Intended for college English teachers, the essays in this collection represent the scholarship of 12 professors who participated in a year-long seminar on the teaching of reading and writing to the "new" types of students who are presently attending two-year colleges. The first essay offers a profile of the new student as one who is job-oriented and who scores in the lowest third on national tests of ability and aptitude, and the second essay discusses ways in which scientific terminology and procedures can damage the teaching of English. The next six essays present practical proposals for teaching the new student, which include using traditional literature, popular fiction, formula fiction, native American literature, folklore, and moral value discussions in composition. The remaining essays call for a humanistic response to the future of writing as proposed by Marshall McLuhan and others, discuss the theories that support traditional modes of rhetoric, and illustrate the function of metaphor in science, the humanities, and all discourse. (MAI)