technical terms, as in the following example: There are far too many vague terms in this paper. As a result, it is uneven-some of your comparisons are sensible with sound causal connections while other similarities made via the key thesis term seem rather superficial. I think the paper will work if you rescue it from a list by making even better causal connections between your pointsi.e., on that are not transitions. The reactions of the content instructor, an historian, were instructive. He himself had not been subjected to such abstract technical terminology since high school, and he did not much like it then. Unsure whether the terms had shifted meaning in subsequent decades, he avoided using them even in our interdisciplinary project. His response was typical of content instructors and of students as well. Richard Beach and Nancy Sommers assail formulaic textbook language because it hinders extensive revising by students.6 Not surprisingly, students seldom knew how to focus on or to reorder their subthesis points. Like the historian, they were often unsure of the definition of the terms. They rarely translated abstract injunctions into concrete action. The variety of abstract terms used by the composition instructor was every bit as daunting as their unfamiliarity and obscurity. A survey of marginal comments uncovered repeated use not only of redundant, but also clutter, wordy, edit for efficiency, combine, repetitive, reword for accuracy, and restate more precisely. Not only was the label transitions obscure, but there were references to additive and logical transitions. The precise differences among terms like redundancy, clutter, and repetitive detail were not self-evident to students or to faculty in other disciplines. While fine nuance might serve an experienced writer or editor, these near-synonyms, when used in comments to beginning writers, seemed intended chiefly to disguise the rubber stamps. It is unlikely that many faculty in the content disciplines will be motivated to learn a large new lexicon of terms for discussion of writing or to teach (or reteach) it to their students using their class or conference time. Still, it became clear from our collaborations that some common terminology, streamlined and useful, would be welcome. It would emphasize the unity and determination of faculty to endorse writing across the curriculum; more important, it would direct the attention of all instructors to certain critically important aspects of student writing and relegate sentence structure and spelling to their proper place. In our first interdisciplinary collaboration, for example, a composition instructor and an historian agreed on two sets of terms now widely used. The This content downloaded from 157.55.39.58 on Fri, 26 Aug 2016 04:56:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 218 College Composition and Communication writing instructor shared with the historian the concept of thesis-subthesisevidence taught in the required freshman composition class. Composition instructors at Loyola teach virtually every freshman and transfer student how to use subthesis sentences, sentences at an intermediate level of generalization, to link the thesis, or general point of an essay, to the specific that supports it. These subtheses, most often topic sentences for each paragraph that would appear as the first two levels in a formal outline of a paper, should form a network of ideas that constitutes a coherent and original discussion of the writer's main point. In the sciences and social sciences, the network of ideas is often presented as the abstract of an article. In a freshman writing course, the sequence of evolving thought that works out the implications of a thesis sentence-what we designate as a network of ideasmight look as follows (the breaks indicate places where the writer would pause to create paragraphs offering specific evidence and discussion): THESIS: Wallpaper is a form of modern art. Wallpaper may at first seem an unlikely art form because of its traditional use. // Yet wallpaper, though practical, has artistic appeal. I// Modern art differs significantly from previous art forms in its union of art and technology; // wallpaper too fuses the ordinary with the extraordinary. // As modern art, wallpaper draws the spectator in by creating a mood, // but wallpaper can also transcend four walls by creating an entire environment. // The power of wallpaper to excite or irritate should not be underestimated. // Still, wallpaper shows all the signs of becoming modern art. When a universal complaint across the curriculum is that students cannot think, their attention needs to be focused on the interplay among thesis-subthesis-evidence, as in the following two comments: