"Psychologists, Social Constructionists, and Three Nineteenth-Century Advocates of an Authentic Voice" (article)

Over two decades ago, when I began writing my first textbook, I had no idea how beautifully my arguments for the necessity of an authentic voice had been anticipated by eminent men of letters in the last half of the nineteenth century. I was unaware of this material because, at the time, I was too much involved with putting into print what I hoped would remedy some serious deficiencies in our pedagogy. Although a revival of interest in classical rhetoric and its application to modern composition teaching had begun approximately ten years earlier, and some excellent applications of it to modern composition teaching (most notably Edward P.J. Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student) had already been published, when I began to work seriously on my book, the problems created by decades of bad composition teaching were still very much with us. For both teachers and students alike, the production of competent nonfiction was a pretty deadly business. For decades, students had been conditioned to perceive classroom writing as an activity totally separated from their active lives. Some had become, as Robert Zoellner pointed out in 1969, tragically skilled at turning out pasteurized prose, the words-for-teacher instead of words-for-me that they should have been producing (307).

The audience for this impersonal, detached, and lifeless writing was too often a graduate student with no preparation beyond a superficial in-service program designed by a senior faculty member "condemned" to direct the freshman writing program. For this young teacher and his or her supervisor, the idea that composition was an intellectual discipline worthy of study was incomprehensible. They knew nothing of significance about the ancient rhetorical arts of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery; nothing about theories of teaching composition or the epistemologies which informed them; nothing of the history of the profession of English and the role of composition teaching in it.

At the University of Illinois, I had tried (futilely for the most part) to effect some changes in the attitudes and practice of the teaching assistants I was asked to supervise. Of course, there was absolutely nothing I could do about the ways some of my peers taught composition. Their methods, I felt, courted mechanically accurate but essentially lifeless prose, and as long as they approved that stuff, I could only grind my teeth and try to do something different in my own classes. The unpopularity of the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement did create some possibilities. Advanced students, particularly, began to challenge the kind of education they were receiving, and some welcomed the opportunity to break out of old molds in their writing. They were especially receptive to the idea that I wanted them to find a voice that was uniquely theirs and express themselves in it. At the time, I thought there was a chance for a real breakthrough.

The Loss of Authentic Voice

Those years have passed, however. As I look back upon the dominant movements in composition teaching over the past ten to fifteen years, I see a reemergence of trends which, in my opinion, once again devalue the individual and celebrate impersonal institutionalized prose. For example, consider the application of cognitive psychology to composition teaching, of which Linda Flower and John Hayes have been the most visible proponents, and their development of an elegant model for composing and a set of strategies for moving students from writer- to reader-based prose. Much as I admire the model Flower and Hayes have developed from protocol analyses, I have been for some time concerned more about what they do not show than what they do. My intent here is not to present a full critique of that model—Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman, among others, did that very well in 1983—but to suggest by one example a problem I have with it, one best demonstrated with an analogy from music. I believe that if Flower and Hayes had been able to get a protocol of Johannes Brahms composing his Violin Concerto in D Major, they could have diagrammed Brahms' decisions to choose certain keys, to modulate from one passage to another, to place the fortes and pianos, the legatos and detachés, even to revise portions of it, but they would not have been able to explain the essential passion and fire of the concerto, which are the fundamental essence of the piece's greatness. It's almost equivalent to putting together a human being from all the requisite parts but being unable to breathe the breath of life into it (pronoun chosen deliberately).

Of the move from writer- to reader-based prose, I have only this question: is it always necessary or desirable? In one of her early papers, Flower invokes the authority of both Vygotsky and Piaget to demonstrate that writer-based prose is essentially egocentric (with definite analogues to the speech of children) and "a natural, less cognitively demanding mode of thought and one which explains why people, who can express themselves in complex and highly intelligible modes, are often obscure" (22). She is, perhaps, referring to literary works like James Joyce's Ulysses, certainly a piece of writer-based prose if there ever was one. Writer-based prose is, for Flower, inadequate to represent the "abstract, synthetic thinking that writing typically demands" (22).

Flower does not disguise her contempt for some kinds of writer-based prose, demonstrating in a number of examples "its tedious misdirection," or its tendency to give the reader "a blow-by-blow account of the writer's discovery process" or reveal "home movies of the writer's mind at work" (25). In the rest of the article, although acknowledging writer-based prose as a powerful recovery tool for writers and as a complex mental process, she does not admit the possibility that good writer-based prose can be just as efficient—perhaps even more so than the kind of cerebral, highly conceptualized reader-based prose that she lauds—at presenting abstract, difficult, concepts.

Actually, Flower's discussion of writer- and reader-based prose opens up some very interesting but infrequently examined issues in composition teaching. One is Flower's assumption that producing reader-based prose is more intellectually demanding than producing writer-based prose. That assumption rests, I presume, on a prior set of assumptions, one of which is that writer-based prose is most often narrative and descriptive while reader-based prose is expository and argumentative or persuasive. I would not challenge such an assumption, but I would challenge vigorously a still further recessed assumption in this argument to the effect that narrative and descriptive writing are easier to produce than expository or argumentative writing.

Contrary to what Flower says, expositions and arguments are relatively easy to compose. It is not difficult at all to teach students to write them because most are contained in prescribed forms approved by writers of academic discourse. These turn out to be, most of the time, adaptations of the ancient rhetorical pattern of organization: introduction, background, argument, refutation, and conclusion. One has only to study contemporary academic journals, which I did in the mid-seventies ("Rhetorical"), to discover a remarkably consistent pattern of organization in the articles. A problem is identified, background for it is supplied, an argument (usually a fresh interpretation of a literary work) is presented, refutations are anticipated and addressed, and a conclusion sums up what has already been said. Winston Weathers called this kind of structure the "box" and sought ways of escaping it.

My larger point, however, is that this structure is easy to produce and easy to teach. Students learn it quickly. Their real problems with expository and argumentative discourse are finding and evaluating the material which they wish to write about. Once they have it, the writing goes rather easily. They are, after all, following a blueprint developed decades ago and approved by their teachers.

Narrative writing, whether fictional or nonfictional, is a much more complex business. It can be simple-minded, of course, the home-movies that Flower complains of, or it can and often is, with students willing to make the effort to produce it, a very sophisticated business. One thinks immediately of the skillful way in which F. Scott Fitzgerald slipped bits and pieces of Jay Gatsby's past life into the principal narrative line of The Great Gatsby before bringing the novel to its conclusion. Even more impressive is Ford Madox Ford's complete and brilliant dislocation of time in The Good Soldier, surely one of the most impressive fictional achievements of the twentieth century. We rarely see Fitzgeralds or Fords in our classrooms, but, on a much less sophisticated level, I have received narratives from students recently who in writing about their own personal experience imitated the narrative pattern of Alice Munro's "How I Met My Husband," a very clever piece of narrative misdirection. I would argue strenuously that these essays, more writer- than reader-based, were much more difficult to construct than the usual expository or argumentative papers that college students are constantly assigned.

Another issue generated by the distinctions between writer- and reader-based prose is the extent to which Flower would equate what she calls writer-based prose and what I call prose with an authentic voice. There is a large body of expository prose which I would call both writer- and reader-based and intensely authentic. It is, in my judgment, considerably superior to the more detached and cerebral prose which I think Flower is calling reader-based prose. For example, I suggest a comparison between the Encyclopedia Britannica's article on fresh-water crossopterygians and Loren Eiseley's "The Snout," from The Immense Journey. The former contains sufficient relevant information about its topic, but it has all the charm and attractiveness of a concrete sidewalk. Eiseley's essay, intensely personal, is also full of good information on the topic, and it's so compelling that one can hardly put it down.

In fairness to Flower, I doubt that she would call the Eiseley piece I have cited writer-based prose. Nor would she characterize Tom Wolfe's essay on Las Vegas in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby or the superb chapters in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac that way. Yet these essays do not fit the description she gives in this article of reader-based prose which moves from "facts, scenarios, and details to concepts" or transforms "a narrative or textbook structure into a rhetorical structure built on the logical and hierarchical relationships between ideas and [is] organized around the purpose for writing, rather than the writer's process" (37). In these works abstract concepts are vividly articulated in very concrete and highly personal ways.¹

Recently, the social constructionists seem to be displacing the cognitive psychologists. I have no time in this paper for an extended critique of their assumptions (I have done that already in "Collaborative"), but I do want to make the point that from what I have read, particularly in Kenneth Bruffee's work, it is clear that the social constructionist argues that knowledge is the product of a consensus within a discourse community. It is but a short step from that assumption to the position that an individual is the product of a kind of community consensus:

Social construction assumes that the matrix of thought is not the individual self but some community of knowledgeable peers and the vernacular language of that community. That is, social construction understands knowledge and the authority of knowledge as community-generated, community-maintaining, symbolic artifacts. Indeed, some social constructionists go so far in their nonfoundationalism as to assume, along with the sociologist Erving Goffman for example, that even what we think of as the individual self is a construct largely community generated and community maintained. ("Social Construction" 777; emphasis added)

Both Bruffee and Karen Burke LeFevre give clear indications of their attitudes toward what I would call an authentic voice, the expression of the essential individuality of a particular writer. They associate it with the concept of the writer as atomistic, pursuing truth in lonely isolation. LeFevre, in thinly veiled sarcasm, refers to it as "the Columbus complex" (124). Bruffee asks these questions: "Is it not true that it is only in infancy (and in our infantile moments as adults) that we are concerned exclusively to please ourselves? When we work maturely and at our best, do we not work to please those we want to please, which usually, but seldom exclusively includes ourselves?" ("Way Out" 464-65). In the essay cited previously, I accumulated a number of answers to those questions, but for now, since I want to get on with other matters, one will have to do. The Kentucky writer, Jesse Stuart, recounting his frustrations with university writing teachers who consistently gave him conflicting advice, said that he "returned from the university with a determination to write something to suit myself. . . . And this idea occurred to me which has been a part of my everyday philosophy! 'Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it'" (11). I do not believe it would be wise to call the mature work of Jesse Stuart "infantile" or "immature."

My own belief is that the attitudes of both the cognitive psychologists and the social constructionists toward the uniqueness of the individual and the value of the self expressed in writing reflects the dominant positivism of our time, a position made attractive by the spectacular advances of science and technology in the twentieth century. The cognitive psychologist is the high priest of language which is detached, cerebral, problem-solving. The social constructionist lives in a world in which people lose their identities in collaborative uses of language—in business, science, technology.² In the late nineteenth century, when scientific advances were (for that age) also spectacular and when, because of the advance of technology, modern industrial states were expanding rapidly, men of letters saw things differently. I wish to cite passages from the work of three who, despite the tenor of the age, never lost sight of the fact that the fundamental quality of good writing was the presence of the individual writer, a presence made visible by what I choose to call an authentic voice.

A Temporary Reversal of Evolution

The first of these is G.H. Lewes, an eminent Victorian and a man of both science and letters. He is best known to us today as the companion of George Eliot in what was called the most respectable adultery in Victorian society. In a series of articles written in the Fortnightly Review between May and November of 1865 and collected and edited by Fred Newton Scott under the title The Principles of Success in Literature (1891), Lewes tells aspiring writers what qualities exist in literature that survives. For my purposes, a few remarks in the second essay, "The Principle of Vision," are cogent:

Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature. The writer must have thought the thoughts, seen the objects (with bodily or mental vision), and felt the feelings; otherwise he can have no power over us. Importance does not depend on rarity so much as on authenticity. . . . So little do writers appreciate the importance of direct vision and experience, that they are in general silent about what they themselves have seen and felt, copious in reporting the experience of others. Nay, they are urgently prompted to say what they know others think, and what consequently they themselves may be expected to think. They are as if dismayed at their own individuality, and suppress all traces of it in order to catch the general tone. Such men may, indeed, be of service in the ordinary commerce of Literature as distributors. All I wish to point out is that they are distributors, not producers. The commerce may be served by second-hand reporters, no less than by original seers; but we must understand this service to be commercial, and not literary. The common stock of knowledge gains from it no addition. (38, 39; emphasis added)

This position is more strenuously argued by T.H. Wright in an essay called, simply, "Style." It was originally published in Macmillan's Magazine in November of 1877, reprinted in Popular Science Monthly in January of 1878, then included in an edition of Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" published by Fred Newton Scott in 1892.³ In the essay Wright takes issue with a number of Spencer's assertions, but none provokes him so strongly as Spencer's assertion that "to have a specific style is to be poor in speech." Spencer had argued that the best writer adapted his style to the particular occasion, changing voice as needed but in no sense revealing a voice uniquely his own. Wright responds by saying that Spencer's remark

has not been implied in the judgments which the world has from time to time passed upon its greatest writers. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that much in proportion as an author has reached a high eminence in his art there has been found in his productions a corresponding tendency to an individuality of expression. Is it not a common complaint against inferior artists, whether in prose or verse, in painting or music, that their compositions lack character and originality? Uniformity is the distinguishing feature of mediocrity, while the work of genius is at once recognized and attributed to the origin whose impress it bears. (80; emphasis added)

Wright goes on to address a basic issue in Spencer's essay: the principle of economy in style, which Spencer praised. Spencer sought to define a style which, because of its economy, allowed a reader to concentrate upon the substance of a discourse and not lose effort and time striving to untangle semi-coherent words, phrases, and sentences. But Wright argued that stylistic difficulties were a necessary byproduct of the individuality of each writer:

In a certain sense, style at all owes its existence to the imperfection of the vehicle of thought. Were language a perfectly adequate means of embodying ideas, what is now to be looked for in the mode of statement would be found directly declared in the statement itself. For the countless devices of language, the gestures and tones of discourse, the thousand rhetorical figures of written composition, are really one and all simple propositions not capable of exact expression in the body of the narrative. They are the lights and shades of the picture, or perhaps rather the finer touches, which are to tickle the imagination of the reader with suggested beauties. And it is exactly in these refinements of expression that the deepest meaning of any author, in other words, his self resides. (83)

Near the conclusion of his essay, Wright turns gently ironic. Paraphrasing Spencer, he says that "the ideal style, then, is but for an ideal being who is to be without personality. The perfect writer may write, now like Junius, now like Lamb, now like Carlyle, but like himself he can never write. He cannot, as we say express himself" (84). Clearly, he thinks this an absurdity: "A significant phrase, for after all it is when a man, as far as he can, expresses himself, that his communication is most worth having. It is the one thing of which he certainly knows something, where he can indeed speak with authority" (84).

If my reading of contemporary composition theory and pedagogy is accurate, however, this is no longer a popular position. Although Peter Elbow, Ken McCrorie, and James Moffett have their advocates, one notices the increasing number of papers on collaborative learning, behind which are the theories of social construction, which appear on the annual program of the Conference on College Composition and Communication convention. And one could point to Irv Hashimoto's shrill diatribe a few years ago in CCC against the notion of an authentic voice, a diatribe directed at Elbow, McCrorie, and me in particular. John Trimbur, in a fairly recent essay in College English takes a calmer more distanced approach to the issue. He says the very notion of individuality does not exist. What he and his fellow social constructionists have not been telling us is that social construction is, among contemporary social psychologists, a peripheral position, one out of the mainstream of current social psychology inquiry.⁴

A most interesting history of the whole notion of individuality, from classical times through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance down to today, is offered by Roy Baumeister, whose "How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research" suggests that the recent move toward social construction has been prompted by a post World War II phenomenon: "the problematic nature of the individual's relation to society stem[ming] from being inextricably bound up in interpersonal society but needing to define one's own meaning and purpose in life actively, because society no longer provides the individual with these" (174). The loss of identity of the socially or linguistically constructed self represents a reversal of an evolutionary pattern, one revealing over the course of many centuries individuals' increasing sense of self. It is, I believe, a temporary phenomenon, one prompted by an acceptance of the need to accommodate one's self to the temporarily fragmented character of modern existence. The larger problem is that modern human beings demand more of life in terms of self-definition and self-fulfillment, and finding that in social structures is but one way to deal with the problem. There remain a number of individuals, like myself, however, who refuse to gain their identities from groups and who seek constantly to transcend group influence in our thinking and use of language. This is a point which current social constructionists are unwilling to concede, even to the point of telling me, as Mara Holt did, that I simply do not understand social construction. No, I understand it very well. I just have a very different view of social dynamics than she does, and I think she is less able to get past her blind spot than I am.

I am also sufficiently aware of the direction poststructuralist criticism, feminism, and current Marxist thought is taking to realize that the notion of an authentic or individual self is a most unpopular position. If I understand these groups, it is an eighteenth-century Enlightenment concept, a white, male, European invention which has been a means of suppressing the voices of women and minorities. I cannot speak for others, but I find this a gross distortion of my own concept of an authentic voice, which is based on the assumption that every human being, no matter how many social and linguistic forces shape him or her, has a perception of the world and life unique to him or herself. Each is valuable as a means of reporting the full range of human experience, and the suppression of any one of these voices distorts our picture of reality, whether we are epistemologically, in James Berlin's terms, positivists, subjectivists, or transactionalists. I have to wonder what political ends are served by insisting that the notion of individuality I describe is yet one more attempt of the white, male, dominant culture to continue its marginalization (the current buzz word) of women and minorities.

To those who say that the notion of an authentic authorial voice no longer exists, that it has crumbled under the attacks of those who have destroyed the very notion of selfhood and would describe us as linguistically constructed, of a variety of voices, I suggest a reading of Edward Sampson's "The Debate on Individualism," a paper congenial to their point of view but amusing to me because the author, unable to entirely dismiss the autonomous self, has had to invent a new concept to deal with the troublesome persistence of that self: "ensembled individualism." Being an old string quartet player, I am grateful to Mr. Sampson for limiting the number of persons and voices I am. An ensemble seems so much more manageable than a full orchestra.

A third advocate of the authentic voice, and the greatest composition teacher of his era, is Fred Newton Scott. In the prefatory essay to one of his least well-known publications, a pamphlet called The Principles of Style which he published in 1890 for use in a class by the same name, Scott differentiates levels of rhetoric. It may be studied by some merely as a means of getting practical instruction in writing essays. More advanced students will move from that stage to the study of rhetoric as a science, a stage during which they will try to discover, systematically, the general rules which give meaning and substance to the practical precepts they have learned earlier. In the third stage, however, what Scott calls study of the "higher rhetoric," students will attempt to account for "the finer effects of literature" (4). This will require "the exercise of certain mental functions in higher degree than was formerly the case. Imagination and Feeling, which had little employment while the Lower Rhetoric was in progress, are now required at every step" (5). The student must also learn a new vocabulary as he or she develops greater refinement of taste. Finally, there will be a sense of integration of all that the student has hitherto learned about rhetoric, and the realization that the essential quality in his or her work is the sense of his or her own personality:

The student's practice—his paragraphing, the management of the rhythm of his prose, even his capitalizing, spelling and punctuation—ought to come more easily and naturally to him through this infusion of life into dry bones. And as for the grasp of principles, he will probably come to wonder whether, before, he ever had hold of any principles at all, so vividly does he now realize for the first time that whatever is not a piece of his own personality can be nothing but . . . a paste-board box to hold abstractions.

A piece of his own personality!—that, after all, is, in the Higher Rhetoric, the only kind of goods worth having. If we say cultivation of taste, what should we mean but holding on steadfastly and sincerely to what takes hold on us—satisfies, that is, what of personality we have achieved up to that point in our development—and striving to grow in grace and knowledge so that more things may take hold on us? Or if we say that a writer must obey the Laws of Composition, what should we mean but that he is to make these laws a part of his own personality and then utter himself? Or if finally we say that such and such compositions are masterpieces of style, what can or ought we to mean but that they are the perfect expression of personalities worth expressing? (7-8)

Could one characterize the "higher rhetoric" as "infantile" or "immature," an early stage in the student's development toward realization of the social construction of belief and his or her own personality as essentially a function of group identity? I think not.⁵

It would be easy to dismiss the statements of Lewes, Wright, and Scott as psychologically immature, the effusions of residual Romanticism not yet purged of its excesses. Again, I think not. All of these men were hard-headed realists, very much in tune with scientific and technological developments in their day and the move toward a detached, impersonal prose to report this new knowledge. For that reason, it is all the more remarkable that they continued to insist that a fundamental quality of good writing was the presence of a genuine authorial voice.

Toward a Return of Authentic Voice

As yet I am not completely sure on the point, but I suspect that one of the late twentieth century's reasons for distancing itself from writing with an intensely personal voice is not only our era's worship of the scientific and technological fact and the mania we have for presenting it uncontaminated, but an even deeper and unexpressed need to avoid confronting the essential shallowness of our spiritual lives. One cannot escape constant reports of it in the media: the increasing divorce rate and its suggestion that many Americans cannot sustain a meaningful relationship with another person over an extended period of time; increasing violence in the country; the advertising industry's incessant defining of the good life in excessively materialistic terms; our fixation with youth and unwillingness to accept the inevitable stages of life with all their satisfactions as well as their flaws. The social constructionists, of course, argue vigorously that richness and depth of personal experience are to be found in one's sense of community, and I take such remarks, particularly coming from someone like Kenneth Bruffee, to be completely sincere. There is a very genuine and attractive humaneness running through all of Bruffee's essays. But that point of view does not acknowledge the full range of human personality and experience.

Equally troubling to me is the continued insistence by some of my contemporaries who echo Herbert Spencer's contention that a writer really has not one but many voices, and the art of rhetoric is choosing which one to adopt for a particular context. That a writer may adopt a number of superficially different surface voices I do not deny, but I will strenuously continue to affirm that any good writer has a single identifiable voice running beneath all his or her work, regardless of the context or genre. Anyone who tells me that he or she cannot detect the same personality in D.H. Lawrence's or Mark Twain's novels, travel pieces, letters, and literary criticism, is simply talking nonsense. And I think we make a serious pedagogical mistake when we do not acknowledge this fact and encourage our students to develop their own voices as far as they are capable of doing so.

Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas

NOTES

¹The parables of the New Testament are yet one more example of this phenomenon.

²Time and space prevent me from giving proper acknowledgement to poststructuralist critics who share the social constructionist point of view except that they describe the linguistically constructed self which has been so fragmented that for them any talk of an individual or authentic authorial voice is a ridiculous fiction. But an unpublished collection of essays I have just been reading on ethos, rhetoric, and the self demonstrates rather convincingly that the issue is by no means so settled as the poststructuralists think it is. I should add, also, that I am intrigued by the notion that so much of this work originated in France. Are we seeing a fundamental difference in French and English? Does the former, noted for its preciseness, limit its native speakers in ways that make it difficult for them to appreciate fully the rich ambiguities and flexibility of which English is capable? I have no idea, of course, but I would be most interested in reading what those who are competent to do so might write on this subject.

³Unfortunately, neither the editors of Macmillan's and Popular Science Monthly nor Scott identify Wright. A reasonable guess is that he is Thomas Wright (1809-1884), an English physician, geologist, and paleontologist.

⁴I wish to acknowledge the considerable assistance of my colleague at Kansas State University, Professor Leon Rappaport of the Department of Psychology, in introducing me to a substantial body of literature on the subject of self.

⁵Those interested in exploring an intriguing extension of this argument should consult Gayley and Scott 254 and 266-70. They summarize E. Groth's Die Grenzboten as follows: "Groth is a follower of Taine, but, like Brunetiere, adds to Taine's formula the principle of individuality. He holds that the presence of the individual element makes it impossible for us to infer from any given work the general character of the period in which it was written. The great masters lie outside their age. The major literary products, therefore, as a source for the history of culture, are inferior to the minor" (254). Their discussion of the origins of poetry (pages 266-70) takes up the question of individual or collective authorship and includes numerous references to those who have written on both sides of the question.

Works Cited

Baumeister, Roy F. "How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987): 163-76.

Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay." College English 48 (1986): 773-90.

—. "The Way Out." College English 33 (1972): 457-70.

Cooper, Marilyn, and Michael Holzman. "Talking About Protocols." College Composition and Communication 34 (1983): 284-93.

Flower, Linda. "Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing." College English 41 (1979): 19-37.

Gayley, Charles Mills, and Fred Newton Scott. An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism: The Bases in Aesthetics and Poetics. Boston: Ginn, 1899.

Hashimoto, I. "Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Composition." College Composition and Communication 38 (1987): 70-80.

Holt, Mara. "Towards a Democratic Rhetoric: Self and Society in Collaborative Theory and Practice." Journal of Teaching Writing 8 (1989): 99-112.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Lewes, G.H. The Principles of Success in Literature. Ed. Fred Newton Scott. Boston: Allyn, 1891.

Sampson, Edward E. "The Debate on Individualism: Indigenous Psychologies of the Individual and Their Role in Personal and Societal Functioning." American Psychologist 43 (1988): 15-22.

Scott, Fred Newton. The Principles of Style. Ann Arbor: Register, 1890.

Spencer, Herbert. The Philosophy of Style. 2nd ed. Ed. Fred Newton Scott. Boston: Allyn, 1891.

Stewart, Donald C. "Collaborative Learning and Composition: Boon or Bane?" Rhetoric Review 7 (1988): 58-83.

—. "Rhetorical Malnutrition in Prelim Questions and Literary Criticism." College English 39 (1977): 160-69. Rpt. in An Alternate Style: Options in Composition. Ed. Winston Weathers. New York: Hayden, 1980. 121-30.

Stuart, Jesse. "When Not to Take Advice." Saturday Review of Literature. 17 Feb. 1945: 11.

Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51 (1989): 602-16.

Wright, T.H. "Style." Macmillans Magazine Nov. 1877: 78-84.

Zoellner, Robert. "Talk-Write: A Behavioral Pedagogy for Composition." College English 30 (1969): 267-320.

JAC Volume 12 Issue 2