First off, teachers (K-12) have rarely had more than four to eight months of supervised apprenticeship before being thrown into the classroom. I do think it would be a great idea if graduate students were paired with a master professor for one academic year of training before being given the reins of a classroom. It would be one way of creating a non-research-centered set of positions for faculty, and it would create a justification for a sort of full-time tenure-track position: secure teachers dedicated to a single institution, knowing it like the backs of their hands, passing that wisdom down to young teachers.

Second, the issue of "composition" is simply far more complicated than presented here (and I know this posting does not intend to be comprehensive). Fish is saying nothing more than what Peter Elbow said in the 1970s, and there is a great deal of research on composition that argues well against that position (see Bartholomae's work, for instance).

The idea of a content-less writing class fails to take into account the fact that beyond the level of the sentence, there is no such thing as "writing" that can be mastered (and even at the level of the sentence, what we call "mastery" is more likely correctness). Each genre has its own demands, and very likely, each genre rests on cognitive processes that are not the same. This seems less obvious when we're talking about the differences between, say, writing a descriptive versus a persuasive essay, but it becomes terribly clear when we observe the differences between writing a novel and writing a play (very few writers can make that transition).

Furthermore, a student's knowledge of the topic on which she writes has a clear effect on the quality of the writing. This is often mistaken for "enthusiasm" -- get the kids to write about what they care about -- but really it's about getting the kids to write about what they already know about. Even spelling and grammar have been shown to go downhill once the student is spending more time figuring about her topic and argument as she goes through the writing process itself. I'm not setting up a simple opposition between thinking and writing, but kids tend to write better when they already know the subject inside and out.

So any composition program must decide what sorts of writing it will privilege in the classroom and what are the best means for teaching it. And if the school wants to teach what we tend to call "analytic" or "academic" writing, then content has been proven necessary, even if that content is simply a means to an end. You can't learn to write an essay about history without learning some history; you can't learn to write music criticism without learning something about music.

LB..."the differences between writing a novel and writing a play (very few writers can make that transition)"...interesting. Could you expand on the reasons for that a bit?

David, I'll try, but it's really a mystery to me. Not that it's surprising that the transition across various sorts of "creative" writing is difficult, but it definitely has to do with how the brain works, a topic I know little about.

I think about how few great writers are masters of more than one genre. Some of that has to do with the historical meaning of genre: periods in which poetry was the highest pursuit and the novel was looked upon as too popular or sensational, or periods in which drama held a vastly different social function than poetry or prose. And then there's simply how we receive a writer. Wallace Stevens wrote some amazing essays, but we don't think of him (and he didn't seem to think of himself) as both essayist and poet. Or W. C. Williams, whose non-fiction prose and short stories are quite great, but who will be remembered primarily as a poet.

I'm not a Henry James expert by any means, but I think of the situation around his play *The Outcry*. Like all of James' theatre work, this was a disaster. It had none of what we come to James for besides the themes (and really, who reads James for themes?). James seemed not to comprehend the depth and significance of his brilliance as a novelist, or else he wouldn't have even tried the theater. At his most powerful -- in a novel like *The Ambassadors* -- nothing happens, and nothing much is said. Subtle movements of thought and sentiment provide the drama of the novel, and James was unable to translate that onto the stage as he comprehended it. (Oddly, someone like Beckett or early Mamet managed to accomplish on stage what James accomplished in the novel.) As a novelist, James was radical; as a playwright, he was terribly conventional. And when he turned *The Outcry* into a novel to make a little cash out of it, he wrote the most conventional of his late works. It's basically the play with some heavyhanded narration around it.

Joyce's poetry is similarly conventional compared to his prose. Emerson's poetry doesn't live up to his own radical ideas about poetry found in his essays (it would take Whitman to follow through on that promise). Faulkner, of course writing for money for the studio system, didn't give us the slightest taste of Faulkner in his screenplays. It's like the brain that finds its genre and pushes it to its limits gets all too comfortable in other genres and just colors inside the lines.

LB...thanks!

In the last 25 years colleges have come a long way in helping students with their writing. Writing centers, peer tutor systems, and other means of support have been established, and that's all for the good. The fact remains, however, that college composition courses are oftentimes taught by neophyte graduate students, which is generally not good, and which is dishonest, as the anonymous CHE writer points out.

Stanley Fish is saying that content is unavoidable in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. The content chosen could presumably be anything by anyone and would help students hone their abilities to describe and persuade. Fish's admonishment that it should be jettisoned after serving its purpose means that published works should not be presented as truth in this context.

The fact is that of all the courses English departments offer, composition is probably the hardest one to teach (and also the hardest one to take). The workload is much greater and in many ways more demanding, for both teacher and student, than a traditional literature course, and the stakes are much higher -- it really matters whether students learn in freshman comp. It matters no matter what they go on to major in, and no matter what they go on to do in life.

I think you have just explained why the senior faculty have fobbed off the task on others.

...you have just explained why the senior faculty have fobbed off the task on others.

Hey, we don't all work for Elite National University. Here at my own humble institution, all English department faculty teach freshman comp.

Among the many problems plaguing freshman comp is the way these classes often fall victim to institutional mission creep. Often their "Student Learning Outcomes" (SLOs) are not limited to writing but also include the improvement of reading, speaking, research, and critical thinking skills, plus things like "service learning" and "working effectively in groups." In my experience I've found this sort of goal-proliferation to be encouraged by accreditors, who like to see lots of SLOs being pursued at the gen-ed level (and of all gen-ed classes, freshman comp always seems to be the one where they wind up getting pursued). I'd be thrilled to see our "composition courses...teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else," but actually putting that on the institutional syllabus would definitely not be a good idea.

No composition course should have a theme... Maybe so, but where I work, such themed classes are definitely smiled upon--not for pedagogical but for market reasons. The idea is that a themed comp class will strike the student as more interesting than a vanilla comp class, and that retention will improve if students self-select into classes with themes that interest them. And retention is a huge issue here. In fact the "performance contract" we have with the state specifies a numerical goal for improving retention (but not, of course, for improving writing instruction).