Besides teaching writing, composition classes in large universities perform a socialization function which has come about because composition is a freshman-year course with limited enrollment (25 students at UB). Students in our classes, right out of high school, need to learn university citizenship: responsibilities which range from getting to class on time, to producing work on time, to interacting with other students and their instructors courteously and productively, to speaking, thinking and writing in concepts and vocabularies consonant with higher education. The transition from high school to university is often painful for students who have been living an unexamined life of values and goals handed to them by parents, school boards, the various media, and teenage culture. At the University, students are not only free to chart their own values and goals but admonished by both the general undergraduate curriculum and their major areas of study that it is their task to do so. True critical thinking, that is the examination of all that they have been taking for granted, is not encouraged in the public schools where teachers structure their pedagogy to maintain order in the classroom and avoid controversy in order to placate parents who do not want their values challenged by their children. Because they are small enough that students and teachers can address each other by name and engage in discussions of intellectual and societal matters that directly affect the students' lives, composition classrooms provide a congenial socialization into the rigorous demand of the university that students take responsibility for their academic work and their attitudes and behaviors toward other human beings.

Fortunately for composition instructors, writing has always been intimately involved with the formation of enlightened citizens, for to write effectively, rather than thoughtlessly, you have to understand your motives, assumptions, strategies, state of knowledge along with those of the audience you are addressing. You cannot persuade others of your point of view or add to a body of knowledge if you merely repeat what you have read in a book or heard authority figures say or what you yourself said a year ago-whether you are writing a grant proposal to study an insecticide for its harmful effects on humans or writing a newspaper review of the latest Hollywood movie. The scientist wishes to better the material human condition and the movie reviewer to better the cultural discrimination of movie-goers. The intentions and actions of both constitute good citizenship. The necessity of earning a living aside, few people are satisfied with jobs whose only satisfaction is a regular paycheck. Humans are political animals, said Aristotle, by which he meant that we are by nature beings which cannot exist outside of a polity, a social environment. We need to feel we are a vital part of our social environments, however small or large they are. Passive acquiescence to tradition and convention or orders from a superior are endurable for a time if we can see that positive benefits will end the tedium of conformity, but true satisfaction comes from "making a difference," to use a contemporary phrase for contributing positively to our social environment. Recognition for our contributions is also a legitimate human satisfaction which the polity owes us-an A grade on a paper, a plum job, a hefty bonus in our paychecks, one's face on the cover of Time.

Higher education should awaken and develop the potential within students to contribute something good to the polity which has fostered them. But students require a great deal of preparation in order to know the good. That preparation usually begins in the first-year composition course in which students self-consciously examine their own selves on the one hand and the state of their polity on the other--and think and write and think and write about them. An expressivist paper in which students analyze a turning point in their lives or a research paper in which they sort through competing ideas or products for the best one which will serve a purpose are equally ethical acts of writing. What is your purpose and why is it? are questions that require you to examine the ethical and intellectual dimensions of both the self and the polity. What best satisfies your purpose? is the question that requires you to find new knowledge and to discriminate among the findings. Finally, how do you best persuade others that your purpose and findings are worth considering or adopting? is the question that requires you to structure words and concepts, sentences and paragraphs into a whole presentation that will give satisfaction to your intended audience. Clearly, only the naive or unreflective person believes that writing is limited to correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Writing engages the whole person in acts of discovery and ambition, in self-knowledge and self-discipline, and in reaching out to others, discovering them, and negotiating through your writing your mutual benefits.

Two semesters of freshman composition can only begin the process of forming our students into reflective and productive citizens, and writing is our medium. Other university programs continue the process, through writing and other means, during a student's baccalaureate study. If the university has done its job properly, the student will be self-motivated to continue the quest for self and societal enlightenment for the rest of her or his life. The business of the Composition Program is to keep our goal in mind while we devise and experiment with pedagogical strategies for enabling our goal. The professional field of composition itself is rich in literature from composition and rhetorical theory to how-to-teach classroom pedagogies. Theories and their attendant pedagogies range from the wholly expressivist (which assumes that students should write primarily about their lives) to the wholly objectivist (which assumes that students should write primarily about things outside the self). Some composition programs devote their entire pedagogy to a single theoretical formulation. Believing that students need exposure to many kinds of writing in order to develop their flexibility, our Composition Program uses several of the major theoretical/pedagogical formulations, avoiding boring effects of repetition that adherence to single theory fosters. Continual writing about oneself at one extreme (expressivism) or continual writing about the abuse of power in society (social constructivism) at the other extreme is more likely to produce solipsists and paranoids than citizens with the optimism and generosity to contribute positively to their polity. However, structuring reading and writing assignments so that students practice the conventions of several of these theoretical formulations offers them different strategies for thinking and organization, different vocabularies, different audiences, different purposes. Later, in other courses at the university or in their careers, students will have an array of writing choices, depending on their immediate or life-time purposes.

The subject of a composition course is the students' writing along with the strategies we teach our students to use in order to produce better writing than they would without them-free writing, process writing, peer consultations and peer editing sessions, and several rewritings of a paper. Whether in groups or in the class as a whole, students are talking about writing. To a lesser extent the teacher and the students discuss some reading assignments, the purpose of which is to provide a common ground for the papers so that students can intelligently and sympathetically critique one another's work. For that reason, reading assignments in composition courses are designed to stimulate thought on matters of interest to all the students rather than to teach a disciplinary subject apart from writing itself.