What, another damned thick book? Yes indeed, but one that, it is a pleasure to report, is well worth its not inconsiderable weight and price. In Research in Composition and Rhetoric: A Bibliographic Sourcebook, editors Moran and Lunsford have energetically solicited from a gaggle of scholars a series of bibliographic essays, which, at their best, synthesize both historical trends and current research in many different areas of composition study. Each contains an extensive reference list through 1982 (with occasional 1983 entries) which will facilitate the reader’s search for sources in a particular area. There is some unevenness in content, style, and tone among the sixteen essays in this collection, but given its diversity of subject areas, the general quality of the essays is high. It’s worth noting that although editing work in such disparate content areas is difficult, I found few errors or inaccuracies. Upon such small virtues are important successes built.

In deciding what areas to review, the editors chose to see “composition” in the way that one of their contributors, Louise W. Phelps, describes it: as a grouping of “interactional realities” derived from the “complex actualities” of writing. The series of topics upon which the volume is organized represents what Phelps terms the “synthesizing thrust” and “pragmatic, ad hoc interpretation of scientific and humanistic knowledge” characteristic of composition studies. The book’s first section contains essays on the relationships between writing and psychology, philosophy, rhetoric, literature, and reading—each essay summarizing the history of its subject area and relating current research to writing and its teaching. The second section offers studies of current research methods in composition, grading, and assignment-making. In the third section, labelled “Basics,” the problems of basic or remedial writing are discussed, followed by assessments of micro-rhetorical aspects of writing: words, sentences, paragraphs, usage, and punctuation. Appendices include assessments of current rhetoric texts and usage handbooks.

The most comprehensive essays come in the first section. I found John Briggs’ “Philosophy and Rhetoric” the most illuminating of the group, primarily because it begins with the earliest classical controversies about rhetoric—the sophists’ debate dramatized in Plato—and continues through Aristotle into that widening consensus about public discourse which we label “classical rhetoric.” Tracing the authorita­tive persistence of this tradition to the present day, Briggs offers a thorough survey of modern discourse systems, including those of Burke, Perelman and others influenced by phenomenology. Phelps’ essay, “An Emerging Psychology of Composi­tion,” though ignoring earlier rhetorician-psychologists like George Campbell (whom Briggs does treat), thoroughly discusses current understandings of the psychology of writing. However, more discussion of the two cognitive psychologists most often cited by current researchers—Piaget and Vygotsky—would have made her essay even stronger. Jasper Neel’s “Reading and Writing, A Survey of the Questions About Texts” is also a thorough and authoritative survey of its field, but it is not about how to teach reading. It traces the problem of textuality and interpretation from phenomenology through recent deconstructionism, dearly summarizing the work of Pierce, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and others concerned with the metaphysics of texts. Such a challenging discussion of contemporary textual theory marks one major advantage of this volume over the collections published by NCTE, whose limits often seem strictly practical and pedagogical.

Readers will notice that the essays in this volume tend to fall into two groups: those that range over their fields synthesizing and evaluating the trends they discover, and those that are content to recite and briefly summarize the works they treat. The former present a dear and authoritative voice; the latter feature a neutral, sometimes colorless voice. The essays already noted fall into the first category. So, for example, does the essay on “Grading and Evaluation” by Reising and Stewart, who discuss not only the obvious scoring methods and strategies, but also the psychology of grading and evaluating and its relationship to current reader-oriented, process-based rhetoric. And they offer a model for judging the potential success of any assessment method. Other essayists take a narrower view of their mission. Lynn D. Beene’s “Assignment Making” offers considerable information on varieties of assignments, but she does not give the reader any help in sorting out the more from the less effective. “Basic Writing,” by Hull and Bartholomae, again is an admirably thorough survey of work on the subject, but it does not query or probe that work for what is more or less promising or effective. For example, Hull and Bartholomae survey several different pedagogical theories with relevance to basic writing, including those of James Moffett, William Coles, and Paulo Freire. Well, these cats wouldn’t tolerate being stuffed in the same bag themselves; are their theories equally relevant to BW? Why were these authors chosen in the first place?

There are some lapses and omissions in some essays. John Warnock’s lead essay, “The Writing Process,” offers a definition of writing both baffling and irrelevant, “the term writing (sic) means the least a machine or a person would have to be able to do to enable us to say truthfully. . . that it was actually writing in the way we know all human beings are able to do in enabling situations.” I looked in vain for his gloss on “enabling situation,” hoping it would offer the key to the definition. To this he adds an error that can’t be overlooked: he asserts that writing is “natural” just as “the ability to speak a language is natural.” Of course speech is natural; all normal children will have speech. But they won’t write unless they learn the alphabet and are taught to write it down. And there’s a significant omission in the book as a whole: nowhere is there a substantive discussion of the statistical methods that underlie most writing research, the correlations and tests of significance and variability that inform virtually every empirical study published in the journals. Are such methods essential to writing research? If so, what procedures are appropriate for which kinds of research? Christopher Burnham’s “Research Methods In Composition” would have been the logical place for such a discussion.

The reader may also notice a great deal of redundancy among the citations in these essays. Given the range of the essays and the eclectic nature of writing research, such overlap is not only understandable but useful. Familiar names—Emig, Moffett, Kinneavy, Hirsch, Corbett—recur throughout the book; a look at its index yields a quick judgment as to the currency of a given researcher’s work in composition research today. Through the prism of this volume, we are offered a strikingly variegated image of our discipline today.