College Composition & Communication - Volume 49, Issue 1, 1998

My aim is to suggest ways of using [Joseph] Cornell’s art in order to create an appreciation of the ways that textual coherence can manifest itself, and to discern a shaping strategy that may help us support students’ prefigurative literate activities.

This article is comprised of a collage of small segments of email conversation between the authors; it also includes fragmented quotes and diagrams. Consequently, it defies encapsulation in a typical abstract. Below is an excerpt that is perhaps the closest one might get to an abstract of this essay. This method of collaboration-which we are arguing is one in a panoply of others-is best represented by a text’s replicating it. This text speaks to its author/s’ collective intelligence, attempts to give it some definition by reference to the claims made here and the ways those claims were developed. The text, we might say, embodies collective intelligence and some of the ways, at least, that such intelligence is created. (Yancey and Spooner 60-61)

Since the 1970s, much major work in composition has been driven by moral purpose… Yet, curiously, our moral gaze has almost completely overlooked one crucial area of our personal and disciplinary responsibility, namely our ethical obligations to the persons whose words and actions we transform into the “data” of our research.

I salute the 1300 two-year colleges-colleges that bring hope, opportunity, fulfillment of dreams to a large segment of our population for whom otherwise higher education would be very difficult, if not impossible. Community colleges are open door, they are accessible, they are affordable, they are cost efficient, they offer a broad array of programs and services, and they open the way for transferring to four-year institutions or entering/reentering the workforce. Familiar words from the Declaration of Independence remind us of the basis of our democracy: "We hold these truths to be self-evident…"-you know the rest of the sentence. The abstractions "created equal," "certain unalienable rights," "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" become realities for many because of their community college experiences. Community colleges are indeed democracy in action. (Pickett 98).

The University of Pittsburgh Press Series in Composition, Literacy and Culture has recently published three titles which should be of interest to historians of literacy and of teaching. Two of the works under review collect historical documents from the 19th century. (Crowley 109).