Not Vigo...

aka "Writing about Talk about Writing" (which we will then, of course, talk about)

This is the best example of the earlier definitional issues we all seemed to have about how broad the field of composition studies is. If it relates to writing, it's in.
The overlap (interdisciplinarity, anyone?)with conversation analysis and, to a degree, philosophy of language made me smile as I read. A friend of mine in undergrad was heavily into language philosophy and linguistics, so I couldn't help but be reminded that pulling insight from one discipline can often break open a problem in another.

As for Lauer and Asher, what can I say? As clergy of the Cult of Empirical Research, a chapter on True Experiments is equivalent to the Ceremonies of the Winter Solstice. Sacre Empiricus aside, the importance of randomization in the selection process was really driven home. Even if I didn't fully grasp all the threats to internal validity, I did see that randomization eliminated most of them. I finally get that randomization is post population selection. You still decide on your group (e.g. freshman), you just constitute it randomly.

I did appreciate their concession, however slight, on page 161. They admit that, while true experiment are the strongest at finding cause/effect relationships “they never lead to certainty.” Probabilistic knowledge is a continuum; power of probability is simply highest with this method.