JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

One of the recent developments afflicting our field is the tendency to form impressions of a person's position based not on reading his or her work but on brief and reductive secondary characterizations. Such a depiction occurred in JAC (Fall 1991) in an endnote to an article by Phillip Arrington, mentioning Composition Research: Empirical Designs by W. Asher and me. Arrington implies that my coauthor and I emphasize empirical research, particularly "comparison studies," over other kinds of inquiry in rhetoric and composition. This insinuation doesn't square with the statements in chapter one of the book advocating multi-modality, a dialogic interaction among modes of inquiry, nor with arguments I make in several other places, including "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline" (in Rhetoric Review), "The Place of Doctoral Studies in Rhetoric and Composition" (with Andrea Lunsford in The Future of Doctoral Studies in English), and most recently in the forthcoming "Rhetoric and Composition--A Multi-Modal Discipline" (in Toward Defining the New Rhetorics).

Further, the endnote states that new theoretical freedoms seek to transcend empirical research. It was to counter such attitudes toward empirical studies that we wrote Composition Research, for those in English studies unfamiliar with the bounded and diverse conventions (called in the endnote "how to" procedures) of different empirical discourse communities, ranging from those conducting case studies and ethnography to those doing meta-analysis. Through the book, we hoped to illustrate both the contributions and limitations of empirical research for composition. The intimation that empirical conventions don't exist or no longer matter is puzzling.

Further, I suspect that composition researchers whose studies we cited as examples of the eight designs in Composition Research would not appreciate having their work characterized as outdated sixties-type research--people including Lillian Bridwell Bowles, Don Graves, Steve Witte, Lester Faigley, Lee Odell, Dixie Goswami, George Hillocks, John Clifford, Barry Kroll, Hugh Burns, Ann Matsuhashi, and Betty Bamberg.

The fact that Composition Research focuses on the discursive practices of empirical research does not mean that it devalues other modes of inquiry. If readers of JAC are interested in more light than agon about the rich complexity of knowledge and inquiry in composition studies, I recommend Louise Phelps' recent article in College English, "Practical Wisdom and the Geography of Knowledge in Composition," which makes intelligent distinctions among lore, reflective practice, practical inquiry, and disciplined inquiry.