Finding a Comfortable Identity

Abstract

I began to teach college composition in 1947 and have been involved with the discipline ever since. One actually doesn't need a forty-year perspective to know what composition teaching was then. Even though composition specialists often take a myopic view of progress, remnants of the attitudes and approaches of 1947 continue to be plentiful in 1987-in departmental policies, in the classroom, and especially in textbooks. In many colleges and universities, Freshman English still serves its traditional role: to get rid of the illprepared, not to help them become better writers. Despite the perpetuation of ill-defined aims and ill-designed courses, remarkable changes have occurred in the past twenty-five years. Composition has established an identity of its own, not solely as a practitioner's art, but as a subject for scholarly study. The burgeoning membership of the Conference on College Composition and Communication testifies to wide professional interest. The organization has done more to advance composition studies than any other. College Composition and Communication and a variety of other periodicals provide outlets for publication. Because of newly established graduate programs, individuals are now able to specialize in rhetoric and composition studies. These people are even finding positions while their fellow-candidates in literature and criticism are not. New opportunities for study and development constantly emerge: writing projects, institutes, conferences, interdisciplinary ventures, explorations into technology, and studies of writing in nonacademic settings. All of these developments are cause for dancing. Yet there is reason to have concern about the status of the composition profession and the future of those involved seriously in it. Those who received their Ph.D.'s five, six, or seven years ago and found themselves welcomed in