Some Important Works in Composition Theory, Part 1

Some Important Works in Composition Theory
A nowhere near exhaustive list in no particular order


Lev Vygotsky. Thought and Language. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1962

Born in 1896, Vygotsky was a major figure in Soviet-era psychology. Thought and Language¸ first published in 1934 after Vygotsky’s death, presents a comprehensive theory of intellectual development as a consequent of social interaction through language.

Dense and deeply theoretical, this book is not for the faint of heart. It provides a wealth of tools for thinking about how people learn to form and communicate concepts. If you're way into cognitive or developmental psychology, contrast with Piaget.



James Moffett. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1968.

Working from a structural perspective, Moffett elaborates a theoretical framework that orders different kinds of discourse in terms of their increasing levels of abstraction and the relations among speaker, hearer, and subject. On this basis, Moffett proposes a curriculum that, in his view, corresponds to the natural order of discursive development in children.

Moffett does lots of theoretical heavy lifting to arrive at a discourse taxonomy not very much different from many others, but he provides some food for thought on the question of what is a reasonable order in which to teach language skills. And I particularly like the part of his last chapter titled, “The Case Against Textbooks.”


Ann E. Berthoff The Making of Meaning Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook 1981.

Ann E. Berthoff, who did her graduate work with I. A. Richards, urges composition teachers to think philosophically about their work rather than merely swap recipes for classroom practices. This collection of her lectures and articles (she calls them casual harangues and serious polemics) argues that “if we are to teach writing as a process of making meaning, we will need a philosophy of language that can account for meaning . . . as a plant that has grown” (v). Berthoff engages the work of Tolstory, Vygotsky, Freire, William James, C.S. Peirce in search of ideas to think with.

Berthoff is deliberately arcane and thoroughly cranky. Read “Composing is Forming” and “Reclaiming the Imagination.”




Mike Rose. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass. New York: Penguin. 1989.
Rose, a faculty member at UCLA, writes about his work with students deemed “remedial” of “underprepared” in the context of his own life experience, which included a period of being deemed in need of remediation. Makes you think about how we mark of turf and boundaries in the world of schools, and what it really means to be literate.

While we’re on the subject of Mike Rose, see also his Possible Lives, which chronicles visits to a wide range of classrooms, with different problems and different approaches, over a period of years. Read about people working on education in Los Angeles and Calexico; in Mississippi and Montana, at Berea College and the University of Arizona. Get some hope for it.

And I’ve mentioned this article before, also by Rose, also about remediation:
“The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” College English 47: 4 (April 1885). Pp. 341-359



Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald, Reason to Believe. SUNY Press. 1998
“How does the history of thinking about education and learning and spiritual understanding in this country . . . connect to the work of teachers now?” Roskelly and Ronald explore how American philosophical pragmatism, as expounded by William James and John Dewey, among others, can work together with the rhetoric of American romanticism (Emerson, Thoreau) to provide a usable framework for teaching writing in the 21st century. Roskelly, a protégé of Ann Berthoff, is also co-author of An Unquiet Pedagogy, an approach to teaching geared to high school students and based in the work of Paulo Freire.