Haswell - 2005 - NCTE CCCC Recent War On Scholarship

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION / April 2005
NCTE/CCCCs Recent War

on Scholarship
RICHARD H. HASWELL
Texas A&M University
This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two profes-
sional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Compo-
sition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the
two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of schol-
arship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported.
The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals,
compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching
of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer
critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also
traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an
academic discipline.
Keywords: research methodology; professional organization; National Council of

Teachers of English; Conference on College Composition and Communica-
tion; sponsorship; disciplinary history; peer critique; research paper; skill
gain
No profession can exist without a body of systematically produced

knowledge.
Carr and Kemmis (1986)
Stephen Witte would not have been tempted by the metaphor in my
title. His belief in scholarship was at root ecumenical, just the opposite
of warlike. This is easily seen in his own scholarship. He launched
Written Communication in 1984 to welcome a broader range of research
topics and methods than were being promoted at the time in dis-
course and composition studies. His own professional writings
included and sometimes combined genres and methods that other
Authors Note: Once again, thanks to Glenn Blalock of Baylor University for his
knowledge of all matters compositional and his generosity in lending it to others.
WRITTEN COMMUNICATION, Vol. 22 No. 2, April 2005 198-223

DOI: 10.1177/0741088305275367
2005 Sage Publications
198
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Richard H. Haswell 199
scholars declared as embattled foes. Although others have pictured

teaching and research as a growing conflict (an escalated war,
Ziolkowski, 1996, p. 572), he distinguished himself in both. Although
others have imagined the journal article and course textbook as irrec-
oncilable genres (a war between good and evil, Connors, 1986, p.
191), he wrote both. Others have described quantitative and qualita-
tive methodologies as competitive (a turf war, Berkenkotter, 1991,
p. 158) and written text and the writing process as irreconcilable (a
battle between form-bound rhetoric and audience-friendly rhetoric,
Farris, 2003); he applied both to study both.
And he judged the scholarship of others by the same ecumenical
light. He defended Hillockss 1986 meta-analysis of empirical studies
of teaching methods because it bridged classroom practice and
research inquiry and thus embraced both the logic of discovery and
the logic of validation (Witte, 1987, p. 207). He ends his review of
Hillockss book with the wish that 20 years hence, the counterpro-
ductive bickering about methodologies will have ended: If by then
the marriage of discovery and validation in composition research has
still not been consummated, let us hope the two are at least sharing the
same house (Witte, 1987, p. 207).
It is nearly 20 years hence, and sadly, Wittes matrimonial trope still
entails more of a wish than a celebration. Calls for an end to the rift
between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies con-
tinue (Johanek, 2000; MacNealy, 1999). The metaphor in my title
remains current. I hope my use of it will be read, though, with an
awareness of the complexities. As the 20 years have taught us, there
are more kinds of war than those waged with declarations of state, all-
out mobilizations and hostilities, and unconditional surrenders.
There are actions, conflicts, incursions, operations, and insurgencies.
There are wars fought with money and ideology, such as the wars
against poverty, drugs, obesity, and illiteracy. There are wars of attri-
tion, such as the slow eradication of todays discourse media by
tomorrows. Perhaps most pertinent to the topic of this article, there
are silent, internecine, self-destructive wars, for instance the bodys
attack against its own immune system. All of these wars but espe-
cially the last, the self-targeted in-house conflicts, can be waged with
the best of intentions.
My topic concerns the two flagstaff houses of postsecondary writ-
ing teachers: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE;
established in 1911) and the Conference on College Composition and

200 WRITTEN COMMUNICATION / April 2005
Communication (CCCC; established in 1949). They have been at

scholarship for a long time. Only in the past two decades have they
been at war with it. It might be more accurate to say that they have
been at war with part of it, but if that part turns out to be vital to the
whole, then with its defeat falls the whole. The scholarship these orga-
nizations target goes by different names: empirical inquiry, labora-
tory studies, data gathering, experimental investigation, formal
research, hard research, and sometimes just research. However they
term it, their exclusion of it has been duly lamented, notably by
Reynolds (1990), Berkenkotter (1991), Charney (1996, 1998), and
Barton (1997). Lucid and persuasive as these and other defenses of
hard research are, however, they seem, well, defensive. Someone else
has taken the initiative, put a legitimate branch of scholarship under
siege, named it as the enemy, and labeled it scientism, fact mongering,
antihumanism, positivism, modernism, or worse. The hazard in defend-
ing one kind of disciplinary inquiry is that the defense may be taken as
a counterattack against other kinds. Yet all of the scholars named above
share Wittes respect for the full variety of scholarship and argue the
need, for the sake of scholarship itself, to share the same house.
My argument, therefore, begins with the assumption that a method
of scholarship under attack by one academic discipline in the United
States but currently healthy and supported by every other academic
discipline in the world does not need defending. It also assumes that
other kinds of scholarship, currently underwritten by NCTE/CCCC,
do not need defending either. In short, I begin with Stephen Wittes
ecumenicalism. What both sides need, I am arguing, is a clear picture
of the damage. My main intent is simply to document historical
trends in the study of the teaching of postsecondary writing during
the past five decades, comparing scholarly work sponsored by NCTE/
CCCC with similar work done elsewhere. My focus is on the kind of
research that the two professional organizations first sponsored and
then, as will become clear, radically unsponsored. I will begin by stip-
ulating as clear a definition as I can of that scholarship, one that cuts
across the grain of some pernicious dichotomies, such as empirical
versus ethnographic and research versus practice. I aim not so much
to lament the attack on this scholarship as to record it and, by record-
ing it, to ask what the consequences may be for the field. My hope,
much like Wittes, is that setting some historical patterns on the table
may be a step, however small and tentative, toward a more produc-
tive accord in the future.

REPLICABLE, AGGREGABLE, AND DATA-SUPPORTED (RAD)

SCHOLARSHIPA DEFINITION
Of the 495 panels at its 2004 annual conference, CCCC designated

17 of them as concerned with research (NCTE, 2004, pp. 32-48). Appar-
ently, its and my definitions of the word differ, because under it,
CCCC did not include my own presentation, on which this article is
based. For the nonce, let me stipulate a definition of a particular kind
of research on which we can agree: to wit, RAD studies, or scholarly
investigation that is replicable, aggregable, and data supported. RAD
scholarship is a best effort inquiry into the actualities of a situation,
inquiry that is explicitly enough systematicized in sampling, execu-
tion, and analysis to be replicated; exactly enough circumscribed to be
extended; and factually enough supported to be verified. RAD schol-
arship may or may not use statistics. It includes a case study of one
student when the participants background is defined, observation
procedure and data analysis are specified, and participants behavior
is recorded to the point that someone else could conduct a comparable
study to validate, qualify, and perhaps add to the first study. It would
also include an institutional writing-across-the-curriculum survey
where courses sampled, questions asked, answers tabulated, and
teacher practices observed are reported so precisely that other people
at other institutions could conduct similar surveys and be able to
compare the data meaningfully.
Numbers may assist but do not define RAD scholarship. That is
why the definition avoids the term empirical, which has so often been
used to set up false oppositions with terms ethnographic, qualitative,
grounded, and naturalistic. Similarly, it avoids the term theory, not
because RAD inquiry distrusts theory (just the opposite, theory is
implicated in any act of RAD inquiry) but because the definition does
not want to risk the most pernicious dichotomy of all: research versus
theory. RAD scholarship is a little different from Flowers (1989)
observation-based theory, which is going a step beyond the data in
an attempt to honor the data (p. 297), or Charneys (1996) research
practices of empiricists, which challenge or extend each others find-
ing (p. 590), or indeed Poppers (1965, pp. 128-131) venerable scien-
tific knowledge, which does not just accumulate, as do objects in a
museum, but advances because it makes itself an object of criticism.
With RAD methodology, data do not just lie there; they are potential-
ized. In the postsecondary teaching of written communication, as in

every professional field, the value of RAD scholarship is its capacity

for growthits comparability, replicability, and accruability.
As I say, this provisional category of scholarship has the advantage
of cutting across polemical trenches that have stalemated profitable
talk about research in the teaching of composition. RAD scholarship
may be feminist, empirical, ethnomethodological, contextual, action,
liberatory, or critical. This point may be clarified with two examples of
research: one RAD and one non-RAD. In Redneck and Hillbilly Dis-
course in the Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical Pedagogies of
Whiteness, Beech (2004) studies student behavior in a way that may
look RAD but is not. She quotes the responses of six different students
to situations involving constructions of the social class redneck.
Although the students language is certainly datum, the contexts
from which the comments arise are not presented systematically. For
instance, one student e-mails in a response to an essay, under what
conditions we do not know, and another student responds to the first,
again under circumstances not described. All posts are abridged, but
how or why is not explained. A third student takes up our discussion
of the term redneck, but how or why again is not explained. The only
background provided for these pieces of student discourse is that
they occurred in a 1st-year seminar (titles of course and texts are pro-
vided) taught by the author in a private university in the Pacific
Northwest (pp. 176-177), but we are not informed how many students
were in the class, what their backgrounds were, what they wrote, or
how many agreed or disagreed with the students who are quoted.
To be fair, Beech does not pretend that these data constitute formal
research. She terms the incidents pedagogical moments and exam-
ples. Essentially, they function as self-selected illustrations in sup-
port of her argument. The data help the reader trust Beech, envision
the class, and judge the probability of her argument that her peda-
gogy achieved its aim to teach students methods of social resistance
and rhetorical strategies for addressing those within positions of
power (p. 184). But the data do not much help a scholar who might
want to test or add to these facts. Because there is no system by which
to sample, elicit, and analyze student response, there is no easy way to
replicate or extend the authors findings. Nor is there any adequate
way to compare her data with previous data, because the parameters
needed to make comparisons fair and meaningful are almost entirely
lacking. The best we can do, as Charney (1996) puts it, is give the piece
a one-shot granting of the benefit of the doubt (p. 589).

In Feminine Discourse in the University: The Writing Center Con-

ference as a Site of Linguistic Resistance, a study of gender effects
operating as male and female tutors conference with students, Bean
(1999) also quotes pieces of student discourse as acts of resistance. To
help scholars understand and use these data, however, she sets up a
transferable method of sampling, eliciting, recording, and transcript
analysis that is clearly RAD. She identifies the tutors as graduate stu-
dents working for one semester in a writing center and teaching 1st-
year composition at the same time. To study tutor-student interac-
tions, she picks seven tutors using a method of controlled random
selection, three male and four females (one herself), and to investigate
talk time, she tapes and transcribes the first 1,000 words of nine con-
ferences. She finds evidence of male tutor domination. Of the six con-
ferences where talk time was relatively balanced between tutor and
student, five involved female tutors, and of the three conferences
where talk time was unbalanced (all three in favor of the tutor), two
involved male tutors. Later in the article, she illustrates some consis-
tent gender effects that she has found in the transcripts with patches
of transcribed talk, but the selections are carefully defined by the orig-
inal sampling (e.g., three of four women in my study explicitly
downplayed their expertise, Bean, 1999, p. 138).
It does not matter that Beans (1999) data are scanty or that one of
the participants was herself. Her study still functions as RAD inquiry.
Indeed, the RAD methodology is there to deal with research imper-
fections, which exist in every piece of research ever done. If any
scholar questions the inferences Bean draws from her findings, she
has described her system so it can be replicated and her conclusions
tested. For instance, the one conference where a female tutor domi-
nated talk was with a female nonnative student. Bean suggests the
controlling factor was the power of first-language status (p. 136), but
her methodology allows other tenable explanations (e.g., same-sex
hostility) to be tested by comparing and integrating her results with
findings elsewhere.
SOME QUESTIONS
Both of these pieces are bona fide scholarship. Taken by them-

selves, neither is necessarily less useful, less insightful, or less profes-
sional than the other. Only the second, however, is RAD inquiry as I
define it. And only the second, it seems, has been the target of NCTE/

CCCC. How could that have happened? Or more basically, how did it
happen? Historically, to what extent have the organizations discour-
aged the publication of RAD scholarshipthe very kind of scholar-
ship designed to grow and by growing to endure and thereby, pre-
sumably, to help the organizations themselves endure?
In 1972, in one of the professions periodic attempts to establish an
annual bibliography of its scholarship (see below), the NCTE editors
of the second installment of the Annotated Index to the English Journal
explained that they had not indexed every piece published in the jour-
nal. They included only pieces that reflect pedagogical or scholarly
concerns of a more or less enduring nature (p. 3). Everything else,
letters to the editor, editorial notes, book reviews, listing of teaching
materials, occasional verse, they excluded as ephemeral (Harvey
& Kirkton, 1972, p. 3). It is easy to question the editors sense of genre.
If a book review systematically and factually covers and analyzes a
stipulated arena of publication, it could be a piece of RAD scholar-
ship. But their distinction between enduring and ephemeral raises
some questions.
Scholarship grows or it does not grow. In 1953, Perry published a
piece in College English on student resistance in writing classes, in
which, among other things, he argued that students of typical 1st-
year college age will resist even a teachers approval of their resis-
tance. Though on a topic that certainly reflected a pedagogical con-
cern of a more or less enduring nature (Harvey & Kirkton, 1972, p.
3), Perrys article did not endure. I have never seen a reference to it in
the body of scholarship on student resistance that has burgeoned
since the 1980s in connection with diversity, testing, feminism, and
liberatory pedagogy and that includes both Beechs (2004) and Beans
(1999) pieces. It is easy to argue that it was Perrys concept of resis-
tance that did not lastclosely tied as it was to the Freudian notion of
resistance as the patients deflection of the psychoanalysts probing of
the id and to the World War II notion of resistance as warfare against
foreign occupation of ones homeland (as in France). Surely, though,
Perrys chosen method of inquiry must have also played a role in
shelving his 1953 piece. He tells classroom stories and speculates on
them, much as Beech does 50 years later. In contrast, his
sociocognitive study Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the
College Years (Perry, 1970), based on transcripts of interviews with a
cross-sectional sample of students at defined points in their college
careers, scholarship that is definitely RAD, has endured in a way only
a few books in composition studies can match, generating among

other things hundreds of experimental replications that have ques-

tioned, revised, and extended his insights. One piece of scholarship
proved ephemeral; the other proved aggregable. Why then does a
random pick of current NCTE/CCCC scholarship in the field have a
much higher chance of retrieving something closer to Perrys 1953
essay than to his 1970 book?
Other questions follow, none of them pleasant to pursue. Whatever
the true ratio of RAD to non-RAD scholarship presented at the 2004
CCCC convention (Berkenkotter, 1991, shows how constructed the
CCCC convention program classification of panels is), what other
academic discipline would publicly admit to a ratio of 17 research to
478 other? Is that proportion, real or constructed, connected with the
reason much of compositionist RAD research, though aggregable,
has remained unaggregated, remained dormant, unvalidated,
unreplicated, and unreviewed? In 1987, North, who applies the meta-
phor of a sleeping giant to experimental studies in composition (p.
146), could not locate a single published replication study (p. 159).
Why since Norths book has Research in the Teaching of Composition, the
one NCTE/CCCC journal explicitly devoted to RAD research, pub-
lished only one review-of-research article (Rossell & Baker, 1996, on
bilingual education in the schools)? Why did NCTE help make the
1972 Annotated Index to the English Journal itself ephemeral, since it did
not support further installments of that bibliography?
The disturbing nature of these questions emphasizes the need for
some basic facts, some documentation of NCTE/CCCCs relationship
to RAD scholarship. What is the history of it? And are there historical
patterns perhaps even more disturbing than just a decline in the
amount of such scholarship supported by NCTE/CCCC in the past
couple of decades?
SOME TRENDS IN NCTE AND CCCC PUBLICATIONS
There are a number of ways to bring such patterns to light. Fate of a

book series is one. For instance, NCTE Research Report Series, start-
ing up in 1963, published 19 volumes up to 1977, 9 since then, and 0
since 1996. Its Theory and Research into Practice Series published 30
volumes in the first 11 years (1976 to 1986), 7 in the second 11 years
(1987 to 1997), and 1 since then. Record of professional accolades is
another method. The annual Braddock Awards are given by CCCC to
the best piece published in College Composition and Communication

during the year, and between its start and 1992, 9 of the 17 winning
essays report RAD research; since then, 0 of the 12 does. It may be
more instructive, however, to focus not on publication venue or pro-
fessional honors but rather on research topic. I will start by looking at
the historical record of scholarship on three representative issues of
lasting importance to the enterprise of teaching college writing: the
assignment of the research paper, the success of writing courses in
improving student writing, and the practice of peer evaluation. I will
follow with a quick look at the attempts of the two professional orga-
nizations to secure the bibliography of the field. Bibliography and
RAD scholarship are connected, of course. Scholarship cannot grow
without a knowledge of what has gone before.
Method of Analysis
The following historical analysis is based on the CompPile data-

base, an online inventory of publications in postsecondary rhetoric
and composition (Haswell & Blalock, 2005). Covering from 1939 to
1999, it is the most complete bibliography available, containing
nearly 80,000 items. It completely indexes the contents of more than
45 professional journals that regularly publish scholarship in college
writing, such as Business Communication Quarterly, Composition Stud-
ies, Computers and Composition, Discourse Studies, English for Specific
Purposes, Journal of Basic Writing, Journal of Second Language Writing,
Journal of Teaching Writing, Journal of Technical Writing and Communica-
tion, Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, Rhetoric Review, Tech-
nical Communication Quarterly, Writing Center Journal, and Written
Communication; and it systematically selects relevant articles from
more than 40 more journals, such as Communication Monographs, Dis-
course and Society, Discourse Studies, Gender and Society, Journal of Social
History, Language in Society, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Visible
Language. It also unsystematically covers scores of disciplinary and
education journals, such as Journal of Higher Education and Journal of
Science Education and Technology. Besides journal articles and mono-
graphs, it indexes more than 17,000 essays from edited collections,
8,000 dissertations, and 10,000 items in the Educational Resources
Information Center (ERIC) Document Reproduction Service data-
base. In my analysis, the three journals affiliated with NCTE/CCCC
are College English (1939 to present), College Composition and Communi-
cation (1950 to present), and Research in the Teaching of English (1967 to
present). My coverage of them is exhaustive. I have omitted Teaching

English in the Two-Year College because it became an NCTE-sponsored

journal only in 1998 and English Journal because it is primarily
devoted to secondary education.1
My categorization of scholarly works as either RAD or non-RAD is
based on the differentiae schematized in Table 1. All counts in the fol-
lowing analyses are my own. As a test of their reliability, a
compositionist with 19 years of experience in the field and I inde-
pendently categorized all 258 articles appearing in College Composi-
tion and Communication from 1981 to 1984 and from 1995 to 1999 (we
omitted letters, author responses, policy statements, memorials, and
book reviews). His and my designations of pieces as RAD or non-
RAD matched 93.4% of the time. Differences usually occurred when
studies were vague about selection of participants (Sternglass, 1982)
or when RAD inquiry was buried in a footnote or appendix
(Simmons, 1984).
The Research Paper
It goes by other names, of courseterm paper, documented paper,

and library paper. I mean an extended essay using sources, with a
works cited page. For decades, the assignment has been popular and
still remains so. The latest survey of practice found 60% of 1st-year
writing courses requiring it (Ford & Perry, 1982). That survey is now
more than two decades old and needs updatingan elementary
instance of accruable but as yet dormant scholarship. I have located
644 journal articles that discuss the research paper at length, as taught
in postsecondary classes, from 1940 to 1999. Figure 1 shows the por-
tion of that scholarship that was published in the three NCTE/CCCC
journals (College English, College Composition and Communication, and
Research in the Teaching of English) compared to the portion published
in journals elsewhere. By decades since 1940, the trend is obvious.
Although the scholarship outside the three journals has grown expo-
nentially, in the three journals, both the rate of publication and the
portion of total publication peaked in the 1950s and declined thereaf-
ter. This trend is repeated when the figures are restricted to RAD stud-
ies. Figure 2 combines RAD studies in the three NCTE/CCCC jour-
nals and in books and monographs published by NCTE. Since the
1960s, the production of their RAD scholarship has dwindled, almost
disappeared, but the opposite has occurred elsewhere. Where does
this RAD scholarship into the term paper continue to appear? In dis-
sertations; ERIC pieces; books, such as Penrose and Sitkos (1993)

Table 1
Definition of the Categories RAD and Non-RAD
RAD Studies Non-RAD Studies
Data resulting from a set procedure of Data or data-like material presented as

observation, elicitation, or analysis illustrative examples of a point being
made
Study of texts or human participants Study of texts or human participants

picked randomly or through an selected by the authors as isolated
explicit and transferable system of examples, points of clarification, or
selection demonstration of an argument
Description of a system of text analysis Description of a method of analysis or

or a research method or a research a research methodology or tool with-
tool, application, and report of out applying it, even when examples
results or cases are used to explain it
Establishment of a descriptive or vali- Description of a test, course, or pro-

dation system and then application gram, without establishing a descrip-
to text, course, or program tive system that could be applied
elsewhere
Review of past research or texts, with Review of research, without coverage

parameters set, items fully reported, defined or exhaustive searches (the
and an effort to be exhaustive typical Review of Research section
of a article)
Replication of a previous research Reporting of other researchers RAD

study, confirming, qualifying, or study, data, or statistics without qual-
disconfirming it with new data ifying them with new data obtained
through RAD methods
Textual analysis with report of applica- Textual analysis, illustrating parts of

tion, using a systematic scheme of the analysis, without systematic
analysis that others can apply to dif- application and report of findings
ferent texts and directly compare
Case study where participant is ran- Case study where participant is not
domly chosen or is chosen to repre- randomly chosen or where back-
sent a specific background ground is so vague that comparison
with other participants cannot be
made meaningfully
Historical data helping to understand Historical data for their own sake or
participants or texts in a study with presented to understand current
RAD methods times
NOTE: RAD = replicable, aggregable, and data supported.

250
235
NonCE, CCC, and RTE
CE, CCC, and RTE
200
Number of Articles
151
150
100
84
50 42
34 27
14 18 14 17
5
3
0
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
D
Decade
d
Figure 1. Journal Articles on the Research Paper Assignment
NOTE: CE = College English; CCC = College Composition and Communication; RTE =
research in the teaching of English.
Hearing Ourselves Think or Fords (1995) Teaching the Research Paper;

and in journals, such as College Teaching, Educational Measurement,
Journal of Geological Education, Journal of Management Education, Social
Education, Teaching of Psychology, Written Communication, and a host of
others. The two professional organizations have nearly stopped pub-
lishing RAD scholarship into the research paper assignment, and they
represent the only venues in the professional field of college composi-
tion studies where that has happened.
Gain in Writing Courses
Since about the mid-1980s, there has been a fairly common opinion
in NCTE- and CCCC-sponsored journals, even in Research in the Teach-
ing of English, that hard facts on gain in student writing from the
beginning to the end of a writing course are difficult to get or are not
worth getting (e.g., Thompson, 1980). The improvement of writing
has not been discredited as a main objective of writing courses, just
efforts to document it. The notion that pre-post gain studies may be
not possible or not meaningful, however, seems to find little support
again in publications outside of NCTE/CCCC. Figure 3 records the

75
69
NonNCTE and CCCC
NCTE and CCCC
60
Number of Publications
45
30 27
22
15
6 7
4 5 4 3
1 1 2
0
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Decade
Figure 2. RAD Studies of the Research Paper in All Publications
NOTE: RAD = replicable, aggregable, and data supported; NCTE = National Council of
Teachers of English; CCCC = Conference on College Composition and Communication.
number of RAD studies of writing gain during a postsecondary aca-

demic course from 1940 to 1999. Tallied are books, dissertations, ERIC
pieces, and edited collection essays, as well as journal articles. NCTE/
CCCC-sponsored publications account for 132 and publications else-
where for 447. The frequency distribution by decades duplicates the
pattern of RAD studies into term paper assignments. Although the
volume of studies climb everywhere else, in NCTE- and CCCC-spon-
sored publications, it has been dropping since 1980, to the point that
in the past decade, the organizations contribution to the growth of
knowledge has been minimal. Between 1970 and 1984, College English
and College Composition and Communication published 53 articles offer-
ing aggregable data related to an increase or lack of increase in knowl-
edge or skill during the span of a writing course. Since 1985, there
have been only five. Yet elsewhere, pre-post studies are still trusted.
New practices in the teaching of the documented paper, such as group
work, coauthoring, and step-by-step composing, continue to be
reported in a long list of journals, including Academic Exchange Quar-
terly, Computers and Composition, Journal of Agronomic Education, Jour-
nal of Basic Writing, Journal of Science Education and Technology, Reading
Research and Instruction, and Teaching of Psychology.

180
NonNCTE and CCCC
NCTE and CCCC

145
150
137
120
103
90
60
51
43 41
30
11 15 14
5 8 6
0
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Decade
Figure 3. RAD Studies of Gain During a Writing Course in All Publications

NOTE: RAD = replicable, aggregable, and data supported; NCTE = National Council of
Teachers of English; CCCC = Conference on College Composition and
Communication.
Peer Critique
A third issue is the scholarship on students evaluating other stu-

dents writing. Figure 4 tabulates 514 pieces of extended commentary
on peer grading, peer editing, or peer commenting in courses
(excluded is peer tutoring in writing centers) in all kinds of publica-
tions. It shows a pattern throughout time similar to inquiry into
research papers and pre-post course gain, with interest by NCTE/
CCCC declining in recent decades and increasing elsewhere. There is
one difference. Historically, peer critique is largely a late bloomer as
an instructional practice. Theres a scattering of early discussion,
including Cooks (1943) astonishing piece describing peer evaluation
in 2-year college classrooms, an article published by McGraw-Hill in
an edited collection called English for Social Living in 1943. But peer cri-
tique really did not catch on until the 1980s, first in the schools and
later in the colleges. At that point, scholars interested in college writ-
ing instruction embraced it with enthusiasm. Yet in NCTE/CCCC
publications, peer critique seems to be one of the least studied of prac-
tices now very common in college writing classrooms. NCTE/CCCC

250
227
NonNCTE and CCCC
NCTE and CCCC 209
200
150
100
50
37
19
9
3 1 1 2 3 2 1
0
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Decade
Figure 4. Extended Commentary on Peer Writing Critique in All Publications
NOTE: NCTE = National Council of Teachers of English; CCCC = Conference on Col-
lege Composition and Communication.
contribution to the postsecondary discussion was modest, short

lived, and dying off by the 1990s. Figure 5 shows that the issuance of
RAD studies in their three journals is even more modest, a pittance 11
pieces in 30 years, whereas publication in other journals has continued
to rise.
Assuming a continued popularity of peer critique in post-
secondary English classrooms (there is no recent survey of practices),
the chronological trends in Figure 5 might seem to say that NCTE/
CCCC members do not need to know more about the technique. But
RAD studies elsewhere suggest that there is plenty of information
teachers could well use. Systematic study of peer evaluation almost
always brings to light unexpected news. In a 1996 study, a fine-
grained analysis of actual revision made after peer critique, Singer
(1996) found that English-as-a-second-language writers made more
revisions than did native writers but none in response to any critique
that was corrective in nature. In a 1990 survey of WAC faculty at the
University of Texas, Braine (1990) found that peer response was one of
the recommended practices least used by interdisciplinary faculty. In
a 1988 look at peer editing groups at the University of Missouri

60
57
NonCE, CCC, and RTE
CE, CCC, and RTE
50
40
Number of Articles
36
30
20
10 8 6
4
1 2 1
0 0 0 0
0
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Decade
Figure 5. RAD Studies of Peer Writing Critique in Journal Articles
NOTE: RAD = replicable, aggregable, and data supported; CE = college English; CCC =
college composition and communication; RTE = research in the teaching of English.
Kansas City, Rothstein-Vandergriff and Gilson found that only the

already proficient students were able to critique their peers essays
profitably. In a 1981 study of 1st-year and 3rd-year peer editing, Stone
reports that even the best of the 1st-year students made few useful
revisions from peer commentary; the method seemed more success-
ful at the junior level. What could be learned about peer evaluation
with a systematic review of all 175 or more data-supported studies?
Bibliographies
Such a review of research would not be easy for writing teachers,

and one reason is that NCTE/CCCC have never succeeded in estab-
lishing a standard annual bibliography for the profession. It is not as if
the organizations have refused to attempt it. They have, over and
over. Here are the major trials:
1. NCTE published College Teaching of English: A Bibliography first as a

pamphlet covering the years 1941 to 1944 and then as an annual publi-
cation in College English, all done by Edna Hays of Pine Manor Junior

College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. But her efforts ceased with the year
1948. Seven years later, in response to many requests, NCTE estab-
lished a committee chaired by John McKiernan and then J. Carter
Rowland. They promised to bring the Hayss survey up to date but
never managed it. They did cover 1954 to 1956 in one installment in
College English and 1957 to 1965 in two subsequent pamphlets. The
items per year fell from an average of about 200 with Edna Hays to half
of that with the committee of eight. NCTE also published 6 years
worth of bibliographies on Certification and Preparation of Teach-
ers in College English, but that venture ceased with the year 1961. In
1965, NCTE abandoned the bibliography business.
2. Two years later, in 1967, Research in the Teaching of English published its
first issue and included in it a Bibliography of Research in the Teach-
ing of English. The journal has issued the bibliography twice a year
ever since. Such perseverance, the anomaly in this survey of profes-
sional bibliographic interest, bespeaks the need for a record of past
scholarship in RAD research (which Research in the Teaching of English
mostly publishes). But one trend is worth noting. In the past 20 years,
the number of entries has gradually declined, implying a decline in
hard research itself. Entries relating to writing in postsecondary set-
tings have especially declined (see Figure 6). The Research in the Teach-
ing of English bibliography indexed 146 such studies for 198120 years
later, for 2001, indexed only 22. But as we have seen with research into
the term paper, pre-post course gain, and peer evaluation outside of
NCTE/CCCC publications, RAD scholarship into writing did not
decline in the 1980s and 1990s but rather increased steeply.
3. In 1975, Richard Larson started an annual Selected Bibliography of
Research and Writing about the Teaching of Composition, which was
published in College Composition and Communication. Selected is an
understatement. His bibliography for 1978 was the largest, numbering
98 items, mostly from NCTE/CCCC publications. Currently, CompPile
has 1,570 items for that year. Larsons bibliography lasted 5 years, until
1979, when he became editor of College Composition and Communication
and may not have had time for it. No one else was around, it seems, who
did have the time. When Larson stepped down from the editorship in
1987, he continued the bibliography for 2 more years (when research
in the title was changed to scholarship), and then it ceased. Five
years later, Larson applied his bibliographic energies to the semian-
nual bibliographies in Research in the Teaching of English.
4. In 1981, CCCC established the Committee on a Bibliography of the
Profession. The story of this ill-fated venture is largely untold. I am fol-
lowing the account by Jones (1987), maybe not the most objective
because it seems tinged with bitterness. The bibliography was to cover
1900 to 1973, ending there presumably because Larson was still produc-
ing his annual bibliographies in College Composition and Communication,

which had started with 1974. Each committee member was responsi-
ble for a decade of scholarship, with every item annotated and catego-
rized. Neither the CCCC nor the NCTE, however, ended up funding
the work, and the committees charge expired in 1985, with only one
part of it seeing light. That is Joness remarkable Bibliography of
Composition, 1940-1949, with 612 items, not annotated but catego-
rized. It was supported and published by St. Cloud State University
and published by them in 1987 in mimeograph format as a supplement
to the Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
5. Finally, rightfully the pride of the field, the CCCC Bibliography of Com-
position and Rhetoric. The CCCC did not initiate this enterprise, but
rather, Erika Lindemann did, on her own, and the first two volumes
(covering 3 years) were published by Longman Press. Later volumes
were supported by the CCCC and published by Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press. But even the multiple effort and the dedication of such
editors as Erika Lindemann, Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, Gail
Stygall, Todd Taylor, and hundreds of contributors each year did not
manage to keep the enterprise going, and it petered out as the fin de
sicle approached. As with the Research in the Teaching of English bibliog-
raphies, the items in the CCCC Bibliographies seemed to show
postsecondary writing scholarship itself flagging in the 1990s, but
using CompPile as a more consistent account of total publications, Fig-
ure 7 shows this is not true.2
SOME PATTERNS IN THE DECLINE OF RAD SCHOLARSHIP

SPONSORED BY NCTE/CCCC
The overarching pattern in all of this is a severe decline in NCTE/

CCCCs support of data-supported, aggregable research into their
own professional topics during the past two decades. But as I say,
there are other patterns, perhaps more disturbing. The most obvious
is that the decline is not paralleled in other academic disciplines, even
elsewhere in the social sciences. Rather, it is the opposite; for RAD,
research publication in three of the activities close to the heart of col-
lege composition instructionthe research paper, course gain in writ-
ing skill, and peer evaluationhas continued to grow everywhere
else. For 25 years now, in College Composition and Communication and
College English, the theoretical scholars have argued that such
research is outmoded (Bloom & Bloom, 1970; Flynn, 1995). A look at
the numbers asks for whom are the theorists speaking.
Another pattern is the decline of official acknowledgment even of
the little RAD scholarship that NCTE/CCCC do sponsor. In her recent

400
360
320
280
Number of Items
240
200
160
120
80
40
0
0
0
198
198
198
198
198
198
198
198
198
198
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
200
Year
Figure 6. Number of Items Pertaining to Postsecondary Composition in

Research in the Teaching of English Bibliographies by Year
3,750
3,500 CCCC
3,250 CompPile
3,000
2,750
2,500
Number of Items
2,250
2,000
1,750
1,500
1,250
1,000
750
500
250
0
4
9
198
198
198
198
198
198
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
199
Year
Figure 7. Number of Items in the CCCC Bibliography and in CompPile by Year

NOTE: CCCC = Conference on College Composition and Communication.

review of Early Bibliographic Work in Composition Studies,

Lindemann (2002) herself forgets the Research in the Teaching of English
bibliographies. From 1984 to 1995, the CCCC Bibliographies omit 34%
of the articles in Research in the Teaching of English; from 1996 through
1999, they omit all of them. It is almost as if we have an organism
attacking itself, as if a self-destruction is going on, a self-doubt, a loss
of faith, as Scholes (1998) puts it, in the possibility of either them-
selves or the scholarship they profess telling the truth about anything
important in the lives of those they are teaching (p. 81). In place of
telling the truth, though, I would say telling anything testable,
replicable, or accruable.
In my survey of NCTE/CCCC publications, there are two other
patterns equally unsettling. More and more, the two organizations
are letting others do their hard research for them. It is not that data-
infused studies into the lives of those we are teaching (Scholes,
1998, p. 81) have died out. As we have seen, they are flourishing but
just not under NCTE/CCCC aegis. That labor is turned over to the
work handsto unlicensed apprentices in masters theses or disser-
tations, to ERIC freelancers who are not peer reviewed, to novices in
Research Net Forums ancillary to the main CCCC convention, or to
laborers in the surrounding disciplines presumably at lower alti-
tudesin discourse and communication studies, technical communi-
cation, second-language writing, social sciences, professional
schools, and schools of education.
Or, the last pattern, hard research just follows the same in-and-out
style enacted by other professional fads, such as Blue Book examina-
tions and overhead transparencies. Research seems not an enterprise
that develops by means of its own past efforts, as it is in other profes-
sional areas, but a stable apparatus occasionally reacting to fortuitous
outside events, not a stage toward a more perfect knowledge, but a
fashion motivated by the need for change itself (Scholes, 1998, p. 81).
Even when hard research into a teaching practice aggregates into a
strong defense of the effectiveness of the practice, the gathered wis-
dom is tossed out with the practice when the practice has lost favor.
Connors (2000) has documented this pattern with sentence combin-
ing and Susser (1998) with word processing. With peer evaluation, the
pattern is even more discouraging. The practice can flow and ebb
with only the most scattered effort by the professional organizations
to support it, challenge it, or build on it with RAD inquiry.
The most feared pattern can only be conjectured. Will these trends,
if they continue, lead to the eventual disappearance of college

composition as a legitimate field of study? As a professional disci-

pline with professional privileges and professional clout, will college
composition also come and go like a fad?
THE FUTURE?
Indeed, where do these changes lead, changes that I have docu-

mented in house publishing by NCTE/CCCC and changes beginning
around 1985? Turn back to Wittes 1987 wish that composition studies
enjoy a future without counterproductive bickering about method-
ologies (p. 207). If in 20 years, he wrote, the marriage of discovery
and validation in composition research has still not been consum-
mated, let us hope the two are at least sharing the same house (207).
Today, the house that comes to mind is not the marriage home but the
Civil War house divided against itself that cannot stand. Yet during
the 1980s and 1990s, NCTE/CCCC championed ecumenicalism in
scholarship, often under the rubric of Boyers (1990) expanded defini-
tion, which included the domains of discovery, integration, applica-
tion, and teaching (e.g., Kirby-Werner, 1998). If NCTE/CCCC sup-
port breadth of scholarship, how can they be charged with waging
war on it, as I have done in my title? Are they and I talking about the
same thing?
Let me extend a conciliatory hand and say that I mean by scholar-
ship anything NCTE/CCCC would like. What kinds do they like? At
the 2004 CCCC Convention in San Antonio, Texas, 495 panel presen-
tations were given, covering every professional topic and methodol-
ogy from A to W, from Aint Misbehavin: Creative Writing Matters,
Too to Write em Cowgirl: Riding Herd on the Rhetoric of Presi-
dents and Place in the Classroom. In a warehouse-sized room below
was a warehouse variety of goods for sale, from issues of Research in
the Teaching of English to packets of teaching materials. Although it is
stretching Boyers (1990) definition of scholarship to its furthest
bourns, if the CCCC would like to categorize all these acts and para-
phernalia as instances of its members scholarship, I am willing to
agree. But with so broad a sponsorship of scholarship, how can the
organizations then be at war with it, as my title contends?
The answer is that during these two decades, NCTE/CCCC defined
scholarship broadly but supported it selectively. More exactly, they
have been hostile to one kind of scholarship while promoting the rest,
with their exclusion of one kind and support of the rest growing more

and more entrenched. Most crucial is that the kind of scholarship they
are killing off happens to be essential to the rest they nurture. Define
scholarship as broadly or diversely as they want, when essential nutri-
ents are cut off, eventually the whole system will die. As when a body
undermines its own immune system, when college composition as a
whole treats the data-gathering, data-validating, and data-aggregating
part of itself as alien, then the whole may be doomed. Even now, the
professions immune systemits ability to deflect outside criticism
with solid and ever-strengthening datais on shaky pins. It lacks a
systematically produced knowledge (Carr & Kemmis, 1986, p. 8) to
defend its central practices from outside attack, lacks a coherent body
of testable knowledge connected to class size, computer pedagogy,
group work, part-time teaching, interdisciplinary instruction, 1st-
year sequenced syllabi, and the list can go on. And in part, it does not
have the body of facts because its most prominent professional orga-
nizations, NCTE and CCCC, do not valorize or support the apparatus
needed to drive RAD research.
Right now, rhetoric and composition is not a category in the
National Research Council classification of disciplines used by
accrediting agencies, nor a numerical code in its Annual Survey of
Earned Doctorates, nor a category in the Chronicle of Higher Education
for new academic books, nor a field used by the National Endowment
for the Humanities for grants. These are just symptoms of a deeper
malaise. That malaise is the fields inability, as yet, to convince schol-
ars outside the field that it is serious about facts, perhaps its inability
to convince them that it is not afraid of what those facts might uncover
about its favorite practices (Reynolds, 1990), perhaps the inability of
its membersteachers and researchers aliketo rid themselves
entirely of the suspicion that their scholarship, however defined, is
maybe no more than a private epideictic, no more than the way we
reveal ourselves to ourselves (Carter, 1992, p. 310). The situation
does not bode well, appearing at best a downward spiral, protracted
but downward nonetheless.
A year after Witte began Written Communication, Hairston (1985) in
her inauguration talk as chair of CCCC warned the organization of
the temptation to seek status by doing only empirical research (p.
279). A certain logic asks why she did not also warn of the dangers of
doing no empirical research. The third danger, and by far the most
likely, is to imagine that these two exclusionary paths are the only
choices a discipline has to act as if the discipline cannot publish the
kind of scholarship that NCTE/CCCC have so strongly promoted

and publish RAD research as well. Actually, the dangers down the
road for postsecondary composition and rhetoric may be sui generis.
What happens when a professional organization is at war with its
own scholarship? What happens when the flagstaff organizations of a
disciplinary field stop publishing systematically produced knowl-
edge? The answers to these questions are not known because nothing
like these events has happened in the history of academic disciplines.
Can NCTE/CCCC alter their scholarly direction?3 If they continue to
publish less and less RAD research and the scholars of the field think
less and less to submit it to journals, any journals, and teach it less and
less to apprentice scholars, how will it all end?
As with all matters chiliastic, we have a choice of metaphors. I end
with a couple of very different visions, in memory of two great
researchers of the field. Connorss (1997) novelesque image is com-
pelling: We are already pursuing research paths so disparate that
many thoughtful people have feared the discipline will fly apart like a
dollar watch (p. 18). Witte (1987), as was his habit, offers a more
commonsense picture, though in no way less horrifying: A field that
presumes the efficacy of a particular research methodology, a particu-
lar inquiry paradigm, will collapse inward upon itself (p. 207).
NOTES
1. For an account of coverage and journals in CompPile, see http://comppile.

tamucc.edu/journals.htm. Because coverage of the three NCTE/CCCC journals and
books is complete and the coverage elsewhere is not, the differences reported in RAD
research between these two categories are conservative. The gap will only widen as
studies omitted from the tabulations are added.
2. Beginning with 2000, CCCC turned over its bibliographic efforts to the Modern
Language Association, thus making rhetoric and composition scholarship accessible
through the MLA International Bibliography database. How that arrangement may fare
remains to be seen. So far, 2002 has the most entries for rhetoric and composition:
1,510. That is half the number of CompPile records for 1999, the last year it covers.
3. In 2004, CCCC started a program to fund research initiative projects, with a special
call for surveys, reviews of research, and meta-analyses, hoping to create an opportu-
nity for researchers to bring together what the profession has already learned, through
a variety of methodologies, regarding the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric,
and literacy (CCCC, 2005). Ten grants were awarded in the fall, including reviews of
service-learning writing, placement testing, visual language, second-language writing,
and 2-year writing programs. I could not locate any new initiatives on the part of NCTE
to support RAD studies.

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WRITTEN COMMUNICATION / April 2005

NCTE/CCCCs Recent War

Keywords: research methodology; professional organization; National Council of

No profession can exist without a body of systematically produced

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION, Vol. 22 No. 2, April 2005 198-223

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scholars declared as embattled foes. Although others have pictured

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Communication (CCCC; established in 1949). They have been at

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REPLICABLE, AGGREGABLE, AND DATA-SUPPORTED (RAD)

Of the 495 panels at its 2004 annual conference, CCCC designated

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every professional field, the value of RAD scholarship is its capacity

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In Feminine Discourse in the University: The Writing Center Con-

Both of these pieces are bona fide scholarship. Taken by them-

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other things hundreds of experimental replications that have ques-

SOME TRENDS IN NCTE AND CCCC PUBLICATIONS

There are a number of ways to bring such patterns to light. Fate of a

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The following historical analysis is based on the CompPile data-

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English in the Two-Year College because it became an NCTE-sponsored

The Research Paper

It goes by other names, of courseterm paper, documented paper,

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Data resulting from a set procedure of Data or data-like material presented as

Study of texts or human participants Study of texts or human participants

Description of a system of text analysis Description of a method of analysis or

Establishment of a descriptive or vali- Description of a test, course, or pro-

Review of past research or texts, with Review of research, without coverage

Replication of a previous research Reporting of other researchers RAD

Textual analysis with report of applica- Textual analysis, illustrating parts of

NOTE: RAD = replicable, aggregable, and data supported.

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Hearing Ourselves Think or Fords (1995) Teaching the Research Paper;

Gain in Writing Courses

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number of RAD studies of writing gain during a postsecondary aca-

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NCTE and CCCC

Figure 3. RAD Studies of Gain During a Writing Course in All Publications

A third issue is the scholarship on students evaluating other stu-

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contribution to the postsecondary discussion was modest, short

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Kansas City, Rothstein-Vandergriff and Gilson found that only the

Such a review of research would not be easy for writing teachers,

1. NCTE published College Teaching of English: A Bibliography first as a

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SOME PATTERNS IN THE DECLINE OF RAD SCHOLARSHIP

The overarching pattern in all of this is a severe decline in NCTE/

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Figure 6. Number of Items Pertaining to Postsecondary Composition in