They take issue with Downs and Wardle's "dismissal of the importance of teaching situated procedural knowledge", most notably the rhetorical situation. Miles et al. claim the only rhetorical situation a WAW course exposes its students to is that of scholarly research. They also argue that Downs and Wardle put too much emphasis on first-year composition within the field of writing studies, seeing it as the predominant branch of the field. They also argue that Downs and Wardle fail to give voice to the students in their case study who didn't benefit from the WAW approach and that only those who did are highlighted. Another main criticism they have is WAW's reliance on one modality of research writing while they argue that their "research and scholarship is an interesting hybrid of several modalities at once." Downs published a response to Miles et al. in which he expresses displeasure at the arguments the authors laid out: My first reaction to Miles et al.'s response to "FYC as Intro to Writing Studies" is about as magnanimous as their response itself – that is, not remotely. This disappoints me, because I do maintain the ideal of scholarship wherein a constructive dialectic stretches, shapes, and builds ideas rather than merely tearing them down. I confess my first instinct is to tear down Miles et al.'s response as they attempt to tear down the construct we forwarded. (Earning the condemnation of an entire department is bracing-and ironic when the scholarship of some of the signatories – for me, Schwegler and Shamoon – planted seeds of ideas they find unworkable.He writes Miles et al. "seem to address us as if we are sitting at the kids' table at Thanksgiving dinner." His main contentions are: He concludes by writing "I am grateful not only for the opportunity to respond, but to have something to respond to. And I wonder how differently our students might understand writing if they had similar opportunities." A response to Downs' response to Miles et al. by Slomp and Sargent doesn't reject Downs and Wardle's ideas in the same way Miles et al. does, but calls for more research on the WAW method. The authors also argue that Downs and Wardle fail to position themselves into an ongoing conversation in the same way they advocate for in WAW. Slomp and Sargent say that Downs and Wardle paint themselves to be "lone pioneers" in this venture, but in the 1990s Wendy Bishop supported the use of writing as the main subject in the writing classroom.