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By the early 1980s, the pioneering research-reviews discussed above were getting outdated, and in any case the genre of the "orientatory essay" was becoming unrealistic for so fast developing a field. There had been enormous growth in writing about composition; new scholars entered the field, new journals were founded, and, on a conservative estimate, there had been a tenfold increase in the number of items annually published. Compositionists were now interested in a much greater diversity of topics and approaches, which added to the difficulty of timely and even-handed prose review or fair selectivity in serial listing. Paradoxically, the increasing size and complexity of the field, and the sustained influx of newcomers sharpened the need for bibliographical resources that could select from or make sense of material that would otherwise be overwhelming. One widely distributed selective list has been The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, ed. Robert Gorrell , Patricia Bizzell, and Bruce Herzberg ( 1984; 2nd ed., 1987), which in its first edition had fewer than 200 entries but gave essay-byessay breakdowns of many collections from the 1970s and added a very helpful brief introductory essay reviewing developments in rhetoric from classical to modern times. Similarly stringent in coverage were such single-author interpretative reviews as James Berlin Rhetoric and Reality (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987) or Stephen North The Making of Knowledge in Composition (Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1987), which attempted to "map" the broad contours of the field. But useful though they often are, such selective works can hardly, by themselves, provide adequate bibliographical guidance for more experienced scholars or an adequate basis for planning longer-term research. The best single starting-place, for orientation or reference, at least on general college composition, is now the revised or second edition of Tate Teaching Composition ( 1987). The new version retains the original's orientatory function, with paragraph-length summaries and generous quotation from important items, but it has been significantly updated and expanded, and the essays have become more inclusive in coverage and markedly more prodigal of brief references (sometimes with three or more recent items grouped in a single end-of-paragraph parenthesis). To the original ten chapters have been added new essays on writing evaluation and on computers and writing, both technical topics that by their very difference foreground the more unified humanistic and pedagogic emphasis of the first edition. The shift from introductory orientation to a more inclusive reference function is exemplified by the provision of a detailed and very useful index of subjects and proper names; it is usually through this subject-index, rather than through the table of contents, that one should first try to identify the central material when starting work on a composition topic. The changed scale and complexity of the field is shown also by the three hefty "bibliographic sourcebooks" published by Greenwood Press from 1984 onwards, which are now the natural starting-point for finding more detailed reviews on special topics in composition research or debate. There are three volumes in the series: Research in Composition and Rhetoric, edited by Michael G. Moran and Ronald F. Lunsford ( 1984), Research in Technical Communication, edited by Moran and Debra Journet ( 1985), and Research in Basic Writing, ed. Moran and Martin Jacobi ( 1990). The Greenwood Press volumes are compilations of review-essays by various contributors, on the established Tate model, and at first sight they just seem more elaborate and inclusive versions of their prototype; indeed the editors of the first Greenwood Press volume deliberately steered their contributors clear of most topics that had been treated in Tate's first edition, as if their effort were merely a supplement to it. But the effect of surveying composition, not in one volume of ten chapters, but in three volumes with over fifty chapters, is to demonstrate just how much the field has changed and diversified. The essays mention many more items in each page of discussion, and each chapter concludes with a substantial reference list for further reading. The biggest shift, however, is not simply in scale, but in the kinds of topics that get chapter-length discussion--everything from writing anxiety to vocabulary, from cognitive psychology and philosophy and literary theory to usage manuals and punctuation and the teaching of legal writing. Though many essays are very readable, no one is likely to read through the three volumes, as one can read (in a sitting) through the 1963 NCTE report that started it all, and as one can still read (more episodically) through the Tate volume. No single reader is going to find every specialized topic relevant or interesting--the field isn't that coherent any more. Only the most committed individual scholar is going to buy books that cost this much; these are not impulse buys for the average conference-goer, but serious library reference purchases. Yet even reference tools this extensive (and expensive) are still generously selective shapings, rather than comprehensive records, of the published material on composition. Like the revised Tate, the Greenwood Press volumes have become essential orientation and reference tools, especially on the more technical and linguistic composition scholarship. Both Tate and the Greenwood Press volumes make us uneasily aware of a new problem, apparently intrinsic to the essay genre as it copes with the publishing growth in composition studies. Some of the most readable contributions are those that present strongly evaluative reviews of a few major issues, perhaps ranging widely in reference but by no means attempting to "cover" all the recent professional publication on the topic; one thinks of John Warnock opening essay on "The Writing Process" in the first Greenwood Press volume. However, once the contributor tries to be more inclusive in coverage, the references multiply, the discussion of each gets briefer, and any commentary that aspires to fairness also becomes rather bland; more and more ideas or studies get mentioned per page, but the reader gets less and less direction in deciding their relative validity, and it is, after all, that direction that justifies using the essay format in the first place. The third recent bibliographic guide tackles this problem of evaluation head-on. It is also, significantly, a single-author text. This is George Hillocks Jr. Research on Written Composition (Urbana, IL: NCRE/ERIC, 1986). Hillocks' purpose was to survey research on composition teaching since the 1963 report, and he shares with that predecessor an emphasis on empirical or experimental work, as well as retaining its openness to research done on writing at the elementary or secondary level. Hillocks and his assistants found references to over 6000 relevant items in various education indexes, and, after examining them, they analyzed for the survey some 2000 (including many unpublished dissertations and project reports); much of this material had not previously come to the attention of compositionists based in college English departments and is not duplicated in Tate or the Greenwood Press volumes Oust as more theoretical or philosophical discussion is not covered in Hillocks). Typical titles for the kind of study Hillocks surveys might be (for a dissertation) "A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Two Grouping Plans for Teaching Community College First-Semester Freshman English Composition" or (more enticingly, for an article) "The Structure of Children's Compositions: Developmental and Ethnic Differences." Hillocks' most distinctive innovation over the earlier report, however, lies in his much debated "meta-analysis." Meta-analysis is an attempt to reassess the validity of apparently conflicting research results on the most heavily researched topics by cross-tabulating nearly 100 additional factors from each report, even if these factors were not part of the report's own focus. Thus, Hillocks checks any variables in class activities or in the duration of the experiment, even when a study is reporting findings about the effectiveness of different essay assignments or teacher-feedback. It is hard to know quite how effective the metaanalysis is (most reviewers blenched), and some of the classifications (for example, in chapter 4 on "Modes of Instruction") seem arbitrary, but Hillocks' summaries are nonetheless quite informative, and it is well indexed. It is the most-up-to-date survey, for instance, of experimental studies on grammar and writing. Clearly the Hillocks volume aspired to be a definitive report on the state of knowledge in the field, yet one of its chief values is as a convenient index to (and cumulated list of) RTEor ERIC-type materials since the early 1960s. These three resources can, of course, be supplemented by a large number of special-topic bibliographies and bibliographic essays, often published in article form or distributed through the ERIC system. Such specialized resources can be discovered through mention in one of the general volumes discussed in this section or through the ordinary serial indexes. It must, however, be kept in mind that specialized bibliographies are only as good as the search they were based on, and that they raise particular problems of search-definition--we are almost forced to define a topic as the compiler did; they are best used for preliminary orientation to a topic, or for refreshing our sense of the range of material, rather than as a substitute or short-cut for our own systematic library search early in a major project.
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