Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900 - 1985

Berlin here continues his unique history of American college com­position begun in his Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Colleges (1984), turning now to the twentieth century.

In discussing the variety of rhetorics that have been used in writ­ing classrooms Berlin introduces a taxonomy made up of three cate­gories: objective rhetorics, subjective rhetorics, and transactional rhetorics, which are distinguished by the epistemology on which each is based. He makes clear that…