With this November issue, I mark my sixth month as an editor for Computers and Composition, a journal I've been pleased and proud to contribute to over the past few years. November also marks C&C's start of its sixth year as a professional forum for writing teachers. These milestones prompted me to look back over our past issues to try to detect how we've changed and in what direction we seem to be moving.

Perhaps the most obvious change is in our physical appearance. No longer is C&C a printed, "letter-quality" newsletter to be dug out from the bottom of a stack of flashier, laser-produced documents. Beginning in August of 1985, Cindy and Kate published our first "small journal" issue with a handsome beige and black format that carried the familiar C&C logo. Now, not only were we professional, but we looked the part as well. Two years ago, with the publication of the November 1986 issue, we had another facelift and began in appearance to rival the more established CCC's. With striking blue accents on a new cream-colored cover, our logo looked even more impressive than in the past. Since then, we have retained our good looks, every once in a while adding a cryptic graphic to the cover to titillate readers. (Do you remember the one-dimensional, narrow rectangle with an Enter key on it that Cindy said was Johndan Johnson-Eilola's version of a computerized pencil?)

In any event, our change in physical appearance reflects in both hardware and software the rapid progress in technology that our profession has been a part of. The rise of desktop publishing, with its capacity to produce sophisticated documents in a short length of time without the labor of typesetting, has not passed us by. Even our experiments in graphics are characteristic of these advances: It's difficult to resist drawing pictures when "paintbrush" programs make the task so easy. C&C continues to be a vital contributor to this technological experiment in electronic publishing.

But appearances aren't everything, and we have also changed in content. Early issues of C&C often involved us as enthusiastic English professionals sharing observational and anecdotal evidence that computers could serve us well as writing and teaching tools. Today our contributors are more cautious. They question research, re-conceptualize the role of computers in writing classes, and seek answers to the pedagogical and political problems that technology creates.

This issue is no exception. Kate and Cindy have assembled a series of articles that reflect this heightened sense of professionalism and show examples of the many different directions such research is taking. Nicholas Gordon and Susan Mansfield write about computers as an extension of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement. Robert Perrin contributes a research essay on how several English handbooks are approaching the subject of computers in writing classes. Terence Collins, Nancy Engen-Wedin, and William Margolis describe the increased student success rate in a computer-enriched first-year writing course and relate it to administrators' concerns about student retention. Valerie Arms writes about using the Apple Macintosh for teaching both writing and drawing in first-year and technical writing courses at Drexel University. Our final two articles in this issue address the question of style and usage software: Randy Smye discusses several such programs in relation to how such programs might be made more accessible to students and more process-oriented, and John Day focuses on WRITER'S WORKBENCH as part of the writing program at St. Olaf College.

We hope that, as you read these articles, you will gain an increasing sense of the directions in which computers in composition are moving. We also hope that you will respond to the survey we have included in the front of this issue as a way of getting to know our audience and its needs better.