Landmark Essays on Advanced Composition

As advanced composition continues to grow as an important sub-area of rhetoric and composition, it becomes increasingly more important for scholars and teachers to have access to key studies produced in the field. Providing a comprehensive overview of significant work on the theory and pedagogy of advanced composition generated between 1980 and 1995, this collection contains 24 essays and articles previously published in major scholarly books and journals.

Divided into four major areas, this book:

* explores how individuals and institutions over the last 15 years have constructed advanced composition courses and programs,

* attempts to articulate what distinguishes advanced composition courses, students, and pedagogies from those commonly encountered in first-year composition,

* outlines specific pedagogies for advanced composition, and

* investigates how scholarship can inform advanced composition and examines several political and ethical issues.

The essays presented here chronicle composition's struggle to define and construct an appropriate writing course on the advanced level. Although these essays have clear historical value -- in that together they trace attempts to come to terms with advanced composition -- they also have implications for future work in the area. They suggest how educators might continue to draw on scholarship both within and outside of composition to investigate relevant theoretical issues and to construct effective advanced pedagogies.