摘要：Who would have thought that a seemingly innocuous two-page document describing what students should do when they leave first-year writing could engender an entire book, but defining a single set of outcomes for first-year composition is no ordinary task. Rhetoric and composition teachers are no ordinary group as exemplified in their self-naming as the “Outcomes Collective” rather than a committee because they didn’t believe the term “committee” fit. They believed “collective characterized the playful chaos that swirls around core questions, a chaos that eventually formed into the Outcomes Statement” (xvi). It’s striking then, as Peter Elbow notes, that “they [the crafters of the Outcomes Statement] managed to attain remarkable agreement among a very disparate but important group of leaders in the field” (178). So it seems fitting that many of the architects of the Outcomes Statement (OS as they call it) also wrote chapters in The Outcomes Book to flesh out the details and nuances necessarily absent from a two-page, bulleted list.
