CCR 691: Lloyd-Jones (1999) "Composition Research Agendas"

Lloyd-Jones. (1999). “Composition Research Agendas in the 1960s and 1970s.” In Rosner et al (Eds.) History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963-1983 (pp. 73-82). Stamford: Alex Publishing Corporation.

In this chapter, author Lloyd-Jones reflects on his experiences during the 60s and 70s when he participated in two influential events in the field through analyzing and synthesizing rhet/comp research as well as evaluating and implementing new English assessment practices. First, in providing a comprehensive analysis of important contributions of rhet/comp research, Lloyd-Jones (and other major rhet/comp characters of the time) collaborated on a project, raising dozens of questions for research topics and practices to be conducted in the future. Although Lloyd-Jones remembers that he and his team recognized that the areas of research they investigated were narrowed, they ultimately concluded that there was not sufficient controlled research currently available to establish the field professionally. Second, working with another team of scholars to critically assess old and implement new practices in English and writing assessment (for organizations such as NCTE and ETS), Lloyd-Jones and his group worked to adjust old practices of the tests (which he saw as socioeconomically biased exercises having no rhetorical purpose, accompanying dated and subjective assessment criteria based broadly on the professor’s/reader’s individual idea of what good writing looks like), and he, then, helped with the design, testing, and implementation of new practices of examination: exercises with rhetorical purposes following descriptive evaluation guides and assessed based on the writer’s unique competence in addressing the rhetorical needs or his or her purpose.

Although this chapter focuses on Lloyd-Jones’ participation in these events and subsequent changes to the discipline, the author also makes frequent comments about practices and research in rhet/comp that are central to current theoretical and pedagogical traditions as well as those from the 60s and 70s. Here are some of his key quotes that seemed to me to be the most insightful:

· He describes research as being fundamentally political in nature: “Maybe, because new formulations of knowledge have social consequences, all research is political. Maybe no research is ever ‘pure,’ but research in composition is inevitably tainted by social purpose, for rhetoric in the classical sense is a practical art. When we talk of composition rather than of rhetoric, we are especially emphasizing teaching, dissemination, and mastery of craft, and that even more implies political effects” (73).

· Based on his and his team’s work with assessment, he concluded that the writings of students do not represent these students’ actual ability or potential: “we noted to ourselves that these young people were capable of far more sophistication than we were ever able to evoke” (78).

· In response to realizing the bias held by readers assessing student writing, he commented, “all testing is a sampling, and samples can easily be skewed. Indeed, they are always skewed; the best we can hope for is to recognize the bias and report it” (79). This comment speaks to researchers in comp/rhet in the ways that it acknowledges how research is far from fact; it is only a sample and that sample is skewed. Also, acknowledgements such as these are no doubt rhetorically useful for reaching wider audiences in research writing.

· Lloyd-Jones also acknowledges the need for “hard numbers” in our research, thus commenting on the audiences in which some of us may wish to reach in various research and professional sites: “Politically, people who want to beat on the schools and teachers don’t hear any qualifiers. They want a really hard number. Also, most researchers in pursuit of correlations of writing skills with parental education, economic status, race, or occupation want hard numbers. Even deans evaluating faculty production want hard numbers. And all of the above want the hard numbers to be derived cheaply, so they are willing to take shortcuts. The little knowledge we obtain in refining the methods for rating writing is a dangerous thing, but the economics of mass education provides us with little choice but to try to discover more persuasive methods” (80).

· His calls for researchers in rhet/comp to consider the broader audience they speak to continues to his last line: “We do rather well among composition/rhetoric people, but we are obliged to talk to a wider public as well, so we must find a series of statements persuasive to regular users of our language. We must discover a series of statements persuasive to our fellow citizens” (82).