2008 NCTE Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose and the ...

316 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
2008 NCTE Presidential Address:
The Impulse to Compose and the Age of Composition
Kathleen Blake Yancey
Florida State University, Tallahassee
The following is the text of Kathleen Blake Yancey’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE
Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas, on November 23, 2008.
In June of 1776 a group of white propertied men labored over a manuscript that
continues to provide the foundation for this country: the Declaration of
Independence. Agreed that the thirteen English
colonies would create a document
authorizing their freedom from England,
the leaders of this effort asked Thomas
Jefferson to begin the drafting process. He
composed the “original Rough draught,”
and then turned to others—including John
Adams and Benjamin Franklin—for revision.
They took Jefferson at his word, making
“a total of forty-seven alterations [to the
draft] including the insertion of three complete
paragraphs.” Afterwards, on June 28,
the text was presented to Congress, when
another “thirty-nine additional revisions to
the committee draft [were added] before its
final adoption on the morning of July 4”
(“Declaring,” par. 2).
Some 232 years later, Barack Obama, an
African American, was elected the fortyfourth
president of the United States—and by a landslide. He won the election for
many reasons, among which was his writing—his two books, his eloquent speeches,
his graphic posters, his emails with embedded video, and his text messages that
announced Joe Biden as vice president; asked you to contribute to the Red Cross
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YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 317
in the aftermath of Ike; reminded you and
your neighbors to vote—often, and then
every day in the final run-up to the election;
and not least, thanked you for helping make
him victorious.
We might say that the defining feature
in both these historical moments is composing.
We see this in the composing of a document
foundational to the formation of the
country; we see it in the multiple twentyfirst
century composings that this year collectively
engaged American citizens as never
before. Put simply: in the first instance, colonists
through writing created themselves as citizens and in the same instant created
a new nation-state; in the second instance, through writing in many media to
multiple audiences—propertied and unpropertied—an unlikely candidate became
a spokesman for a generation of hope.
At the heart of both of these composings is
agency, individual and collective.
For those familiar with the history of literacy
practices, observations like these—connecting writing
to agency to citizenship—may seem at once both
obvious and bold, but we do not often step back to
make sense of such practices and of the ways that both
history and the current moment influence our sense
of what it is that we do. We are, after all, literacy educators—teachers
who write ourselves and who also
support the writing of others, especially that of our
students. Taken together, such observations provide
the context for an articulation of how writing has
changed over the last century, for discussion of how
it is changing in the current moment, and for consideration of what this history
and current practice mean for the teaching of composition in the twenty-first
century.
These considerations, I take as my task today, one I’ll orchestrate by way of
four quartets:
Quartet One: An Impulse to Compose Tested
Quartet Two: An Impulse to Compose Scaled and Experienced
Quartet Three: An Impulse to Compose Processed
Quartet Four: An Impulse to Compose Electrified, Networked, Transformed

318 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
Quartet One: An Impulse to Compose Tested
If you don’t look back, the future never happens.
—Rita Dove
As many have noted, the definitive history of writing and writing instruction in
twentieth-century America has yet to be written. 1 What we do know, however, is
worth noting, and here I’ll identify only five of what are many themes.
The desks we had were box-type,
there was a lid to lift and you could
keep books inside. . . . We were doing
composition. I had my head under the
lid and inside the desk, reading . . .
the library book.
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/
recorddetails2.php?id
One theme: Writing has never been
accorded the cultural respect or the support
that reading has enjoyed, 2 in part
because through reading, society could
control its citizens, whereas through
writing, citizens might exercise their own
control. As E. Jennifer Monaghan and E.
Wendy Saul explain,
Society has focused on children as readers
because, historically, it has been much
more interested in children as receptors than as producers of the written word.
Only an educated citizenry could be relied upon to preserve the Republic. In pursuing
that goal, however, the emphasis was not on creative individuality, but on obedience
to the law. Reading and listening were the desired modes. It is by requiring children
to read the writings of adults that society has consistently attempted to transmit
its values. (90–91)
A second theme: Reading—in part because of its central location in family and
church life—tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by
way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness—with unsatisfying work and
episodes of despair—and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence. As Deborah
Brandt puts it in her accounts of twentieth-century Americans,
Whereas people tended to
remember reading for the
sensual and emotional
pleasure that it gave, they
tended to remember writing
for the pain or isolation
it was meant to assuage.
People’s descriptions of the
settings of childhood and
adolescent writing—a hospital
bed, the front steps of

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 319
a house, and . . . a highway overpass—were scenes of exile, hiding, or at least degraded
versions of domesticity, in marked contrast to the memories of pillowed, well-lit family
reading circles. . . . (156)
A third theme: In school and out,
writing required a good deal of labor. 3 We
forget how difficult the labor of writing
has been historically—the “sheer physical
difficulty of inscribing alphabetic characters
on some sort of surface” (Murphy 5),
especially for children; how pencils weren’t
widely available until the early part of the
twentieth century, which was forty years
before the invention of the ballpoint pen;
how messy and sloppy it was to try to
compose in ink that dripped all over the
page—and then smudged. The labor of
composing was such, in fact, that for a few
years in the late 1920s manual typewriters—and
we know how hard it is to pound
those keys on the page—actually seemed a
viable alternative to pencil or pen for
children in elementary school. 4 In fact, it may be that what George Hillocks Jr. has
called our over-attention to form in composition instruction began in our
attention to the form of handwriting,
because in the early part of the century,
much instruction in writing was no more
than instruction in penmanship. Much
as in the case of grammar today—when
grammar is identified as writing (Yancey)
—writing itself in the early twentieth
century had little if any status or conception
apart from handwriting. Donald
Graves, in recalling his own instruction
in writing, lamented that identification:
“Handwriting was one of those early
school experiences I have tried to repress.
. . . Recollections of endless circles, precise
spacing, and comments about my
untidiness take away my energy. I had no
idea that handwriting was for writing. . . .”
(qtd in Thornton 188; italics added).

320 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
A fourth theme: Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing.
In 1845, Horace Mann advocated that teachers should test students not in
speech but on paper, in part to serve the interest of fairness (Odell 4–5). It was his
observation that teachers’ evaluations of students’ oral presentations were uneven
and thus unfair. Tests of writing, which could be reviewed more consistently, provided
a remedy for this problem (Odell 4), but this remedy also helped initiate a
narrative about writing-as-testing that continues to haunt us today. As important,
this narrative was reiterated on the college level with the advent of the Harvard
exams, in which writing was identified in two ways: with testing and with socalled
basic skills, as Mark Richardson explains:
In 1874, responding to an influx of new students [of widely varied social classes and
levels of literacy, Harvard] administered an entrance exam in [writing]. . . . Over half of
the applicants who took it failed.
Colleges responded by creating composition courses. Harvard’s new writing courses
were not taught by a rhetorician or an
English teacher, but by a newspaperman,
Adams Sherman Hill. None of the
other instructors of Harvard’s composition
courses had advanced degrees,
either. In other words, “composition”
was not a strategically planned curricular
development, nor did it evolve out
of scholarship or pedagogical expertise.
It was invented in a hurry to resolve a
perceived crisis. . . . And as Harvard
went, so went the rest of American
higher education. (pars. 4–5)
In other words, without a research base or a planned curriculum—which were the
central components of reading and, likewise, the central components of all disciplines
—composition tended to take on the colors of the time, primarily its identification
as a rudimentary skill and its predominant role in the testing of students.
And still, outside of school, people composed—orders from the Sears book; letters
from European trenches in World War I; diaries recording the flotsam and
jetsam of daily life.
Quartet Two: Composing Scaled and Experienced
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments
—T. S. Eliot

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 321
As the century progressed, writing instruction was influenced by two countervailing
trends: science and progressivism. 5
The influence of science permeated all
of education, and on one level, it promised
the hope that with a more systematic approach,
more students could be helped to
learn and the teaching profession might become
just that, a profession. As a practical
matter, however, especially in the case of
writing, what immediately happened was
that writing became a phenomenon to be
measured, and it began with the most rudimentary aspect of writing, the labor
that produced it: handwriting.
The development of quantitative handwriting scales [which were the first scoring guides
used for writing] began in 1909, when E. L. Thorndike, professor of educational psychology
at Teachers College, Columbia University, developed a method of assigning
numerical ratings to handwriting samples. In the absence of such a scale, Thorndike
asserted, penmanship pedagogues were in the position of students of temperature before
the invention of the thermometer. With it, they graduated into the company of
scientific educators. (Thornton 148–49)
The effects of such scales were indeed systematic, affecting every aspect of the
educational enterprise, and not in a particularly healthy way.
Pupils would have to take note of minimum standards for satisfactory completion of a
grade level, while teachers would need
to ensure that their students as a whole What we need now is a revolution in
met standards for classroom-wide averages.
Meanwhile, quantitative com-
writing instruction, not just another test
prep exercise.
parisons of one class with another could
be used to figure out what methods were Brent Staples, New York Times, May 15, 2005
most effective or, by the same token,
which individual instructors and schools were substandard. Tests tested pupils, but they
also tested teachers. (Thornton 149)
Sound familiar?
The fascination with such scales, which soon expanded to address entire texts,
as well as with other testing technologies, continued until the 1940s, which is about
the time that testing shifted to multiple-choice measures, a shift that made rating
scales for essays obsolete. 6
But at the same time, in part because of the influence of the 1935 NCTEdeveloped
Experience Curriculum in English, teachers from elementary schools

322 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
through college had a more enlightened view of all language arts, including composition,
as expressed in a curriculum centered on the child. Indeed, the focus on
each unique child was a first principle, and in that principle, it sounds forwardlooking:
To attempt to create a single curriculum suited to pupils in environments so different
as are to be found in the United States would be folly. The previous experiences and
attainments, the capacities, the interests,
the present and probable future
needs are not the same for children
in a city tenement neighborhood, for
children in a wealthy suburb, and for
children on the farm. Likewise, they
are not the same for children in a
New Hampshire village and for
Mexican-speaking children in Texas.
(Hatfield v)
Noting that “experiences in the use
of language” are “always social contacts,”
a curriculum much like today’s writers workshop was proposed, with six
classroom procedures—including identifying an occasion to write, “providing
assistance to writers as they write,”
and helping students understand
that success is dependent “on the
effect of their efforts on the audience”
(Hatfield 136). It was a curriculum
rich in everyday genres:
letters, recipes, diaries, reports, reviews,
summaries, and new stories.
At the same time, the dearth of
theory or research that characterized
the beginnings of composition
persisted. Put simply, composition
suffered from an absence of theory. While theories of rhetoric abounded in the field of
English, theories on composing processes were conspicuously lacking. In fact, researchers
who investigated composition in the 1950s and 1960s took it for granted that the
important questions for research were pedagogical ones, and operated—mistakenly—
on the assumption that they in fact knew what composition actually was. (Monaghan
and Saul 100)
What resulted, then, was what I have come to think of as composition-aswindowpane.
As linguists tell us, the windowpane theory of language “reflects the

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 323
belief that language can and should be invisible,
and that objective facts will speak for
themselves if the language is sufficiently ‘clear’”
(Jones, Abstract). In the case of compositionas-windowpane,
it—like language—isn’t used
as a knowledge-making activity or understood
as a cultural artifact—as a process or an object
of study—but rather as a vehicle for any
interest you have in mind. Reviewing the titles
of articles in English Journal (EJ) during the
1930s and 1940s, we see both the influence of
science and the absence of theory. Some almost-random
samples:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
In 1930 it’s a liberating activity;
In 1932, a bookmaking activity and an
activity in art;
From 1933 to 1934, we have three
articles on experiments in composition;
In 1934, a criticism of life;
From 1935 to 1938, we have first, composition as adventure, and then
composition as travel;
In 1946, the basis for a shared contemporary experience; and
In 1934, my personal favorite: “Teaching Behavior and Personality
through Composition.” 7
The trends of this time thus included the formation of the technologies of
testing so familiar today and an abiding care for students as unique individuals.
And still, outside of school, people composed—through the support of the Works
Progress Administration; from prisoner of war camps; inside religious books to
annotate their evening reading.
Quartet Three: Composing Processed
It is today in which we live.
—Auden
In the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, we saw a new conception of writing emerge, one
that came to be called process writing, informed by nascent research and
enthusiastically adopted by many teachers, in classrooms large and small and

324 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
throughout the curriculum. Some scholars studied the writing processes of
famous authors, while others—Janet Emig and Sondra Perl, Lucy Calkins and
Nancie Atwell, Donald Graves and Mina Shaughnessy—learned from students
how composing works. Their studies and others like them provided a new
curriculum for composing located in new practices: invention, drafting, peer
review, reflection, revising and rewriting, and publishing. And this new work in
composing, in part because it was language-based, supported other scholarly and
pedagogical advances of the time, for instance CCCC/NCTE’s 1974 position
statement “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” a document authorizing
As I’ve been trying to write this
column, I’ve toggled over to check my
e-mail a few times. I’ve looked out the
window. I’ve jotted down random
thoughts for the paragraphs ahead.
David Brooks, New York Times,
June 17, 2008
students as legitimate language users in
ways not imagined a mere 20 years
before nor obvious to the culture at
large, even now. During this time we
also saw new assessment practices develop
from this process-rich model of
composing, most influential among
them the portfolio. With a portfolio—a
collection of writing, selected from an
archive and reflected on by the student—writers and their various audiences could
literally see development over time and achievement across texts. It’s also important
to note that classroom teachers were in the vanguard of this work, helping others,
including assessment researchers, understand both how and why portfolios are
valuable. In addition, the process movement motivated another line of research
that today focuses on genre, on activity theory, and on situated learning.
At the same time, however, we see again a countervailing set of circumstances:
the promise of composing process as developing theory and classroom practice
was truncated by several factors,
among them two that
are related: (1) the formalization
of process itself, from a
variegated and diverse, context-situated
practice to a
stagebound model suitable
for (2) tests designed by a
testing industry that has
thrived over the last forty
years, an industry that too
often substitutes a test of
grammar for a test of writing
and that supports writing, when it does, as an activity permitted in designated
time chunks only, typically no more than 35-minute chunks.

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 325
In reviewing writing instruction
during the last fifty
years, George Hillocks Jr.
provides a compelling explanation
of how three factors
work together to shape a narrow
version of composing.
He says that (1) our flawed
assumption that a few general
principles are sufficient
for a writing curriculum is
then reinforced by (2) pressures
for accountability and
(3) by exams that promote a preferred model of text rewarding length rather than
inquiry. Such a version of writing, of course, was documented in the 1975 Britton
et al. study The Development of Writing Abilities (11–18), whose results demonstrated
the consequence of such a curriculum. In the younger years, children wrote
to several audiences including trusted adults, but the older students got, the fewer
the audiences, until the conclusion of their schooling when only one audience
was left: the teacher as examiner. Alas, this model of composing is still all too
familiar today—inside school—in contrast to that outside of school. 8
But at the same time that writing process was, on the one hand, being theorized,
researched, and used to help students write and, on the other hand, being
undermined, an invention that would transform writing, education, and life more
generally was created: the personal computer. Here I’m referring not to the network,
which is a second transformation, but simply to the box that is the computer.
That box, as Richard Lanham has suggested, makes available means of expression
beyond pencil, beyond pen, beyond earlier imagination. And what that
meant for writers was explained early on, in 1988, by Patricia Sullivan when she
identified four changes that computerized composing introduces, all of them beneficial:
Desktop publishing—[which] refers to a computer system that can be used to produce
a finished page . . . —can inspire students to ambitious, creative projects; it can give
teachers a means for teaching how visual and verbal elements of a page work together
to make meaning; it can give writing classes a new and intensely social application; and
it can give students useful skills. (346–47)
Sullivan also suggests that research on this composing—which is basically a new
model of composing in its attention to the visual and to audience—is needed for
several reasons, among them to inquire into “what visual wrinkles desktop
publishing adds to our own understanding of meaning” (347). In this model of

326 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
composing, meaning created through the interaction between visual and verbal
resources is central. Also key to composing is the role of audience and the social
nature of writing, an aspect of writing process that received attention later rather
than earlier during this time, and that, as we will see, has become a central feature
in the new models of composing emerging now.
More generally, this period was one of great ambition, in some ways the highwater
mark of composition, but an ambition abridged. It also includes an invention
that would carry forward and transform earlier ambitions for a composition
located in theory and research.
And still, outside of school, people wrote: soldiers composed accounts of Korea
and Vietnam; Ford, a pardon of Nixon; Martin Luther King Jr., a letter from Birmingham
Jail.
Quartet Four: Composing Electrified, Networked, Transformed
When I finally arrive there—
and it will take many days and nights—
I would like to believe others will be waiting
and might even want to know how it was.
—Billy Collins
Enter digital technology and, especially
Web 2.0, and suddenly, it seems, writers
are *everywhere*—on bulletin boards
and in chat rooms and in emails and in
text messages and on blogs responding
to news reports and, indeed, reporting
the news themselves as I-reporters. Such
writing is what Deborah Brandt has
called self-sponsored writing: a writing
that belongs to the writer, not to an
institution. In the context of these multiple
modalities, the social dimension
forecast by Sullivan has exploded, with
the result that people—students, senior
citizens, employees, volunteers,
family members, sensible and nonsensible
people alike—want to com-

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 327
pose and do—on the page and on the screen and on the network—to each other.
Opportunities for composing abound—MySpace and Facebook and Google Docs
and multiple blogs and platforms—and on national media sites, where writers
upload photos and descriptions, videos and personal accounts, where they are
both recipients and creators of our news.
In a lot of this new composing, we are writing to share, yes; to encourage
dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate. In fact, in looking at all this
composing, we might say that one of the biggest changes is the role of audience:
PS-Don’t reply to this email, for I am a
robot and cannot respond.
For any questions, contact our
humans at http://delicious.com/
help/support.
writers are everywhere, but so too are audiences,
especially in social networking
sites like Facebook, which, according to
the New York Times, provides a commons
for people (Thompson), not unlike the
commons that used to be in small towns
and large, and an interesting response to
Robert Putnam’s discussion of community
in Bowling Alone. Putnam claims, based on some impressive data, that in the
late twentieth century community participation declined. No doubt that’s so, but
this is the twenty-first, and participation of many varieties is increasing almost
exponentially—whether measured in the number and kinds of Facebook posts,
the daily increase in activity on the NCTE Ning social site, the number of students
involved in this year’s elections, the numbers of blogs and the increase in little
magazines, and even in the number of text messages I seem to get from persons,
political campaigns, and my own institution.
Perhaps most important, seen historically this writing marks the beginning
of a new era in literacy, a period I’m calling the Age of Composition, one where
composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction alone
(if at all), but rather through what we might call an extracurricular social co-apprenticeship.
Scholars of composition (e.g., Beaufort; Ding) have discussed social
apprenticeships: opportunities to learn to write authentic texts in informal, collaborative
contexts such as service learning sites, labs, and studios. In the case of
the Web, though, writers compose authentic texts in informal digitally networked
contexts where there isn’t a hierarchy of expert-apprentice, but rather a peer coapprenticeship
in which communicative knowledge is freely exchanged. In other
words, our impulse to write is now digitized and expanded—or put differently,
newly technologized, socialized, and networked.
I want to put a face on this composing with two examples, one individual and
one collective.
The first: earlier this year, on August 23, Tiffany Monk, a sixteen-year-old
who lives in Melbourne, Florida, looked out her window and was alarmed. Tropical
Storm Fay had passed through Melbourne, but not before leaving a flood in its
wake, and Tiffany saw that something was very wrong in her trailer park.

328 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
“There were people trapped in their homes,” Monk [explained]. “Water was rising and
there was no way out. (There were) people with oxygen tanks and wheelchairs and
there was no way out. They needed help.” (“Girl Uses Computer,” par. 3)
Tiffany knows how to compose. She took pictures of Groveland Mobile Home Park
showing the rising waters, she composed emails, and then she sent both on, at the
same time asking for help and illustrating why it was needed. “‘You really have to
see this,’ she said in emails [including] photos of tires floating by in her road. ‘We
are trapped in. Literally, there is no way out.’” (par. 5)
See this they did: all
Tiffany’s neighbors were rescued
and many of their personal
possessions were salvaged
as well—because a
sixteen-year-old girl saw a
need, because she knew how
to compose in a twenty-firstcentury
way; and because
she knew her audience. And
what did she learn in this
situation? “ . . . [T]hat if you
actually take action then
someone might listen to
you.” (par. 9)
That’s a real lesson in composition.
A second story of composing begins in the spring of 2008, when a high school
student on Facebook decides that test-taking could be more fun for him, for other
test-takers, and for the
test-scorers. 9 And the
test? Advanced Placement—AP
English, AP
history, AP psychology,
AP calculus . . . all AP
tests. The idea was basically
simple: get students
to write the
“iconic phrase” THIS
IS SPARTA from the
movie 300, in capital
letters, anywhere on
the test, and then cross
it out with one line.

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 329
Because the rules of the test stipulate that students can cross out mistakes and
cannot be penalized for doing so, none of the test-takers could be penalized. 10 In
addition, “bonus points” were available if students also wrote
THIS IS MADNESS elsewhere on the test.
And write they did.
Facebook users “flocked” to join the group Everybody Write
“THIS IS SPARTA!”—in fact, over 30,000 students. And the
readers of these exams enjoyed several laughs, which was the
intent. According to Erica Jacobs, who teaches at Oakton High
School in Virginia, AP readers participated in the joke in several
ways, including exchanging notes with each other about the crossed-out lines,
posting a sign proclaiming “THIS IS SPARTA” on a reader table, and beginning
the last day by announcing, “This is Sparta!” (par. 9). And what were they laughing
at? Two student examples from AP history exams:
•As the country slid deeper into
the Depression, it became clear
that drastic change was needed
in order to save the American
banking system. Fortunately,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
after taking office, immediately
declared “THIS IS MAD-
NESS!” and established a fourday
banking holiday.
•After the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth cried, “THIS IS SPARTA” before
jumping from the balcony. 11
Now, what’s interesting to me about this event is fourfold.
One is that these students understand the power of networking, which they
used for a collective self-sponsoring activity, in this case a kind of smart-mob
action. When you have a cause, you can organize thousands of people on very
short notice—and millions when you have more time. 12 Teenagers understand
this in ways that many adults do not, and what’s as important, they understand
how to make it happen.
Two is that the students didn’t stop with the Facebook and AP. They went to
Wikipedia, where they posted the line THIS IS SPARTA at one point on the entry
for the College Board, and THIS IS MADNESS at another point on the same entry.
Both those lines stayed on Wikipedia for at least a month, when they were
taken down: contrary to popular belief, Wikipedia is monitored. But these stu-

330 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
dents understand how to contribute to Wikipedia. They understand both the reach
and the impact of networking. They understand circulation of messages—from a
Facebook group to high school and college teachers to a site that rivals encyclopedias
in comprehensiveness and exceeds them in timeliness and that offers opportunities
for all of us literally to make knowledge.
Three is that the students understood the new audiences of twenty-first-cen-
Google Answers is no longer accepting
questions.
tury composing—colleagues across the
country and faceless AP graders alike.
They understood one audience—the
testing system—and knew how to game
it. Several of the students were concerned enough not to want their scores to be
negatively affected, as they revealed on another site where college advisors answer
questions (answers.yahoo.com)—and those queries were removed, too!—but these
students—and there were thousands and thousands of them—were quite simply
bored enough to take the chance. Put differently, they refused to write to Britton’s
teacher-as-examiner exclusively; they wrote as well to teachers who might be
amused at the juxtaposition between a serious claim about John Wilkes Booth
Facebook became the de facto public
commons—the way students found
out what everyone around them was
like and what he or she was doing.
Clive Thompson, New York Times,
September 5, 2008
and THIS IS SPARTA. Put differently still,
they wanted not a testing reader, but a
human one.
Four and last, we can imagine the
ways we might channel this energy for a
cause more serious, for a purpose more
worthy. In other words, these students
know how to compose, and they know
how to organize, and they know audience. How can we build on all that knowledge?
How can we help them connect it to larger issues?
Taken together, what do these observations about new composings mean?
• First, that we have
moved beyond a pyramid-like,
sequential
model of literacy development
in which
print literacy comes
first and digital literacy
comes second and networked
literacy practices,
if they come at all,
come third and last.
And truly, this pyramid

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 331
has been deconstructing for some time now. It’s the same hierarchy that
some want us to use with print composing. When teaching children to
write in print, we don’t insist that they spell every word correctly before
they are allowed to write a sentence; we don’t expect perfect paragraphs
before they are allowed to write a story. We expect complex thinking to
develop alongside and with beginning skills. Complex thinking and skills:
they develop together—for the two-year-old learning to talk, for the sixyear-old
learning to write, and for the sixty-year-old still learning to
compose—new genres and new media 13 —because perhaps as never
before, learning to write is a lifelong process. That’s the way we learn to
compose digitally, too, of course, in concert with print and alphabetic
literacy, not in sequence.
•Second, that we have
multiple models of
composing operating
simultaneously, each
informed by new
publication practices,
new materials, and
new vocabulary. We
have many questions
about these new
composings that we
need to pursue, to
document, and to
share. For example:
• Our current model(s) of composing is located largely in print, and it’s
a model that culminates in publication. When composers blog as a
form of invention or prewriting, rather than as a form of publication
(which I did in composing this text: see kbyancey@wordpress.org),
what does that do to our print-based model(s) of composing that
universally culminate in publication?
•How do we mark drafts of a text when, as Pam Takayoshi showed
twelve years ago, revising takes place inside of discreet drafts?
•How and when do we decide to include images and visuals in our
compositions, and where might we include these processes in the
curriculum? 14
•How do we define a composing practice that is interlaced and interwoven
with email, text-messaging, and Web browsing? As Mark Poster
observes, composing at the screen today isn’t composing alone: it’s
composing in the company of others. How does that change our
model(s) of composing?

332 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
•How does access to the vast amount and kinds of resources on the
Web alter our model(s)?
•Can we retrofit our earlier model(s) of composing, or should we
begin anew?
These are questions we need to take up inside school.
And still, outside of school, composing is ubiquitous. Through writing, we participate—as
students, employees, citizens, human beings.
Through writing, we are.
Conclusion
We become by making.
—Breyten Breytenbach
Taken together, what does this brief history and set of observations mean?
We can and should respond to these new composings and new sites of
composings with new energy and a new composing agenda. Let me also suggest
that a historical perspective like the one I’ve sketched out here helps us understand
an increasingly important role for writing: to foster a new kind of citizenship,
one that has roots in an earlier time but that is being reimagined today.
In this context, let me identify three tasks that those of us who care about
literacy and who are literacy educators need to take up.
One: Articulate the new models of composing developing right in front of our
eyes. Through research documenting these new models, we can create the theory
that has too often been absent from
composition historically, and we
can define composition not as a
part of a test or its primary vehicle,
but apart from testing. In creating
these new models, we want to include
a hitherto neglected dimension:
the role of writing for the public.
As Doug Hesse has argued, the
public is perhaps the most important
audience today, and it’s an audience
that people have written for
throughout history. If this is so, we need to find a place for it both in our models of
writing and in our teaching of writing.
Two: Design a new model of a writing curriculum K–graduate school. In 1995,
David Russell suggested that if we wanted writers to compose well, we might consider
focusing on writing as an object of study. In 2003, John Trimbur made the

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 333
same point. He notes that a legacy of the process model is that we think almost
exclusively in terms of process, which makes it “difficult to think of writing as a
subject” [italics added]. “When we say
‘writing,’” he asks, “do we mean its participial
form that refers to writing as an you’ll have to read my blog.
If you want to know more about me,
unfolding activity of composing or do we
http://www.melissadonovan.com/about
designate its noun form to refer to the
material manifestations and consequences of writing as it circulates in the world?”
(par. 11) 15 This question, in posing both answers, points us beyond windowpane
composition and beyond an obsessive attention to form and beyond writing as
testing; it points us toward creating the fully articulated research base, the theories
of composing, and the planned curriculum that have been missing from composition
and its instruction for over a hundred years.
Three: Create new models for teaching. Here I’m indebted to Matthew Kay, an
early career teacher in Newark, New Jersey, whose use of communication technologies
is changing the instructional model. Two quick examples:
One: he “rarely” grades alone. “The students rarely do their homework in isolation. The
same chatting software that, when mismanaged, gives us fits in our classrooms, enables
us to collaborate in dynamic ways. Students
now continue fiery classroom debates when
they get home from school. They now walk
each other through difficult readings of ‘The
Odyssey’ and ‘Hamlet’ and return to class
with stronger understandings. Our projects
are regularly published—which leads to
comments and ongoing conversations with
the outside world.” (par. 8)
Two: he sees research in a twenty-first century
world. “It is more crucial that [students]
learn how to sift thoughtfully
through increasing amounts of information.
The Internet presents a unique challenge
to scholarship—many of the questions that once required extensive research can
now be answered with ten-minute visits to Google. The issue now is distinguishing
between rich resources and the online collection of surface facts, misinformation, and
inexcusable lies that masquerade as the truth. It will be hard for our students to be
thoughtful citizens without this ability to discern the useful from the irrelevant.” (par.
9)
These are challenges we currently face: developing new models of composing,
designing a new curriculum supporting those models, and creating new pedagogies

334 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
enacting that curriculum. But these challenges: they are also opportunities—to
help students create the texts of their lives as we connect to and carry forward the
larger history of composing. Early on in this history, we composed on stone, using
plant and animal materials for color; much later, we
composed documents creating citizenships; much
later still, a West Virginia miner composed his last
hours on whatever paper he could find in order to
assure his loved ones that his death was not painful.
Historically, like today, we compose on all the available
materials. Whether those materials are rocks or
computer screens, composing is a material as well as
social practice; composing is situated within and informed
by specific kinds of materials as well as by its
location in community. We have simply never seen
it quite so clearly as we do now.
Historically, we humans have experienced an impulse
to write; we have found the materials to write;
we have endured the labor of composition; we have
understood that writing offers new possibility and a unique agency. Historically,
we composers pursued this impulse in spite of—in spite of cultures that devalued
writing, in spite of prohibitions against it when we were female or a person of
color, in spite of the fact that we—if we were six or seven or eight or even nine—
were told we should read but that we weren’t ready to compose. In spite of.
Originally, borrowing from Garrison Keillor, I titled this talk “Time to Leave
the Ranch and Head for the Twenty-first Century.” In my words, it’s time for the
current White House occupant—
W—to return to his ranch and become
part of the past, time for the
rest of us to join the future and support
all forms of twenty-first-century
literacies, inside school, outside
school, and especially composing, in
this, the Age of Composition. For in
this time and in this place, like Keillor,
we want our kids—in our classrooms,
yes, and in our families, on
our streets and in our neighborhoods,
across this wide country and, indeed, around the world—to “grow up in a
society that values knowledge and hard work and public spirit over owning stuff
and looking cool.” So, yes, this is a call to action, a call to research and articulate
new composition, a call to help our students compose often, compose well, and

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 335
through these composings, become—the citizen writers of our country, the citizen
writers of our world, and the writers of our future.
Thanks to Erika Lindemann, Leila Christenbury, National Council of Teachers of
English, Kristie Fleckenstein, Michael Neal, Ruth Kistler, Kara Taczak, Doug Hesse,
the Florida State Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Composition, and the Florida
State English Department.
IMAGE CREDITS
1. Draft of the Declaration of Independence. “Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents.”
Library of Congress. 6 July 2005. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/images/draft1.jpg.
2. Barack Obama, U.S. Senate portrait.
3. Merged image created by author from photos of English Composition as a Social Problem and
author’s cell phone.
4. From Stephen Judy, “Composition and Rhetoric in American Secondary Schools, 1840–1900.”
English Journal 68(1979): 34–39.
5. Poster created for the Illinois Works Projects Administration (WPA) Art Project, August 1940.
From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.
3f05199.
6. Photo by Bain News Service, c. 1910–1915. From the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library
of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.10578.
7. Soldiers at Fort Upton, New York, c. 1918. From the National Postal Museum, http://
photography.si.edu/SearchImage.aspx?t=5&id=2028&q=A.2006-99.
8. Photo by Marjory Collins, 1942. Part of the Farm Security Administration—Office of War
Information Photograph Collection in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query.
9 & 10. Cover of English Journal, June 1920.
11. Composition book from St. Jerome’s University; photo by author.
12 & 13. Graphs created by author.
14. Florida State University English Department bulletin board; photo by author.
15. Cover of English Journal, Vol. 97, No. 1, September 2007.
16. An earlier draft of this talk. Photo by author.
17. Blue examination book from Roaring Spring Paper Products.
18. Kathleen Blake Yancey’s Facebook page.
19. FSU Writing Center Digital Studio. Photo by author.
20. Author’s blog. http://kbyancey.wordpress.com/.
21. PowerPoint slide show from NCTE Presidential Address, November 2008.
22. Douglas Hesse’s Model of Writing, developed for the University of Denver Writing Program.
Used by permission.
23. Library, College of Charleston, March 2008. Photo by author.
24. Adobe Acrobat screen shot.

336 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 43 February 2009
NOTES
1. There are, of course, many writing histories, but they often tell different stories. See, for example,
the stories of James A. Berlin, and Nancy Nelson and Robert C. Calfee.
2. Two good examples of how reading is supported in the culture: (1) in the institution dedicated
to reading, the library, which even today offers a poster series with celebrities who read (but who
do not write or whose writing is invisible); and (2) the poster series on reading produced under
the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. While there is a single poster supporting a
letter-writing week, for example, there are posters for every month inviting people to read.
3. The labor of learning to write isn’t limited to the student; the teacher endured (and continues to
endure) considerable labor as well. See Heyda; Hopkins; Popken.
4. The interest in the typewriter as an instrument was short-lived; while it produced no harm, it
seemed to produce no good, either. Interestingly, handwriting was assumed to be fundamental to
the development of writing; as I indicate, handwriting was often conceptualized as writing.
5. Nelson and Calfee identify the effects of such tensions as centrifugal and centripetal.
6. The abandonment of scales was short-lived; they returned with essay tests. And their use still
prompts considerable disagreement; see, for example, Gallagher and Turley, and Kohn.
7. Specifically, the article titles are the following:
Seely, Howard Francis. “Composition as a Liberating Activity.” EJ 19 (1930): 107–17.
Persons, Gladys. “Composition and Bookmaking.” EJ 21 (1932): 123–28.
Auld, Ina Bell. “College Composition for Art.” EJ 19 (1930): 735–38.
Belleau, W. E. “An Experiment in Composition.” EJ 22 (1933): 410–11.
Hazelrigg, Blanche. “An Experiment in Teaching Composition.” EJ 22 (1933): 486–90.
Bishop, Ernest. “Another Composition Experiment.” EJ 23 (1934): 766–67.
“Editorial: Composition as a Criticism of Life.” EJ 23 (1934): 417–18.
Eberhardt, Paul M. “Composition as Adventure.” EJ 27 (1938): 323–30.
Baldwin, Katrina. “A Travel Project in Composition.” EJ 24(1935): 645–49.
Whittaker, Charlotte C. “The Shared, Contemporary Experience as a Basis for Freshman Composition.”
EJ 35 (1946): 21–29.
8. Outside of school, composing today flourishes. Unfortunately, students do not identify what
they do outside of school—in texting, emailing, and blogging, for instance—as composing. Rather,
they identify those activities as communicating. See, for example, the recent Pew Study reporting
on adolescents’ definitions of writing (Lenhart et al.).
9. This effort was not limited to AP tests; students were invited to participate on any test. See
“Everybody Write ‘THIS IS SPARTA’ on AP and School Essays”: http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=12424842511.
10. Crossing out lines thus functions as both material practice and method of gaming the system.
Were we to allow students to use computers for writing, such gaming would be more difficult. So
the material conditions of the test—which are so at odds with the “normal” practices of writing—
contribute to its opportunity for gaming.
11. Students have continued to talk online about which of the answers they created were most
creative, which suggests that this “prank” was meaningful to them after the test as well, especially
given that a considerable percentage of them are now in college.
12. The current best example of the effects of social networking is the election campaign of Barack
Obama, whose use of all communications technologies has revolutionized electoral campaigns.
Perhaps not surprisingly, his chief speechwriter then and now, going into the White House, is
twenty-seven years old.

YANCEY Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose 337
13. Seniors are learning new skills as well, especially through a multi-state project designed for
them called SeniorNet: see Mohn.
14. As scholars in writing in the disciplines and in professional communication will attest, several
of the decisions as to what kinds of visuals and when and where to use them are suggested by the
genre itself. At the same time, however, new practices are emerging, especially in the humanities
and on the Web.
15. Several writing scholars are developing a new curriculum in the spirit of these suggestions: see,
for example, Downs and Wardle, and Yancey, Composition.
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