Eric H. Hobson

The invitation to "write/right the wrongs" in college composition is seductive.
Admittedly, when asked to participate in this project, I leaned toward
polemic--the invitation seemed to beg, "Say what you've always wanted to say
about college composition." The invitation offered free space in which to
articulate the Solution that rallies everyone to produce the high levels of student
communicative ability that our institutional mission statements allude to and that
our course catalogues and outcome statements promise. That offer is hard to
refuse. Equally hard was determining what about college composition I wished
to focus on. Thankfully, my colleagues' chapters cover many topics about which
I have an opinion. Also, their chapters' comprehensiveness--along with my
chapter's position at the end of the collection--allows me to shift the discussion
somewhat.

I offer no cure-all prescription for what's ailing college composition. Instead,
this chapter flirts with the issue of what it will really take for college writing
teachers to deliver the outcomes that we have promised to our stakeholders:
students, colleagues, administrations, parents, boards, alumni, legislatures,
regulators, and accreditation agencies. What is needed, I believe, already exists;
we really don't need new theories, or worse, new paradigms. Theory building
and paradigm shifting often are activities of convenience: they make a minority
group in the process of higher education (e.g., composition specialists) feel

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