a publishing scholar. Consistent with Burke’s metaphor, the conversation of a discipline—its scholarship—continues beyond any one individual’s participation.
Gary Olson is one composition specialist who has written explicitly about the correlation between an ongoing conversation and scholarship in composition studies. In his essay “Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition: Joining the Conversation,” Olson depicts a scene quite similar to Burke’s metaphor of a parlor conversation:
[I]magine a faculty cocktail party in which various colleagues and their spouses are standing in groups sipping cocktails and engaging in intimate, sometimes passionate discussions. After freshening your cocktail, you approach several people discussing the influence of postmodern theory on composition pedagogy. Obviously, it would be considered rude to jump immediately into the conversation that had been going on before you arrived. Basic etiquette dictates that you join the group, quietly listen to what is being said, and develop a sense of the larger conversation—both its tone and content—before you begin to make a contribution. The same kind of dynamics attend to the scholarly conversation. Before rushing into print about this or that subject, it is imperative that you read what is currently being said about the subject, discover what the positions are and who is taking what position, and in general, acquire a sense of the larger conversation. (21)
In quoting both Burke and Olson at length, I invite you to imagine the scholarship of composition studies as a lively conversation that is well underway. Is this a conversation you would like to listen to and perhaps eventually join? If so, this book will aid you by providing directions for finding the composition studies’ parlor, that is, the books, journals, and other sites where the scholarly conversations of this discipline are taking place. In writing this guide, I hope to both ease and speed your entry into this scholarly conversation.
For Writing and Discussion
1. If the scholarship of composition studies can be aptly described as a conversation taking place in a parlor, what experiences have led you to the doorway of this parlor? Why are you interested in stepping inside to hear the conversation?
2. Suppose that you are interested in reading more about composition studies but can’t now imagine that you might join the conversation by publishing in the future. What value might you still find in simply listening to the conversation for a while?
The Need for Student-Centered Introductions to Composition Studies
Guides written specifically to introduce advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students to the discipline of composition studies, such as this text, are only now beginning to be published. One reason is because composition studies emerged as a discipline relatively recently. In his article “Composition History and Disciplinarity,” Robert Connors states that “we can trace the possibility of the field of composition studies” (8) from the New Rhetoric of the 1960s, but that “the founding decade of the disciplinarity of composition studies” (8) was the 1970s, the decade when much serious scholarship in rhetoric and composition began to be published and when the first rhetoric doctoral programs in English departments were formed. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s, writes Connors, that composition studies experienced the “full-blown growth of disciplinarity” (10).
Since then, the composition studies parlor has become increasingly populated with students. According to surveys published periodically in the journal Rhetoric Review (see Chapman and Tate; Brown et al.), there were 38 composition doctoral programs in 1986 and 72 such programs when the survey was updated in 1993, a near doubling of programs in just seven years. Though the number of doctoral programs declined slightly to 65 by the next survey of programs, conducted in 1999, the total enrollment of students in composition doctoral programs had increased by ten percent, up to 1,276. The first survey of MA programs in composition studies, conducted in 2004, identified 55 programs, yet the authors of this survey admit the likelihood that many MA programs in rhetoric and composition were not represented in this survey.
As student enrollments in composition studies programs have grown, so too have compositionists’ discussions about how to best prepare students for entry to the discipline. For example, Louise Wetherbee Phelps has argued for the development of a graduate writing pedagogy, one that faculty can use “in teaching graduate students as prospective scholars how to engage in a postmodern rhetoric” (67). Janice Lauer has raised questions about whether students should be expected to become active members of the profession, even to publish, while they are still in graduate school. Karen Peirce and Theresa Enos have expressed concern that faculty who teach in graduate composition programs share little consensus about graduate curricula, including what kinds of writing assignments are required and what textbooks are used.
The issue of how best to facilitate students entering the conversation of composition studies is addressed most recently and comprehensively in the 2006 book Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the New Wave in Rhetoric & Composition, edited by Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano. In one essay from this volume, “Inviting Students into Composition Studies with a New Instructional Genre,” Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter critique the “immersion approach to instruction” (198) that has been a mainstay of composition studies programs, whereby “students are expected to jump into the middle of the stream of expert-level discussions and, through a sink-or-swim process, come to understand the various arguments and their relation to one another” (198). Fontaine and Hunter argue that this approach, which may have questionable merit in any discipline, is particularly unsuitable for composition studies because nearly all students entering graduate composition programs have had little or no introduction to the discipline as undergraduates. Thus, students have no “knowledge-building schema” (203), no ready framework for judging the relative importance of what they read or context for interpreting the issues at stake. Fontaine and Hunter then build a case for a new instructional genre in composition studies, books that are written specifically for students entering the discipline, that “acknowledge [students’] position at the threshold of disciplinary knowledge and would actually prepare them to become expert learners in the field of Composition” (203). Such texts, say Fontaine and Hunter, should aim to teach students “the behaviors and practices of the discipline” (206) and should present “theoretical or practical concepts and methods of inquiry that could cross courses” (207), reflecting a “curricula whose rhythms draw on habits of mind much more than the replication of expert knowledge” (207).
To meet the need for texts in this new instructional genre, Parlor Press created the Lenses on Composition Studies series, and this is the first text to be published in the series. As a student beginning your training in composition studies, you’re crossing the threshold into the disciplinary parlor at an especially opportune time. As scholars in the discipline, we welcome you. We hope to make you more comfortable while you listen for a while, so when you’re ready you may join us in the conversation.
For Writing and Discussion
1. As a student beginning to learn about composition studies, what do (or did) you find challenging about reading scholarship in the discipline?
2. Prior to picking up this book, what, if anything, has helped to ease your entry to the composition studies parlor?
The Need for Bibliographic Instruction in Academia
In addition to answering a call for more student-centered introductions to composition studies, this book also answers a call from academic librarians for bibliographic instruction to be integrated into courses in the disciplines. Bibliographic instruction emerged as a distinct field for academic librarians, coincidentally, during the same period that composition studies was developing as a discipline (Fister, “Common Ground”). According to librarian Larry Hardesty, the modern period of attention to bibliographic instruction began in 1969 and “by the early 1970s, bibliographic instruction had emerged as an authentic movement” (340). In 1983, a scholarly journal devoted to the field was initiated, entitled Research Strategies. Shortly afterwards, bibliographic instruction became a priority of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), which is the major professional organization of academic libraries and is a division of the American Library Association (ALA). In 1987, the ACRL developed its first “Model Statement of Objectives for Academic Bibliographic Instruction.” As library resources became more prevalent online, librarians began to replace the term “bibliographic instruction” with the more comprehensive term “information literacy.” The ACRL then issued two additional documents meant to advance such instruction: “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,” approved in 2000, and “Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction: A Model Statement for Academic Librarians,” approved in 2001 as a revision of the ACRL’s earlier model statement of objectives for bibliographic instruction.
Bibliographic instruction, especially when defined more broadly as information literacy, trains students to do much more than locate relevant sources. The skills that comprise information literacy are best delineated in the following excerpt from the ACRL’s document “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education”:
An information literate individual is able to:
• Determine the extent of information needed
• Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
• Evaluate information and its sources critically
• Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
• Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally
Librarians hope that information literacy skills will be introduced to students in elementary and secondary schools, and that information literacy instruction and practice will be incorporated more fully into the higher education curriculum in all disciplines and at all levels, including graduate courses (Rockman). Such in-depth instruction is all the more necessary because in recent decades, academic libraries have undergone radical changes, largely because of technological developments. Not long ago, students and scholars who wished to research a topic needed to spend long hours physically in the library, sifting by hand through a card catalogue and annual bound volumes that indexed journal articles. Now, much research can be conducted from outside the walls of the library, through online catalogues and databases that allow users to conduct far more exhaustive searches and to do so far more quickly. Such ease in searching presents students with new challenges. As librarian Ilene Rockman explains, “the issue is no longer one of not having enough information; it is just the opposite—too much information, in various formats and not all of equal value” (1). Given such wealth of information, continues Rockman, “the ability to act confidently (and not be paralyzed by information overload) is critical to academic success and personal self-directed learning” (1).
Librarians are also adamant that bibliographic instruction be integrated into courses, not addressed solely by librarians in one or two class sessions. As Patricia Senn Breivik, past President of the ACRL and Chair of the National Forum on Information Literacy, states succinctly, “information literacy is a learning issue not a library issue” (xii). For this reason, librarians have expressed interest in forming more collaborative partnerships with faculty. For example, librarian Larry Hardesty has analyzed faculty culture to determine why faculty resist bibliographic instruction in their courses. After determining that the biggest obstacles to this instruction are faculty’s sense of inadequate instructional time and faculty’s reluctance to view librarians as peers, he concludes that librarians must take the initiative in forging better relationships with faculty through one-on-one informal contacts and through publishing about information literacy in sources that are likely to be read by faculty in the disciplines. Also, as recently as 2004, in an essay entitled “Developing Faculty-Librarian Partnerships in Information Literacy,” Susan Carol Curzon coaches librarians on how to interest faculty in the need for student information literacy skills. She advises librarians to relate information literacy to critical thinking, which faculty value already; to discuss information literacy as a lifelong skill; to talk about how information literacy helps students succeed academically; to stress that information literacy is an essential skill in academic life; and to present faculty with data that assesses students’ current information literacy skills.
Perhaps the strongest argument for course-integrated bibliographic instruction is that it improves students’ academic work, as confirmed in an empirical study conducted by librarians David Kohl and Lizabeth Wilson. Based on their study’s data, Kohl and Wilson conclude that “bibliographic instruction taught as a cognitive strategy did increase the quality of student bibliographies to a statistically significant degree” (209). Although their study was published in 1986, prior to the ACRL’s rich articulation of information literacy I have cited above, their qualification that the approach must be “taught as a cognitive strategy” is fully consistent with more contemporary definitions of information literacy. The effectiveness of course-integrated information literacy can be deduced from their discussion of their conclusions:
The traditional, tool-specific approach does not seem as helpful as an approach that focuses on helping students develop a more complex, appropriate, and individualized research strategy for themselves. [ . . . ] If bibliographic instruction is to be effective, it needs to be recast into an approach that begins with the student’s research question rather than the library tool and that focuses on understanding how information is organized rather than simply explaining the mechanics of how to use library tools. (210).
My hope is that the bibliographic skills you learn from this book will not only help you to complete a specific assignment for a course in composition studies but will also increase your information literacy skills more generally, making you more equipped for any research endeavor you undertake.
For Writing and Discussion
1. In commenting on the ease of online bibliographic searches, librarian Ilene Rockman writes that it is easy for students to be “paralyzed by information overload” (1). Have you ever felt paralyzed by too much information when working on an academic assignment?
a. If you have felt paralyzed in this way, describe the experience. Then review the ACRL’s bulleted list of skills that characterize a person with information literacy, cited earlier in this chapter. Which of these skills do you think would most have helped you resolve this paralysis? How so?
b. If you cannot remember feeling paralyzed by information overload, describe any prior bibliographic instruction you have received that you think has helped you to avoid this experience. Then review the ACRL’s bulleted list of skills that characterize a person with information literacy, cited earlier in this chapter. Which of these skills are strengths you developed from your previous bibliographic instruction? Which of these skills do you still hope to improve?
2. Identify someone who has been employed as either a faculty member or an academic librarian for at least ten years. Informally interview this person about how technological developments in the last decade have changed the process they use when searching for academic sources. Summarize the person’s responses; then describe what this interview exercise has taught you about the merits and the limitations of bibliographic instruction.
The Need for Bibliographic Instruction in Composition Studies
We have just examined the need for bibliographic instruction in all academic disciplines; in this section we will examine why bibliographic instruction is particularly necessary in composition studies.
Although he was not the first to call for bibliographic rigor in composition studies, the person who is most often credited with initiating a demand for bibliographic resources in the discipline is Paul Bryant, 1973 chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the first to chair the CCCC Commission on a Bibliography for the Profession in 1981. In his keynote address as CCCC chair, entitled “A Brand New World Every Morning,” Bryant lamented that the teaching of composition at the time was notably ill-informed by earlier scholarship. Without an annual bibliography on teaching composition, wrote Bryant, the discipline was ahistorical, like a brand new world every morning, one that permitted “the repeated reinvention of the same pedagogical wheels” (30), which Bryant bluntly described as “wasteful and stupid, to say the least” (31). It is only through a greater awareness of work already done, he wrote, that the discipline can develop in ways that are “as linearly progressive as possible” (32).
Yet several characteristics make composition studies challenging for bibliographers to manage. According to Patrick Scott, who has written extensively about bibliographic problems in composition studies, one of the greatest challenges is the classification of subjects. Unlike scholarship about literature, which can be classified almost entirely using proper names, such as a literary work’s author or title, scholarship in composition studies must be classified by terminology that is often less fixed. Scott provides the example of someone researching how writers begin writing; the terms “pre-writing,” “invention” and “planning” have all been used to describe this stage of the writing process, yet conducting searches of these words would yield different results. Retrospective searches in composition studies can be difficult, writes Scott, because “even where older research had addressed similar or overlapping questions, the old indexes don’t use the expected new words, and a kind of bibliographical amnesia sets in” (“Bibliographical Problems” 169). In addition, Scott writes, what makes the retrieval of relevant sources by subject terms further challenging is that “compositionists tend to talk about more than one topic in an article, and to raise issues that cut across simple subject-categorization” (“Bibliographical Resources” 83).
Still another bibliographic difficulty Scott discusses is that of field demarcation. Scholarship in composition studies is often interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as education, linguistics, speech communication, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and literary theory. This broad scope of potential inquiry makes it difficult for compilers of bibliographic resources in composition to determine which sources to include and which to exclude when indexing scholarship. Such ill-defined parameters for the discipline also leave researchers uncertain about how fully a subject has been searched when using the bibliographic resources in composition studies. As recently as 2006, librarian Daniel Coffey confirmed the interdisciplinary nature of composition scholarship when he analyzed the citations in a representative sample of the discipline’s core monographs and journals. Coffey concluded that “part of what makes composition scholars unique is that their research is not completely encapsulated within the disciplinary realm of the humanities” (162). Perhaps even more than students in traditional humanities disciplines, then, students of composition studies would benefit from a longstanding, comprehensive, user-friendly bibliography.
Unfortunately, the development of a thorough bibliography in composition studies is instead more recent and troubled. Patrick Scott, Paul Bryant, and Richard Haswell have all published historical accounts of the development of bibliographic resources for composition studies, and they all fault the discipline’s professional organizations for not developing a comprehensive annual bibliography for the discipline sooner. Scott writes that the sheer multitude of professional organizations in composition studies created a professional segmentation, hindering the commitment of a single organization to devote the money, staff, and resources to a large-scale bibliographic endeavor (“Bibliographical Problems” 172–173). Scott describes this lack of initiative on the part of professional organizations as “embarrassing” (“Bibliographical Resources” 82); Bryant’s criticism is equally unforgiving: “That neither the CCCC nor the NCTE saw fit by the mid-1980s to devote some of their considerable publication resources to such a clearly needed, basic professional tool as a comprehensive annual research bibliography when, during that same period, they found it possible to provide significant support to various political and social agendas is regrettable” (“No Longer” 144).
Although helpful volumes were available that offered an introduction to composition scholarship, these also had extensive shortcomings, as Scott explains:
[I]n addition to being dated, discursive and orientatory guides pose other problems: nearly all the existing guides are avowedly selective in their coverage, most of them are silent about the kinds of searching from which they were compiled, they are often biased one way or another in their selection of material, and most fundamental of all, there are disturbing gaps in the chronological coverage they provide. (“Bibliographical Problems” 167).
What Scott claimed that composition studies still lacked and sorely needed in 1986 when he wrote the above passage was “on-going, systematic, non-judgmental coverage of activity in the field” (167).
This need began to be filled the following year, although it was more than a decade before an annual bibliography in composition studies had a permanent home. In 1987 and 1988, Erika Lindemann edited the Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric, which provided citations and annotations of scholarship in the discipline that was published in 1984–1986. When Longman discontinued this series after publishing just two volumes, the CCCC contracted with Southern Illinois University Press to continue the annual bibliography under the title the CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric. The nine volumes that followed provide citations and annotations of scholarship in composition studies that was published in 1987–1995. These annual volumes then ceased because the CCCC began plans to join its annual bibliography with the one compiled by the Modern Language Association (MLA); however, Todd Taylor later combined all eleven volumes from both prior publishers and updated them through 1999 into an online, searchable, open access database. Scholarship published after 1999 that would have been included in this annual bibliography, had it been continued, is instead indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
Whereas composition studies once lacked adequate bibliographic resources, such resources for the discipline are now plentiful. In addition to the continuation of the discipline’s annual bibliography in the MLA International Bibliography, students and professionals can also use CompPile, JSTOR, ERIC, WorldCat and other valuable resources to conduct bibliographic research in composition studies. Because all of these resources differ in how they operate and what they offer, now more than ever, students entering the discipline need bibliographic instruction to gain skill in using these varied resources astutely.
It may be tempting to become comfortable with only one or two bibliographic resources and to assume they will produce adequate results, but Scott warns against this practice, arguing that “in composition, as in other reference fields, we are often channeled by our favorite bibliography’s taxonomy and coverage base into one particular research tradition or one phase of a continuing debate, while being cut off from other traditions or phases, and we need, here as in other disciplines, to come to terms with this channeling effect” (“Bibliographical Problems” 176). Elsewhere, Scott reiterates this advice: “For most purposes, it is better to use multiple bibliographical sources rather than relying on a single favorite source—not just because a favorite source might exclude relevant items (different bibliographies have different methodological leanings, for instance), but because in any particular source all the relevant items may not be sorted or indexed under the heading(s) the researcher is using” (“Bibliographical Resources” 88). An important objective of this text, then, is to make you confident about your ability to enhance your search results by using multiple bibliographic resources.
In addition, in keeping with the recommendations of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) previously discussed, the bibliographic instruction you will learn in this text extends beyond just explaining the tools available to addressing the research process itself. The importance of this approach, as articulated by Scott, is worth quoting at length:
Practical advice about composition bibliography must therefore be concerned with attitudes and search-strategies, not just with the bibliographies themselves. Often, for instance, when quite sophisticated composition graduate students turn to a bibliographical search, they revert to the worst kind of old-style high-school-research-paper thinking and assume that, given the right subject-heading and the right bibliography, they ought to find readymade the list of all necessary material. This could only be true if the research project was a first-level search on a very stable aspect of the discipline. As compositionists should know, research-writing (and therefore research) is not simply about assembling readymade information, but about changing the ways a topic can be looked at and about making new cross-connections between material. (“Bibliographical Resources” 87)
Scott continues by cautioning researchers against relying on “the bibliographer’s prepackaged selections” (“Bibliographical Resources” 87) and explains that “specialized bibliographies [ . . . ] are best used for preliminary orientation to a topic, or for refreshing our sense of the range of material, rather than as a substitute or short-cut for our own systematic library search early in a major project” (“Bibliographical Resources” 79).
What this text will teach you is the processes used by experienced researchers in the discipline, what Scott describes as “search-strategies that maximize [your] own active choosing role” (“Bibliographical Resources” 87). Such strategies are not self-evident in composition studies, making the bibliographic instruction provided in this text necessary. I contend, though, as does Scott, that what makes composition studies bibliographically challenging is what also makes it bibliographically interesting (“Bibliographical Resources” 90–91).
In 1994, Paul Bryant wrote that because bibliographic resources in composition studies now exist, the discipline no longer needs to function as if we face “a brand new world every morning.” Yet the bibliographic needs of the discipline are still pressing:
Perhaps most important, and still much neglected, is the education of graduate students soon to be entering the profession. Use of the ample bibliographic resources in literary studies has been a staple of graduate education in English for generations, but similar instruction in composition and rhetoric is still seldom found, even in some of our most progressive research institutions. This, perhaps, is the next major project for those who would make the study of composition and rhetoric a fully developed academic discipline. We have the tools. Now let us make sure that the next generation of composition teachers and scholars are adequately prepared to use them. (“No Longer” 150)
As I write this chapter fifteen years later, the need for bibliographic instruction in composition studies is still largely unmet. With this book, I hope to fill this need.
Suggestions for Using This Book
The first half of this book provides an introduction to composition studies as a field. More specifically, chapter two explains the modes of inquiry that people in the field use to construct disciplinary knowledge, and chapter three explains the ways in which knowledge in composition studies is disseminated to others in the field. Both of these chapters provide a useful context for helping you to locate work done in composition studies and assess the significance of any source for your own research project as well as its significance to the field. The remaining chapters of this book guide you through your own research process. While reading chapter four, you will make preliminary decisions about your own bibliographic search techniques and criteria. Chapter five will then introduce you to databases and bibliographies that are especially useful to composition studies, and chapter six will guide you through the research and writing process to produce an annotated bibliography and literature review. Even if you are most interested in the discipline-specific databases and guidance for bibliographic assignments that is offered in the final chapters, I recommend that you read this book in sequence and in its entirety because the early chapters will give you knowledge about the field that will help you to make wiser decisions about your research strategies and the individual sources you find. Ultimately, though, you will gain the most from this book if you don’t simply read it; you should instead identify a bibliographic project that you can undertake as you read, which will allow you to practice the research strategies and become more adept at using the bibliographic resources discussed in this book.
Perhaps you are encountering this book as a text for a course in which you are enrolled. If so, it is likely that your professor will assign one or more written projects that require you to locate, read, and synthesize prior knowledge in composition studies about a particular topic; the guidance offered in this text can help you to complete those assignments. Or, you may be consulting this book independently of a course, perhaps to hone your research skills in the discipline before beginning an extensive endeavor like writing a thesis or dissertation. Whatever your situation, it can be helpful to identify an issue in composition studies that you’d like to research as you read the remaining chapters of this book.
Take the first step now by formulating a question you would like to research. By using a question to guide your research, rather than just a topic, you will be better able to judge which sources are useful to your research. For example, the research topic “online writing instruction” offers less direction than the research question “What are the best practices in online writing instruction?” or the question “How does online instruction impact students’ improvement in writing skills?” Your question should be open-ended, not a question that can be answered with simply a “yes” or “no.” Consider writing a group of related questions that you can use to initiate your research, and then after you read some of the sources that these questions help you to find, you can then revise your inquiry, narrowing it to a core question that has not yet been fully resolved by knowledge-makers in the discipline.
If you have difficulty identifying an initial question to research, consider your prior exposure to composition studies. When you think of scholarship you have already read in the discipline, what topics have interested you most? Why? Also, what from your reading have you found most confusing? What could be accomplished by conducting bibliographic research to resolve this confusion? Your experiences as a writer, a writing student, a writing tutor, and/or a writing teacher can serve as additional prompts for research questions. When you have had these experiences, what has puzzled you about the practice, theory, or teaching of writing? If you have thus far had limited exposure to the discipline of composition studies, you may also want to read an introduction to the discipline, which can help you to identify what issues define the discipline. One such introduction is Janice Lauer’s essay “Rhetoric and Composition,” included in the book English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s); the full citation is included in the bibliography at the end of this chapter.
Once you have written your research question(s), write a paragraph that explains why you are interested in this inquiry, then seek feedback on your question(s) and explanatory paragraph from your professor, classmates, and others you may know in composition studies. Although you should then refine your question(s) based on the responses you receive, be aware that once you identify relevant sources and read more about what is already known and what remains to be known about your topic, you will likely need to revise your question(s) again. In other words, just as bibliographic research is a recursive process, so too even the identification of a research topic and question is often recursive, requiring revision throughout your research process.
Some Cautions about This Book
Now that we have examined the need for student-centered introductions to composition studies, for bibliographic instruction in the academy, and for bibliographic instruction specifically in composition studies, and you have identified a research interest to investigate as you read the remainder of this book, I want to conclude this chapter with some cautions about your use of this book, as it is only fair to forewarn you about what this text cannot do.
As should be obvious, this text can’t prepare you for what’s not available at the time this book is being written. Edward Corbett, a founding member of the profession, has written that “Nothing—not even last year’s hemline—dates as quickly as a published bibliography” (qtd. in Scott, “Bibliographical Problems” 167). Fortunately, bibliographic resources do not date as rapidly as do bibliographies themselves, but they too change. For example, when I began writing this book, in only a matter of months several changes took place that required me to make revisions before this book even went to press: the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a new edition of its publication manual; the CompPile and JSTOR databases both got new interfaces, which in turn changed several of their features; several databases added key journals to those they regularly index; and some journals added to their websites the capacity to search the journal’s archives. By the time this book appears in print, additional changes affecting bibliographical endeavors in composition studies will undoubtedly have occurred. Much larger changes, such as the increased availability of scholarship through digital formats and open access publishing, are also on the horizon. You will therefore need to update your knowledge of bibliographic resources as the discipline changes in years beyond the publication of this book. However, because this book explains not just bibliographic resources in their current form but also bibliographic strategies, this book will teach you the skills you will need to independently update your knowledge of bibliographic tools.
You should also recognize that while this book will help you to identify scholarship in composition studies relevant to your research interests, finding sources is not the same as understanding and using them well. As librarian Barbara Fister explains, “students must not only be able to find information but to present ideas, shape them to appeal to a particular audience, and support them with convincing evidence. Information must not only be retrieved and evaluated, it must be put to use rhetorically—i.e., used to construct a text” (“Teaching” 212). While bibliographic resources and strategies are the beginning of your own scholarly work in composition studies, they are not all you need to know to participate well in the scholarly conversation. Additional courses in composition studies, as well as your independent reading of scholarship in the discipline, will help you in this regard.
Finally, there are additional issues related to joining the scholarly conversation in composition studies that this book does not discuss. Much has been written about how an author’s gender and contractual obligations affect his or her scholarly work in composition studies. There are also published discussions about the appropriate voice for scholarly writing, about experimenting with new forms of publication, and even about the relative merits of teaching and publishing. These are all nuances of the conversation about composition studies scholarship that are beyond the immediate purpose of this book; if these issues interest you, you can learn more about them once you have used this book to enter the composition studies parlor, where these and many other discussions take place.
I urge you, then, to not think of this book as an encyclopedia of all you may ever need to know about scholarship in composition studies. I write it instead as a navigation guide for first-time travelers entering the discipline. If you follow its guidance, you will arrive at your destination—the parlor of composition studies—via the shortest, fastest route, with fewer wrong turns than you’d be likely to make without such a guide. I also hope to direct your journey so that you won’t be already exhausted and disoriented upon your arrival but can instead arrive refreshed, ready to listen and learn from the conversation taking place.
Let’s begin.
Works Cited
Anderson, Virginia, and Susan Romano, eds. Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric & Composition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006.
Association of College & Research Libraries. “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.” January 2000. American Library Association. 19 November 2007 <http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.cfm>
—. “Model Statement of Objectives for Academic Bibliographic Instruction.” May 1987. American Library Association. 19 November 2007 <http://www.ala.org/cfapps/archive.cfm?path=acrl/guides/msobi.html>.
—. “Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction: A Model Statement for Academic Librarians.” January 2001. American Library Association. 19 November 2007 <http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/objectivesinformation.cfm>.
Breivik, Patricia Senn. Foreword. Higher Education in the Internet Age: Libraries Creating a Strategic Edge. Patricia Senn Breivik and E. Gordon Gee. Westport, CT: American Council of Education, Praeger Series on Higher Education, 2006. xi-xiv.
Brown, Stuart C., Rebecca Jackson, and Theresa Enos. “The Arrival of Rhetoric in the Twenty-First Century: The 1999 Survey of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 18 (2000): 233–374.
Brown, Stuart C., Paul R. Meyer, and Theresa Enos. “Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition: A Catalog of the Profession.” Rhetoric Review 12 (1994): 240–389.
Brown, Stuart C., Monica F. Torres, Theresa Enos, and Erik Juergensmeyer. “Mapping a Landscape: The 2004 Survey of MA Programs in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 24 (2005): 5–12.
Bryant, Paul T. “A Brand New World Every Morning.” College Composition and Communication 25 (1974): 30–33.
—. “No Longer a Brand New World: The Development of Bibliographic Resources in Composition.” Composition in Context: Essays in Honor of Donald C. Stewart. Ed. W. Ross Winterowd and Vincent Gillespie. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 139–51.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 1941. 3rd edition, revised. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.
Chapman, David W., and Gary Tate. “A Survey of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition.” Rhetoric Review 5 (1987): 124–85.
Coffey, Daniel P. “A Discipline’s Composition: A Citation Analysis of Composition Studies.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32 (2006): 155–65.
Connors, Robert J. “Composition History and Disciplinarity.” History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963–1983. Ed. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. 3–21.
Curzon, Susan Carol. “Developing Faculty-Librarian Partnerships in Information Literacy.” Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum: Practical Models for Transformation. Ed. Ilene F. Rockman. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004. 29–46.
Fister, Barbara. “Common Ground: The Composition/Bibliographic Instruction Connection.” Academic Libraries: Achieving Excellence in Higher Education. Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Ed. Thomas Kirk. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 1992. 154–58.
—. “Teaching the Rhetorical Dimensions of Research.” Research Strategies 11 (1993): 211–19.
Fontaine, Sheryl I., and Susan M. Hunter. “Inviting Students into Composition Studies with a New Instructional Genre.” Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the New Wave in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2006. 197–213.
Hardesty, Larry. “Faculty Culture and Bibliographic Instruction: An Exploratory Analysis.” Library Trends 44 (1995): 339–67.
Haswell, Richard H. “NCTE/CCCC’s Recent War on Scholarship.” Written Communication 22 (2005): 198–223.
Kohl, David F., and Lizabeth A. Wilson. “Effectiveness of Course-Integrated Bibliographic Instruction in Improving Coursework.” Reference Quarterly 26 (1986): 206–11.
Lauer, Janice M. “Graduate Students as Active Members of the Profession: Some Questions for Mentoring.” Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. 229–35.
—. “Rhetoric and Composition.” English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s). Ed. Bruce McComiskey. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2006. 106–52.
Olson, Gary A. “Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition: Joining the Conversation.” Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Albany: SUNY P, 1997. 19–33.
Peirce, Karen P., and Theresa Jarnagin Enos. “How Seriously Are We Taking Professionalization? A Report on Graduate Curricula in Rhetoric and Composition.” Rhetoric Review 25 (2006): 204–10.
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. “Writing the New Rhetoric of Scholarship.” Defining the New Rhetorics. Sage Series in Written Communication Volume 7. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. 55–78.
Rockman, Ilene F. “Introduction: The Importance of Information Literacy.” Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum: Practical Models for Transformation. Ed. Ilene F. Rockman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004. 1–28.
Scott, Patrick. “Bibliographical Problems in Research on Composition.” College Composition and Communication 37 (1986): 167–77.
—. “Bibliographic Resources and Problems.” An Introduction to Composition Studies. Ed. Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 72–93.
For Further Reading
Berkenkotter, Carol, Thomas N. Huckin, and John Ackerman. “Conventions, Conversation, and the Writer: Case Study of a Student in a Rhetoric Ph.D. Program.” Research in the Teaching of English 22 (1988): 9–44.
Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Breivik, Patricia Senn, and E. Gordon Gee. Higher Education in the Internet Age: Libraries Creating a Strategic Edge. Westport, CT: American Council of Education, Praeger Series on Higher Education, 2006.
Fister, Barbara. “Connected Communities: Encouraging Dialogue Between Composition and Bibliographic Instruction.” Writing-Across-the-Curriculum and the Academic Library: A Guide for Librarians, Instructors, and Writing Program Directors. Ed. Jean Sheridan. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. 33–51.
Lauer, Janice M., and Andrea Lunsford. “The Place of Rhetoric and Composition Studies in Doctoral Programs.” The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. Ed. Andrea Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin. New York: MLA, 1989. 106–10.
Lindemann, Erika. “Early Bibliographic Work in Composition Studies.” Profession. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002. 151–57.
Lindemann, Erika, and Gary Tate, eds. An Introduction to Composition Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Lunsford, Andrea, Helene Moglen, and James F. Slevin. The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. New York: MLA, 1989.
North, Stephen M., Barbara A. Chepaitis, David Coogan, Lale Davidgon, Ron MacLean, Cindy L. Parrish, Jonathan Post, and Beth Weatherby. Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education, and the Fusion-Based Curriculum. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000.
Nystand, Martin, Stuart Greene, and Jeffrey Wiemelt. “Where Did Composition Studies Come From? An Intellectual History.” Written Communication 10 (1993): 267–33.
Raspa, Dick, and Dane Ward, eds. The Collaborative Imperative: Librarians and Faculty Working Together in the Information Universe. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.
Rockman, Ilene F., ed. Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum: Practical Models for Transformation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.
Scott, Patrick, and Bruce Castner. “Reference Sources for Composition Research: A Practical Survey.” College English 45 (1983): 756–68.
Sheridan, Jean. “What Bibliographic Instruction Librarians Can Learn from Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Instructors.” Writing-Across-the-Curriculum and the Academic Library: A Guide for Librarians, Instructors, and Writing Program Directors. Ed. Jean Sheridan. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. 113–19.
