Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction

Joseph Petraglia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136689222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

To a degree unknown in practically any other discipline, the pedagogical space afforded composition is the institutional engine that makes possible all other theoretical and research efforts in the field of rhetoric and writing. But composition has recently come under attack from many within the field as fundamentally misguided. Some of these critics have been labelled "New Abolitionists" for their insistence that compulsory first-year writing should be abandoned. Not limiting itself to first-year writing courses, this book extends and modifies calls for abolition by taking a closer look at current theoretical and empirical understandings of what contributors call "general writing skills instruction" (GWSI): the curriculum which an overwhelming majority of writing instructors is paid to teach, that practically every composition textbook is written to support, and the instruction for which English departments are given resources to deliver. The vulnerability of GWSI is hardly a secret among writing professionals and its intellectual fragility has been felt for years and manifested in several ways:
* in persistently low status of composition as a study both within and outside of English departments;
* in professional journal articles and conference presentations that are growing both in theoretical sophistication and irrelevance to the composition classroom; and
* in the rhetoric and writing field's ever-increasing attention to nontraditional sites of writing behavior. But, to date, there has been relatively little concerted discussion within the writing field that focuses specifically on the fundamentally awkward relationship of writing theory and writing instruction. This volume is the first to explicitly focus on the gap in the theory and practice that has emerged as a result of the field's growing professionalization. The essays anthologized offer critiques of GWSI in light of the discipline's growing understanding of the contexts for writing and their rhetorical nature. Writing from a wide range of cognitivist, critical-theoretical, historical, linguistic and philosophical perspectives, contributors call into serious question basic tenets of contemporary writing instruction and provide a forum for articulating a sort of zeitgeist that seems to permeate many writing conferences, but which has, until recently, not found a voice or a name.

I

The Tension Between Writing
and Writing Instruction:
Historical Perspectives?

1

The New Abolitionism: Toward
a Historical Background^*

Robert J. Connors

University of New Hampshire

Since the required course in freshman composition was conceived at Harvard in 1885 and quickly adopted by most U.S. colleges and universities, it has been at the heart of a continuing series of arguments about its worth and standing. Arthur Applebee (1974) characterized the history of English teaching in the United States as being marked by periods of tradition and reform, and in this chapter I want to borrow one of his terms and, changing its meaning rather seriously, claim that the history of American higher education in composition over the last century has been marked by alternating periods of what I call reformism and abolitionism. During reformist periods, freshman comp, although problematical, is seen as the thin red line protecting the very life of literacy. Abolitionist periods are times during which at least some English teachers call for the end of freshman composition, declaring the large sums expended on this all–but–ubiquitous course a gross waste.

There is a sense in which these arguments about the required comp course are metonymic representations of other more general questions facing American culture. We see reformist periods of deep interest in improving composition—some of which are called literacy crises—and abolitionist periods, when some teachers declared it too hopeless to reform, repeat themselves several times across the last 10 decades. Each reformist or abolition period is to some degree unique, of course, but they do have certain elements in common, and they ebb and flow according to patterns that we may learn from. As this volume suggests, we are now involved in the end of a reformist period and in a new period of abolitionist sentiment. Contributors to this anthology represent a growing number of writing professionals asking us to reconsider the theoretical integrity and practical utility of required composition as manifested in general writing skills instruction (GWSI) for over the last century. By way of introducing the collection gathered here, it may be worthwhile to ask how or whether this New Abolitionism is like the older ones, and whether the current movement will go the way of the older ones. To understand the New Abolitionists in context, we need to look back.

REQUIRED FRESHMAN COMPOSITION: THE FIRST REFORM AND ITS ANTAGONISTS

The required freshman composition course itself is the product of a reformist period. It was created in direct response to the literacy crisis of the period 1875 to 1885. This is a story that has been told many times by historians, and we need only outline it here. Harvard College, roused by popular debates on literacy and linguistic correctness, had by 1870 become uncomfortably aware that students entering from the academies that served as its feeders were having problems with its demanding classical courses. In response, Harvard instituted its first entrance examinations in written English in 1874. To the horror of professors, parents, and the American intellectual culture as a whole, more than half the students taking the exam failed it. What had been a vague disquiet crystallized into a sharp alarm. Large numbers of American boys from the best schools were incapable of correct writing, and something had to be done. This first crisis might be called the “Illiteracy of American Boys” crisis, after the best known article written about it.

The Harvard exam and the continuing problems students had with it (and with the host of similar writing examinations quickly set up by the many colleges that took Harvard for a model) created the first American college literacy crisis and the first experiments in basic writing instruction on the college level. The Harvard examiners began quickly to agitate for better training on the secondary level and for more effective writing instruction on the college level.

A. S. Hill, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, had argued strongly as early as 1879 that the sophomore rhetoric course be more oriented toward correctness and composition and be made a required course for freshmen: “The next best step [after improving secondary schools] would be to give to English two hours or more a week during the Freshman year. Could the study be taken up at the threshold of college life, the schools would be made to feel that their labors in this direction were going to tell upon a pupil’s standing in college” (Hill, 1896, p. 12). At first no room could be found for such a requirement during freshman year, but the exam results kept the pressure on and in 1885 a basic freshman course, “English A,” was offered at Harvard. Its structure solidified quickly. By 1894 the only required courses for freshmen were English A and a modem language (Rudolph, 1962). By 1897 the only required course at Harvard for any student was English A. Many other colleges took Harvard’s lead on all educational issues, and by 1890 the majority of U.S. colleges and universities had established required freshman composition courses. The formation of these courses nationwide was a great paroxysm of reformist work, a large–scale curricular endeavor that has no parallel in U.S. college history.

Yet it was very soon after 1890 that the first widespread movement to disestablish these new course requirements arose. This first group of abolitionists consisted primarily of literature teachers in what were then newly established English departments. Their dislike of required composition courses was based in their affiliation with Amoldian idealism, but their essential rationale for abolishing freshman requirements was based on two more practical claims about college composition: First, the required freshman course was never meant as a permanent English offering, but was instead a temporary stop–gap until the secondary schools could improve; and second, the teaching of required composition was tiresome, labor intensive, and a bad use of trained literary scholars.

That the early freshman course was considered a temporary remedial measure and was bitterly resented by college faculty members is clear from the few published comments that exist on it. “The instruction in English which we are forced to give to Freshmen and perhaps to Sophomores should all be finished in the preparatory schools,” wrote Hurlbut (1896). “It is absurd that a college should be obliged to teach spelling, pronunciation, grammar, construction of sentences and of paragraphs” (p. 49). Only if reforms were made on the elementary and secondary levels, argued Hurlbut, would the student acquire there “the training in English composition which is now given in college, and the college student will be able to devote himself to university work” (p. 53). Up until the mid–1890s, in other words, it was assumed by many that freshman composition courses were a stop–gap remedial measure, a temporary aberration, to be dispensed with after the great propaganda war in favor of more secondary school composition had been won.

We see a good deal of this attitude in William Morton Payne’s (1895) interesting collection, English in American Universities, which contains 20 reports on the teaching of college English at different institutions that had originally appeared in The Dial in 1894. Although most of the reports detail both literature and composition courses being offered, several are fervid in their triumph at having dispensed with required freshman writing altogether. Payne himself, the editor of The Dial was entirely sympathetic to this movement, and his introduction makes clear why; he was a classic exponent of literature teaching who was in favor of the most stringent entrance requirements possible. He was very doubtful about the Eastern colleges’ reliance on the freshman course. “As we go West, we do better and better” (p. v) he said, noting that Indiana, Nebraska, and Stanford had all abolished freshman composition in favor of strong entrance requirements.

Examining the reports from those schools, however, it was clear that liberal culture is not the only reason for the abolition. Martin Sampson (1895) of Indiana wrote that “There are no recitations in ‘rhetoric.’ The bugbear known generally in our colleges as Freshman English is now a part of our entrance requirements” (p. 93). Melville Anderson’s (1895) report on English at Stanford gives us a genuine feel for the earliest abolitionist sentiments. Stanford, he said, had abolished Freshman English: “Had this salutary innovation not been accomplished, all the literary courses would have been swept away by the rapidly growing inundation of Freshman themes, and all our strength and courage would have been dissipated in preparing our students to do respectable work at more happily equipped Universities” (p. 52). We see here the expected liberal culture attitudes, of course, but more strongly we see pure self–protection on the part of the tenured faculty. They did not want to teach theme writing, and killing the requirement was the easiest way out of it. Anderson wrote a bit later that Stanford would be hiring two “instructors” the following year to give the two unfortunate composition professors a break, because “however great a man’s enthusiasm for such work may be, it is incident to human nature that no man can read themes efficiently for more than three hours at a stretch” (p. 52).

THOMAS LOUNSBURY AND LIBERAL–CULTURE ABOLITIONISM

The first wave of abolitionism ebbed after 1900, and Anderson’s attitude gives us a key to the reasons why: the growing willingness of universities and colleges to draw on lecturers, instructors, and graduate students to teach their required freshman courses. As discussed in more detail in Connors (1991), the rise of academic specialization and the modem hierarchy of ranks in English departments meant that between 1880 and 1900 most tenured professors were gradually relieved of composition duties by younger and less powerful colleagues or by graduate students. Thus the earliest wave of abolitionism, which had been caused by overwork panic among faculty members, receded because the Andersons and Sampsons no longer had to worry themselves about having to teach freshman composition. This was fortunate for these senior professors, because the requirement of the course had hardly been touched by their arguments in most places (Stanford, for example, reinstituted English A in 1907; Greenbaum, 1969). The years between 1885 and 1915 saw a tremendous number of critiques of the freshman course launched, but most of them were oriented toward reforming the course. Not until the end of that period was there a resurgence of the abolitionist sentiment, in the famous article “Compulsory Composition in Colleges” by Thomas Lounsbury (1911). David Russell (1988) did groundbreaking work on Lounsbury and some of the attitudes that have underlain the early forms of abolitionist argument. Russell described Lounsbury’s abolitionist sentiment as a product of a specific kind of educational idealism that sounds today like liberal culture literary elitism, tinged throughout by Lounsbury’s thinly concealed opinion that undergraduate students were ignorant barbarians.

To Lounsbury, the idea that expression could be taught was idiotic, the conception that college students could know anything worth writing about silly, and the position that writing teachers could respond usefully to student writing unlikely. Wrote Lounsbury (1911), “I [am] thoroughly convinced that altogether undue importance is attached to exercises in English composition, especially compulsory exercises; that the benefits to be derived from the general practice in schools is (sic) vastly overrated” (p. 869). His answer to the problem of literacy was more or less to let it take care of itself, to make composition completely elective, thus making certain that only those students who wanted to write—a minority compared to that “large body of students who have not the slightest desire to write a line” (p. 876)—took it. The enthusiasm of the students would make the course so much more satisfying to teach that it would again attract experienced and effective teachers.

Despite his romantic elitism, Lounsbury (1911) made some telling points against compulsory composition. He was correct in his assessment that “the average student loathes it,” that “under the compulsory system now prevailing the task of reading and correcting themes is one of deadly dullness,” in which “more and more does the business of correcting and criticizing themes tend steadily to fall into the hands of those who ... have themselves little experience in the practice of composition” (pp. 870–871). But Lounsbury was an outsider. His claim to have 25 years’ experience correcting themes had never actually included required freshman composition, which Yale did not have, and he was senior enough to have avoided the most punishing junior composition teaching assignments. Thus his sympathy for teachers was mostly forced, because he considered most of them “incompetent to do anything much better,” and for students hardly existent; they are “crude,” “thoughtless and indifferent,” “immature,” and clearly in need of a stiff dose of Milton. Lounsbury presented an early but completely recognizable version of E. D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy argument: Writing could not be taught as pure practice–based skill without content. His real and obvious sympathy was with those who had a “cultivated taste begotten of familiarity with the great masterpieces of our literature” (p. 876), and until students’ minds were thus furnished, they need not apply, to him at least.

This article caused a small sensation in the English teaching world, and especially in the still–active circle of composition enthusiasts. Lounsbury had repeated several times in his essay that his was an unpopular minority position, but it was taken very seriously. His article was not followed up in Harper’s, but it created a long discussion in the Educational Review (ER) in 1913, and we see here the whole modem reformist–abolitionist debate for the first time.

Although some of the ER correspondents agreed with Lounsbury, the majority did not. Some commentators saw no problem in the freshman course at all, and they actively praised the course as they had experienced it. We also see in this discussion the first wave of what might be called status quo or modem reformism. These correspondents took the position, as all reformists later would, that the course was imperfect but necessary, and that it would be much improved by the author’s suggestions. N. A. Stedman (1913) of the University of Texas admitted that freshman English was useful and yielded some good results, but he saw that its “technical” nature created in students “a distaste for English” (p. 53), and proposed that the course be reformed to create more interest in English. Lucile Shepherd (1913) of the University of Missouri believed that “the course on the whole is admirable,” and that with more humanism and a few tinkerings it would be better still (p. 189).

Lounsbury had some clear allies. Carl Zigrosser (1913) of Columbia wrote that, “in my estimation prescribed work in English is unnecessary” (p. 188), and George Strong (1913) of North Carolina huffed that, “My own experience with these courses was profitless. It was, in fact, enough to discourage me from continuing the study of English. I failed to derive any benefit whatever from them. . . Away with such work! I should rather live an ignoramus all my life than to endure again such a burden as I did in English I and English II” (p. 189). We begin in these responses to Lounsbury to see proposals for that brand of abolitionism later called writing across the curriculum. Preston W. Slosson (1913) proposed that “The real way to make sure that every Columbia graduate, whatever his other failings, can write whatever it may be necessary for him to write as briefly, logically, and effectively as possible, is not to compel him as a freshman to write stated themes on nothing–in–particular but to insist on constant training in expression in every college course” (p. 408).

Finally, the Lounsbury–based discussion petered out sometime around 1915, after having never attained a solid enough base of agreement from the abolitionists. Charles G. Osgood (1915) writing in English Journal, titled his article “No Set Requirement of English Composition in the Freshman Year,” and suspected that the suggestion made by his title “is not a popular opinion, and that in holding it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Tension Between Writing and Writing
• 1 The New Abolitionism: Toward a Historical Background
• 2 The Disciplinary Instability of Composition
• Part II: Classroom Writing Within Social and Cognitive
• 3 Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction
• 4 Writing as an Unnatural Act
• 5 Writing and Learning at Cross Purposes in the Academy
• 6 The What, Where, When, Why, and How of Classroom Genres
• 7 Creating Opportunities for Apprenticeship in Writing
• Part III: Philosophical Issues in Writing and Writing
• 8 Lived Experience and the Problem With Invention on Demand
• 9 Writing Dialogically: Bold Lessons From Electronic Text
• Part IV: Alternative Conceptions of Writing Instruction
• 10 Discourse, Interdiscursivity, and Composition Instruction
• 11 Integrating Cultural Reflection and Production in
• 12 (Dis)Missing Compulsory First–Year Composition
• 13 Response: Curricular Responsibilities and Professional Definition
• Author Index
• Subject Index