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professor made the decisions. The professor could take that grading
hand and override, overwrite, and overpower the students' words.
However, current discussions about assessment in Composition
are moving toward discovering more humane, respectful, and local-
ized ways to evaluate a range of student writing (Allison, Bryant, &
Hourigan, 1997; Elbow, 1996; Faigley, Cherry, Jolliffe, and Skinner,
1986; Huot, 2002; Yancey & Weiser, 1997; Zak & Weaver, 1998).
These discussions are a start, as the language of assessment now
sounds somewhat more democratic than in its earlier phases at the
beginning of the 20th century. Now, Composition's culture at least
uses the rhetoric of process—and in some circles, the rhetoric of
postprocess—to discuss how to evaluate e-texts. Although much
more needs to be done in this area to put the rhetoric into widespread
practice, these voices have pushed us away from the behavior-
ist-based products like the Intelligent Essay Assessor and other such
predicate analysis or key-word-in-context programs to evaluate
student writing. Instead, writing specialists began online assessment
with the electronic portfolio, as Batson noted (2002). In the follow-
ing chapters, several models of evaluation are presented that suggest
convergence can and will transform writing assessment practices as
well as offer students the respect they deserve as authors who own
their own words.