The pendular shifts in attitudes toward teaching writing reflect varying concerns that educators have had about the proper instructional emphasis--whether it should be student centered or discipline centered. The historical dates that act as signposts to these shifting attitudes toward methods of writing instruction include the following: the founding by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1949; NCTE's 1956 publication of "The English Language Arts in the Secondary School," a position statement stressing the needs of the whole child; the 1957 launching of the Sputnik satellite, initiating a scrabble for educational discipline and academic reform; the 1966 Dartmouth Conference, which developed reactions to the academic reforms; and the "back to basics," movement, typifying the retrenchment of 1977-1979. Within this historical context, several writing theories, models, and activities can be discussed: the works of John Dixon and Ken Macrorie, urging student self-discovery through language experience; Robert Zoellner's "talk-write" model; Peter Elbow's "developmental" model; Francis Christensen's "Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence"; James Moffett's theory of discourse; John Mellon's tranformational generative grammar; Frank O'Hare's sentence combining; and the heuristics of Frank D'Angelo, Richard Young, and Kenneth Burke. (RL)