Composition Studies Saves the World

Abstract

I had to gather my courage before trying to score on someone as quick as Stanley Fish, who’s faster than Kobe Bryant in the paint. I’ve admired his work and, indeed, been shaped by it for a very long time. He once said something nice about my work—I treasure that. But, unfortunately, in his new book he also says that composition studies presents “the clearest example” of what’s desperately wrong in the academy, because in writing classrooms “more often than not anthologies of provocative readings take center stage and the actual teaching of writing is shunted to the sidelines” (49, 40). Therefore I venture to defend my field and try to block a few of his shots. Fish objects to shunting writing to the sidelines because teaching writing is the proper job of composition specialists and academics have one job and one job only: to teach the material of their disciplines. The goal of this teaching is to help students learn how to arrive at carefully qualified, antifoundationalist, but nevertheless objective and trustworthy truths about the objects of study. For composition scholars, the goal should be to help students learn to write better. But this is exactly what composition specialists have always been trying to do. The field’s development has been profoundly shaped by the changing demographics of the college classroom, bringing more and more