Human-computer interaction studies? Digitizing mimesis, topic, and decorum? Windows and composing? Speech synthesizers and revising? An annotated bibliography concerning real-time networks? The labyrinth of hypertext? Electric Language? What would a writing instructor in 1979 or even in 1983 make of all this? Jargon or something else?

We prefer to view the strange terminology surrounding our work as indicative of "something else." In fewer than 10 years, we've adapted and developed a vocabulary that reflects the broadening interests of computers and composition studies while, at the same time, asserting our relevance to the perennial problems and interests of writing instructors. Literacy, classical rhetoric, poetry, fiction (even if interactive), and style--all traditional concerns of English teachers and all represented in this issue of Computers & Composition.

This issue, perhaps more than any we have published to date, suggests the eclecticism of our field. In the lead article, Pat Sullivan shows us what research in human factors can offer regarding the learning of word processing. In doing so, she uses the talk of specialists in human-computer interaction "to help us 'hear' their voices so that we may better read their literature." Ellen Barton and Ruth Ray then describe a graduate course in which students write and read about computers. The authors argue that this particular approach to computers can provide students with a coherent view of literacy in our society today. Following these articles, George Peek, Tony Eubanks, Claire May, and Patsy Heil show us how one particular group--accounting students--fared with a style checker, and Michael Marx demonstrates the value of using windows in teaching writing. Finally, two relatively new applications in composition instruction are introduced by Eleanor Berry and then Jane Douglas. Berry explores the potential of voice synthesizers in a writing class while Douglas goes on to describe STORYSPACE, an interactive-fiction program that uses hypertext to lead its readers through technological spaces. Thus, in this issue, we begin with a discussion of how machines can best suit humans and end with the challenge of how humans might use machines to create new knowledge.

Add to this Joy Peyton's bibliography of computer networks and composition, Richard Lanham's discussion of classical rhetoric and modern technology in our "Computers & Controversy" section, Rich Slatta's review of Michael Heim's Electric Language, and Donna Cheney's poem, "Computer, Writing," and we have an ambitious August issue. The synthesizing of the old and the new, the human and the technological, continues to make our field exciting and to provoke our wonder and curiosity. We hope you like the August issue, and we invite you to contribute poems you think appropriate to our new poetry editor, Jim Kalmbach.

With this issue, we also proudly announce a new series of books for C&C, appropriately entitled Advances in Computers and Composition. Our first book, Creating a Computer-Supported Writing Facility: A Blueprint for Action by Cindy Selfe, will be out by September. I know of no other individual more qualified to address the issues raised in this volume than Cindy. Her knowledge and experience in establishing computer-supported writing facilities throughout the country go far in making this book an important reference for anyone working with computers, students, faculty, and writing.

The second book, Questions for the 1990s, is an edited volume focusing on theoretical, pedagogical, and research issues in computers and composition studies. With the help of six members from C&C's editorial board (Hugh Burns, James Collins, Ron Fortune, Lisa Gerrard, Dawn Rodrigues, and Patricia Sullivan), Cindy and I have selected twenty or so essays from well over fifty submissions for the book. Our aim for this new series is to place particular emphasis on today's problems and tomorrow's possibilities for writing and learning in the Electronic Age. In addition, then, to inviting you to contribute poetry to the journal, we also invite you to submit proposals for book-length manuscripts that you're interested in publishing in this new series of Advances in Computers and Composition. We hope it will be a series that you will ultimately come to rely on as an important resource in computers and composition studies.