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Conference on College Composition and Communication
The CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric 1984-1999
edited by Todd Taylor
Scope: what this bibliography covers
 

If you would like to contribute to CCCC Bibliography substantially, please email Todd Taylor at cccc-bib@ncte.org; there are still contributor and assistant editor positions available.

  The CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric, published by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, offers teachers and researchers an annual classified listing of scholarship on English and its teaching for the years 1984-1999 (see explanation under History). The bibliography lists each work only once, but it descriptively annotates all citations, cross-references them when appropriate, and indexes all authors and editors. A group of contributing bibliographers prepared the citations and annotations for all entries (see Credits).

The CCCC Bibliography includes works that treat written communication (whether the writing people do is in English or some other language), the processes whereby human beings compose and understand written messages, and methods of teaching people to communicate effectively in writing. The Bibliography lists entries in six major categories:

1. Bibliographies and Checklists
2. Theory and Research
3. Teacher Education, Administration, and Social Roles
4. Curriculum
5. Testing, Measurement, and Evaluation
6. Resources and Teaching Materials

The Bibliography makes few restrictions on the format, medium, or purpose of the works it includes, so long as the subject of the work falls into one of the six categories described in the preceding list. It lists only published works: books, articles, monographs, published collections (of essays, conference presentations, or working papers), bibliographies and other reference works, films, microforms, videotapes, and sound recordings. It includes citations for unpublished doctoral dissertations appearing in Dissertation Abstracts International. It also includes review articles that discuss several works, define movements or trends, or survey an individual's contribution to the discipline. It excludes masters theses and works written in a language other than English.

SOURCES

The CCCC Bibliography cites works from four major sources.

Periodicals. Journals publishing articles on composition and its teaching are the source for most of the entries entries. With few exceptions, the contributing bibliographers preparing entries for journal articles examined the material firsthand.

Publishers. A second source of materials are commercial publishers and university presses. These publishers, whose participation in the bibliography project is voluntary, provided contributing bibliographers with written information for the books listed in this volume. Often, contributing bibliographers were unable to examine books firsthand and had to rely on these materials for their entries.

This volume also includes scholarly essay collections, books that bring together essays, articles, or papers by several authors. The Bibliography annotates these collections, but does not annotate each essay.

Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI). DAI represents a third source for citations. Not all degree-granting institutions list their unpublished doctoral dissertations in DAI, and as a rule, the contributing bibliographers have not examined these dissertations firsthand. The citations in this volume serve only to direct readers to abstracts in DAI. Users will want to consult the DAI abstracts for additional information, including who supervised the degree candidate's work and which institution granted the degree.

Resources in Education (RIE). A fourth source of materials in the CCCC Bibliography is the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), a federally funded document retrieval system coordinated by sixteen clearinghouses.

ERIC indexes its materials in two reference works. Journal articles appear in Cumulative Index to Journals in Education (CIJE). Resources in Education (RIE), on the other hand, indexes documents in the ERIC microfiche collection, available in 2600 regional libraries or directly from ERIC. These documents, frequently published elsewhere, include government documents, research and project reports, bibliographies, and conference papers. Documents indexed in RIE receive a six-digit "ED" number (e.g., ERIC ED 305 701) and are cross-referenced under various subject headings or "descriptors."

Some documents may be listed in RIE and may become available through ERIC several years after they were written. For convenience and to ensure comprehensiveness, the CCCC Bibliography reports ERIC documents cited in RIE during the years covered in the current volumes; that is, this volume cites ERIC documents listed in RIE in 1984-1999, even though the works themselves may have an earlier "date of publication." Also as a convenience, each ERIC entry includes the six-digit "ED" number.

Contributing bibliographers working with ERIC materials have developed the following criteria for determining what documents to include in this volume:

Substantiveness. Substantive documents of general value to college composition teachers and researchers are included. Representative publications are curriculum guides, federal government final reports, and technical reports from various publication series, such as those published, for example, by the Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy and the Center for the Study of Reading.

Relevance. Documents that seem to represent concerns of high interest to researchers are included. Topics related to first-year composition, computers and literacy, and gender studies, for example, represent concerns of greater relevance than the teaching of handwriting.

Inclusiveness. Relevant papers on composition and rhetoric available in ERIC and delivered at the annual meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE-Fall and Spring conventions) are included. Papers delivered at other regional and national meetings-for example, meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the International Reading Association (IRA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA)-have also been selected for inclusion on the basis of their substantiveness and relevance.

Reference value. Items for which the ERIC microfiche system might provide unique access are included. Representative of entries meeting this criterion would be books or collections of articles no longer available from their original publishers.

Alternate access. Many professional organizations regularly make copies of book and monograph publications available as ERIC microfiche. And many papers presented as reports or conference talks and available in ERIC are later published as monographs or as articles in journals. When such information is available, the entry in this volume will include ERIC ED numbers to indicate an alternate source of access to the document. However, users of this volume should keep in mind that, although a book in ERIC reflects the exact contents of the published work, an article in ERIC is a manuscript that may see substantial revision before it is published.

The following criteria determine which items cited in RIE are excluded:

Local interest. ERIC documents concerned with composition and rhetoric but judged to be primarily of local interest are excluded. For example, the bibliography omits annual evaluation reports of writing programs in local schools.

Availability. Publications of commercial publishers and other organizations that are listed in RIE and assigned an ERIC ED number but are not available through the ERIC microfiche system are omitted.

Users of the CCCC Bibliography may wish to supplement this resource by consulting RIE or various computer-assisted retrieval systems that access ERIC documents. Copies of most documents indexed in RIE can be purchased in paper or microform from the ERIC system. ERIC clearinghouses also make available free or inexpensive guides to special topics of interest to rhetoric and composition teachers and researchers. Order forms and current addresses for these clearinghouses appear at the back of each monthly issue of RIE.

The items listed in the annual bibliography are not housed in any single location or owned by any single individual. The CCCC Bibliography lists and describes these materials but does not provide users of the bibliography any additional means of retrieving them. However, librarians can be extremely helpful in finding copies of particular works to examine firsthand. Some materials may be available through interlibrary loan, OCLC and on-line catalogues, ERIC and other information retrieval systems, or state and university libraries. To locate materials cited in this volume, ask your librarian to help you.

CONTRIBUTING BIBLIOGRAPHERS

The reliability and usefulness of these annual volumes depend primarily on a large group of contributing bibliographers. Contributing bibliographers accept responsibility for compiling accurate entries in their areas of expertise, for preparing brief, descriptive annotations for each entry, for determining where each entry will appear within one of the six sections of the Bibliography, for cross-referencing entries when appropriate, and for submitting completed entries by a specified deadline.

To ensure consistency, contributing bibliographers receive a Handbook for Contributing Bibliographers to guide them in their work and fill out a printed form for each entry. Contributing bibliographers agree to serve a three-year term and, thereafter, may request reappointment for another two-year term.

ANNOTATIONS

Annotations accompany all entries in this volume. They describe the document's contents and are intended to help users determine the document's usefulness. Annotations are brief and, insofar as the English language allows, are meant to be descriptive, not evaluative. They explain what the work is about but leave readers free to judge for themselves the work's merits. Most annotations fall into one of three categories: they present the document's thesis, main argument, or major research finding; they describe the work's major organizational divisions; or they indicate the purpose or scope of the work.

More: Scope, History, Credits, Help
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