At the start, much of the discipline of college composition took to computers like a fish to air. There was a lot of gasping about mysterious black boxes, soulless mechanization, and loss of jobs. To my knowledge, the earliest composition book with a representation of a computer on its cover is Edward R. Fagan and Jean Vandell's eighth collection of Classroom Practices, published by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1971. The cover's image of computers is completely negative. Against its title, Humanizing English, it sets a stylized computer punchcard and bit-mapped computer font style. The message is clear. It is our students who should not be folded, spindled or mutilated. Computers are associated with item testing, empirical head-counting, behaviorist psychological inventories, and the Red Scare. "English as it is taught in some schools today," writes Fagan in his introductory essay, "is perilously close to a dehumanized mass production system where outputs are judged almost exclusively by standardized tests." The pedagogy promoted by the volume is individualized instruction and its opposite is mass-produced commodity. Although many essays in the volume encourage the use of radio, tape recorder, and TV in the classroom, none mentions computers.

Ten years later, in the fall of 1981 to be precise, William Wresch starts planning the edited collection that will be called The Computer in Composition Instruction: A Writer's Tool (1984), also published by NCTE. This time the contributors' take on computers is positive, even enthusiastic. They include some of the earliest advocates of computers in the teaching of college writing: Lillian Bridwell, Hugh Burns, Colette Daiute, Kathleen Kiefer, Richard Lanham, Stephen Marcus, Christine Neuwirth, Dawn and Raymond Rodrigues, Helen Schwartz, Cynthia Selfe, Charles Smith, Michael Southwell. In some ways the cover, however, does not seem to share in this advocacy. Front and back cover are connected, a wrap-around. A colorless student is keyboarding, oddly with one hand, his right hand, held in a position more suitable to typing on a typewriter. From the computer screen comes—well, what is it projecting from the screen? Bars on a graph? Pawls on a ratchet wheel? Fantastically long bodies of metal type? Optical rods for the color green? What is this bulging, tentacled, green thing jumbling up "c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-i-o-n" for the student writer? And why is everything, including the student, laid out against a black grid? It strikes me that the cover artist whom NCTE hired (identified as "Tom Kovacs for TGK Design") was perhaps more familiar with the evil robots, humanoids, and computerized aliens of Analog and Galaxy than with IBM's 1983 Personal Computer XT.

But then what graphic artist would have been much familiar with personal computers in 1983? Apple's MacDraw was still on the drawing board.

RH, November 2005