She states that "one type of research is not necesarily better than another," but out of approximately 910 lines of her text she devotes only 30 lines to scholarly inquiry and practitioner inquiry and over 870 lines to qualitative and quantitative methods. She lists the characteristics of productive research as "credibility," "transferability," "dependability," and "confirmability," and I think she and most of her readers would agree that, based upon that criteria, empirical methods succeed much more than scholarly or practitioner inquiry.

The purpose of methodological clarity and consistency in a discipline is, as she says, to "let one know how much a given piece of research can be relied on." To return to computers and writing, then, the boundary between a "critical" and an "uncritical" enthusiasm is drawn by a presumed universally agreed upon set of criteria for what claims "can be relied on." Underlying all these calls for a greater methodological consistency in research is an implicit or explicit desire to support computers or writing or rhetoric and composition as a clearly defined academic discipline with a discipline's usual political stability and clout.