ABSTRACT
William E. Coles Jr. (1932–2005) was a renowned, iconoclastic, and highly readable author of books on composition, among the first in the field to approach the subject through creative nonfiction. His The Plural I: The Teaching of Writing (1978) is a fictionalized narrative of one writing class from the 1960s; his Seeing Through Writing (1988) incorporates a fictional teacher-persona, the Gorgon, who creates the book’s writing assignments. Coles’s other books on writing include Composing: A Guide to Teaching Writing as a Self-Creating Process (1974), Composing II: Writing as a Self-Creating Process (1981), What Makes Writing Good (1985), and The Plural I—and After (1998). Sometimes described as an expressivist, he rejected the label. The self he hoped to help his students express was not preexisting and autonomous but rather one that was composed as well as plural, as the titles of his books suggest. As John Warnock puts it, Coles’s work aims to help writers develop a kind of literary, textual self “that may be inferred from the language that has been used.” 1
