The End of Composition Studies

Setting forth an innovative new model for what it means to be a writing teacher in the era of writing across the curriculum, The End of Composition Studies urges a reconceptualization of graduate work in rhetoric and composition, systematically critiques the limitations of current pedagogical practices at the postsecondary level, and proposes a reorganization of all academic units.
David W. Smit calls into question two major assumptions of the field: that writing is a universal ability and that college-level writing is foundational to advanced learning. Instead, Smit holds, writing involves a wide range of knowledge and skill that cannot be learned solely in writing classes but must be acquired by immersion in various discourse communities in and out of academic settings.
The End of Composition Studies provides a compelling rhetoric and rationale for eliminating the field and reenvisioning the profession as truly interdisciplinary—a change that is necessary in order to fulfill the needs and demands of students, instructors, administrators, and our democratic society.

The End of Composition Studies urges a reconceptualization of graduate work in rhetoric and composition, systematically critiques the limitations of current pedagogical practices at the postsecondary level, and proposes a reorganization of all academic units.

David W. Smit, a professor of English and the director of the Expository Writing Program at Kansas State University, is the author of The Language of a Master: Theories of Style and the Late Writing of Henry James. His articles have appeared in Journal of Advanced Composition, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric SocietyQuarterly, and other journals.

The title, as Smit says at the outset is a pun, but both meanings apply. Smit is trying to define what should be the end / goal of composition studies but also urging for the end/finish of composition studies (and the teaching of writing) as it now exists. He suggests that writinginstruction not be so narrowly tied to English or Writing Departments, but rather be tied to particular discourse communities. Thus for some­one to teach Writing in the Health Sciences (as I happen to be doing this quarter), that someone would have been formally trained in such writing in graduate school (which I most certainly was not). It is odd, I think, that at first I thought it was radical to suggest that teachers of “writing across the disciplines” should actually formally study writingin those disciplines. Is it not indeed a modest proposal to suggest “that graduate programs in composition studies be organized in order to promote the training of compositionalists as writers of particular kinds of discourse, as scholars of particular discourse communities, and as specialists in pedagogy”? (195)

To suggest that writing teachers should have practice doing the kinds of writing they teach is a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

Isn’t it obviously so? Shouldn’t writing teachers be selected on the basis of their skills as “writer-practitioners of the kinds of writing they are going to teach”? And shouldn’t “universities require portfolios with a broad range or writing from a variety of disciplines, professions, and workplaces as the student nears graduation”? And shouldn’t graduate students, in Rhetoric and Composition (and in English) be trained as writers? Smit points to a survey of doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition that revealed “of seventy-two programs, only thirteen have any requirement, or even an option among requirements, that students take a writing course.”

While perhaps Smit falls back too often on the Wittgensteinian trick of showing that most of the time most people (writers included) don’t have any idea what the words we are using actually mean, this book is, as Steven North says on the back cover, “a major and salutary contribution about the future of rhetoric and composition.” It will be salutary indeed even if we start following only this one of his many recommendations: train writing teachers as writers.