Patrick Scott UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA

There are two good reasons for compositionists now to look carefully at the bibliographical resources in the discipline. First, the resources have changed, and improved, a great deal in the past few years On a practical level, the enormous growth in research and commentary on composition is quite unmanageable if we are unfamiliar with these improved resources. But, second, the problems that composition bibliographers have faced, and the ways they have faced them, tell us a lot about the knowledge-structure (and social structure) of the discipline. By viewing composition through the speculum of its bibliographical structures, we see more sharply how the emergence of modern English compositionhas precipitated new configurations of people, purposes, and disciplinary traditions; indeed, its very bibliographical intractability is one of our best clues to the special character of composition's goals and perspectives.

The Background and Prototypes of Composition Bibliography

At first sight, composition and bibliography would seem culturally antithetical. Compositionists typically have stressed the role of discourse in sharing or shaping or creating a world, while bibliographers have typically seen themselves as value-free technicians, who through impersonal labor enable other researchers to locate all the particles of a preexistent knowledge.

Indeed, for many years, bibliography in composition was simply a non-problem, because few people (at least in English departments) saw composition as a research field. For English-based compositionists, the teaching of writing was largely a matter of oral folklore, while the commonest kinds of writing on the topic were the textbook or the hortatory conference paper directed at fellow-teachers; it seemed much less important to relate to previous published material than to the audience's classroom experience. 

This practical concern with composition's audience and mission influenced the kind of bibliographical resources that composition scholars would develop in the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast with bibliographers in, say, literary history, who aimed to serve subsequent specialist researchers, composition bibliographers have more usually aspired to be the expert mediator, selecting and synthesizing the results of research for readers who are practicing teachers or newcomers to the field. Interestingly, Kuhn made it one of the marks of a new research paradigm that publication in a field would have this concern with consolidation and dissemination, rather than just communicating to other specialists. For good as well as ill, the characteristic genre of composition bibliography was set very early, not as a reference listing, but as the discursive review-essay.

The pattern was established by the founding document of modern composition studies, the 1963 NCTE report, Research in Written ComU+00AD position, by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer . The purpose of the report (which runs to a little over a hundred pages of text) is to summarize for English teachers the conclusions reached by experimental and empirical researchers (most based in education departments), and though the report is now nearly thirty years old it is still a valuable orientation to that research tradition. The final twenty-five pages are a straight small-print (and unannotated) listing of research items, now of course long outdated, but what gave the report its character and impact was the text, with its polemic assertion that composition should be a knowledge-based field and with its user-friendly summaries of what recent research had concluded (most famously, about the neutral or negative effects on writing of direct grammar instruction). No bibliographical list alone would ever have had the impact of this report or reached the same kinds of readership.

Some ten years later, the same review-essay pattern was used for a second equally influential publication, Teaching Composition: 10 Bibliographical Essays, edited by Gary Tate ( Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1976). Tate's contributors included many of those then most influential in the field, and each essay provided summaries and generous quotation from the composition scholarship being reviewed. In an interesting shift from the 1963 report, the emphasis was no longer on the results of experimental research but on the explication of current ideas and approaches ("theory"); the volume's deserved success was in part because it provided a wide-ranging and readable introduction to what active compositionists had been talking about. The topics were broadbased issues of theory or pedagogy ("Invention," "Basic Writing," "Approaches to the Study of Style"), and the shared humanistic values and pedagogic optimism of the contributors largely prevented multiple authorship from introducing marked ideological divergences between essays. As a reference work, the 1976 Tate volume had difficulties; the coverage of topics was avowedly selective, some essay topics overlapped, and there was no index (something put right for Tate's second edition). Certainly, given the breadth of topics it covered, there was no chance of giving comprehensive coverage or even brief mention of all previously published material about each topic, and the widespread feeling by the mid-1970s that composition had changed meant that most older research or comment, or research done from different perspectives, would have seemed irrelevant anyway. By continuing the reviewessay format, the volume was free to shape and consolidate composition as an independent field of study, distinct from the border disciplines of linguistics, education, and English.

Of course, all cumulative or retrospective print-bibliographies, whatever their format, have a cut-off date, after which they stop adding new coverage and go to press. Most established disciplines provide serial updatings of recently published scholarship. The 1963 NCTE report and Tate's 1976 volume can each be linked to such a serial bibliography. The 1963 focus on empirical research led to the founding of a new journal, Research in the Teaching of English, which has provided since 1967 a twice-yearly list of research studies and reports, while through the 1970s the Tate volume could be conveniently supplemented by Richard L. Larson's annual list in College Composition and Communication (covering from 1973-78, appearing in CCC's May issues 1975-79). Unlike the serial bibliographies in most other disciplines, both the RTE and Larson CCC bibliographies were selective and soon both provided annotations to each item--that is, both serial bibliographies shared the user-orientation of their cumulative precursors.