Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon

Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory . . . . Delivery. Of the five rhetorical canons defined by Aristotle, Delivery is the most overlooked and most frequently undertheorized. Delivery provides a lens into the ways composition curricula is designed; into the kinds of writing expected from students; and to the new electronic, physical, and curricular spaces created for composing. Delivering College Composition addresses the need for a more rigorous examination of Delivery, arguing that composition is increasingly being delivered in different ways by different individuals for different purposes within different contextsyet retaining its identity as well.

Kathleen Yancey asks a number of probing questions about the current state of writing instruction:

What is college composition?
What does it look like, given the multiple ways it is delivered?
What features do courses share?
Is there a common understanding about their purposes, methods, and outcomes?
How do multiple delivery systems alter and redefine this thing we call college composition?
How does delivery matter?

From a research university, to a private college, to an historically black school, to a cyberschool, to advanced placement English classes, Delivering College Composition gives answers to these questions through in-depth analyses from more than a dozen teaching environments.

Focusing strongly on practice and its theoretical implications, Yancey and company provide a frank and informative "thick description&qupt; of classroom instruction, and in the process offer new definitions of what composition means in the presentand what it might look like in the future.