2003
MMLA
New Histories of Writing IV:
Forms and Rhetorics
Alexander
Bain's Long Shadow: The Current-Traditional Paragraph in the Classroom
For
I must be allowed to say, that when we are employed, after a proper manner,
in the study of composition, we are cultivating reason itself. True rhetoric
and sound logic are very nearly allied. The study of arranging and expressing
our thought with propriety, teaches to think, as well as to speak, accurately.
By putting our sentiments into words, we always conceive them more distinctly.
Everyone who has the slightest acquaintance with composition knows, that
when he expresses himself ill on any subject, when his arrangement is
loose, and his sentences become feeble, the defects of his style can,
almost on every occasion, be traced back to his indistinct conception
of the subject: so close is the connexion between thoughts, and the words
in which they are clothed. (952)
These words, written by Hugh Blair and published in 1783, express an attitude
toward the study and exercise of composition that pervaded the next century,
and which we still embrace in ours. Good writing is good thinking, and
writing is necessary to education because it accomplishes what other means
of study do not: it reveals, more glaringly than any multiple-choice exam,
the writer's "indistinct conception of the subject," and necessitates
the forging of a more distinct one. Yet somehow, this primary truth has
often been obscured in composition pedagogies. The connections between
writing and thinking, and logic and arrangement-the very crux of composition-are
often glossed over, to the point that John T. Gage, in his 1986 essay
"Why Write?", felt it necessary to exhort composition teachers
to dare to judge between good ideas and bad ones in evaluating student
essays, just as they do in professional writing; and further, to value
good ideas over "proper" grammar and structure.
All too often, the composition instructor hopes for a certain type of
essay-one which reveals independent thought-but teaches and even evaluates
with another sort of essay in mind, one where technical considerations,
particularly correct structure and grammatical correctness, are at the
fore. This split-personality evidenced in many composition classrooms
is encouraged by most of the composition rhetorics on the market, as they
teach form-such as paragraph development-while offering writing models
that supersede those forms; and teach the application of rather rigid
structures, while suggesting writing assignments that encourage exploratory
and independent thought, which do not easily fit into such forms.
In turn, this split-personality of composition handbooks and freshman
English rhetorics reveals a parallel split in contemporary composition
theory, which is symptomatic of an incomplete break from current-traditional
rhetoric, at least in the instructional advice that many contemporary
freshman rhetorics and handbooks offer. Current-traditional rhetoric,
developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, can be defined as
an approach to teaching composition that emphasizes prescripts of structure
and style. As such, current-rhetorical theory is widely criticized as
a pedagogy that encourages the separation of form from content. James
A. Berlin calls current-traditional rhetoric "the manifestation of
the assembly line in education" and "the triumph of the scientific
and technical world view" (62).
In this essay, I will attempt to consider the cultural, historical, philosophical,
and practical forces that have kept the current-traditional approach entrenched
in the composition classroom, and to propose the need to reexamine paragraph
theory in two contexts. First, we need to question how the prevailing
paragraph pedagogy affects student writing, and second, we need to examine
its effects on how society at large considers the act of and purposes
for writing. For if we believe that the development of ideas progresses
within the language act, then composition must take on a much more central
educational role throughout the various disciplines; and if composition
is to do so, we must reconsider how to teach it, on a practical as well
as an ideological level. Finally, I intend to suggest that in an age immersed
in Thomas Kuhn and Nietzche, it is pedagogically irresponsible, rather
absurd, and counter to our educational goals to continue to follow a pedagogical
approach that distinguishes form from thought, and which reduces writing
instruction to set formulas and matters of superficial correctness.
Bain's Paragraphing
Rules in the Classroom
The development of current-traditional rhetoric, as well as the reactions
against it, can be framed by the history of paragraph theory. When a writing
instructor turns to that part of most freshman composition rhetorics or
handbooks that deal with essay structure, she finds that the architecture
of the paragraph holds a prominent place; in fact, the composition is
commonly conceived of as a structure of paragraphs. The paragraphing rules
set forth in such textbooks are in most cases very much like those formulated
by Alexander Bain in his 1866 text, English Composition and Rhetoric,
which conceived of the paragraph as a rhetorical structure with fixed
requirements (Lewis 20). His rules have become so entrenched in our understanding
of paragraph and essay structure that it is surprising to realize that
the paragraph was not a subject of any detailed rhetorical consideration
until Bain. Bain's rules have become our rules, and most contemporary
freshman rhetorics restate them in more or less the same fashion.
Bain conceived of the paragraph's structure as analogous to the sentence.
He likened the topic sentence to main clause, asserting that "[t]he
opening sentence, unless so constructed as to be obviously preparatory,
is expected to indicate with prominence the subject of the paragraph."
The other sentences are conceived of in analogy to subordinate elements,
and serve to flesh out the meaning of the topic sentence. Furthermore,
Bain asserted that the paragraph is also characterized by three features,
coherence, unity and development. Bain spent the most ink on the subject
of coherence, taking care to list the various conjunctions and connectives
that can be used to show the relationships between the clauses and sentences
within the paragraph; and emphasizing the importance of parallel structure
in sentences that illustrate the same idea. Unity, "which implies
a definite purpose, and forbids digressions and irrelevant matter,"
is another prominent consideration. The third is development (which subsequent
current-traditionalists renamed mass or proportion), meaning that the
paragraph topic is expanded upon sufficiently to satisfy the reader, and
the mass of the paragraph is in proportion to its importance to the composition's
overall purpose.
Yet if we perceive the paragraph rules we encounter in our rhetorics as
as self-evident as gravity, the evidence of many composition theorists
since the 1960s shows that our sense of paragraph theory is a bit confused-Bain
did not discover some inevitable laws of the paragraph. Instead, he prescribed
a particular style of paragraphing, which proceeds deductively. Bain's
rules went virtually unquestioned for a century, until a number of composition
theorists investigated the actual English paragraph, and discovered that
professional essayists have transgressed Bain's standards to excellent
effect, both before and since 1866.1 At the most extreme, Richard Braddock
concluded that paragraphs beginning with topic sentences were surprisingly
rare in professional contemporary expository prose-comprising only 13
percent of paragraphs he examined. William Irmscher's graduate students
repeated Braddock's investigations and found topic-led paragraphs to be
more common, between 40 and 50 percent, although their frequency varied
among individual writers (Irmscher 98). A.L. Becker identified a variety
of paragraph patterns beyond Bain's topic-led one.2
With some exceptions, the majority of composition theorists since the
1960s have viewed Bain's highly teachable prescriptions as actually detrimental
to the development of student writing. The title of Virginia M. Burke's
1967 essay, "The Paragraph: Dancer in Chains," says it all.
For Burke, the current-traditional rhetoricians are very like the critics
that Fielding criticized in Tom Jones: "men of shallow capacities"
who "mistake mere form for substance" (Burke 37). Philosophically,
the new rhetoricians object to the current-traditionalist's division of
form and thought. As James A. Berlin encapsulates their theoretical stance,
"[s]tructure and language are a part of the very formation of meaning;
they are at the center of the discovery of truth and are not simply the
dress of thought" (91). Or, as John T. Gage asserts,
The forms cannot be given to students, whose task is then to fill them
up with ideas, since in such cases the ideas will not have a purpose in
themselves other than to satisfy the demand of the form. It is ideas which
come first, in writing, and forms which satisfy the demands that face
a writer who has them. (729)
If your freshman composition classes are anything like the ones I have
taught, your students are not particularly inspired, or helped, by the
current-traditional explanation of the paragraph. Usually such advice
elicits groans-or worse-glazed-over eyes. It's no wonder: they've had
this advice drilled into them since grade school. Most of them are competent
at this structure, but it doesn't seem to be helping them to fulfill that
part of your assignment that asks them to deal with a thought-provoking
issue, to consider something in a new light, to consider an unfamiliar
concept. In other words, to think, for God's sake.
First of all, there's the rather embarrassing fact that the model essays
that we encourage our students to study and emulate do not always follow
the paragraph prescriptions we teach. Further, our paragraph prescriptions,
which seem so concise on the page, become problematic when put into practice.
The paragraph is supposed to confine itself to one main idea, but so is
the essay, the sentence, and even the word. Upon close examination, it's
very difficult to ascertain exactly what an "idea" is, as many
critics of current-traditional paragraphing rules have pointed out. Paul
C. Rodgers Jr., in his 1966 essay, "A Discourse-Centered Rhetoric
of the Paragraph," listed the amendments that have been made to Bain's
rules, based on the study of the paragraph as it is actually written:
--A proper paragraph always has a single central topic idea, except when
it has two, three, or more.
--Development of the topic is always limited to the paragraph in which
the topic is broached, except when the topic requires that exposition
continue in the next.
--The topic sentence always expresses the topic idea, but the work of
expression may be disposed of in a minor segment of the sentence; or,
on the other hand, a complicated topic may take several sentences, and
these sentences may be widely separated in the paragraph.
--There is always a topic sentence, yet it may not actually be stated.
In this case, it is "implied," and serves as a sort of offstage
influence directing the action in the paragraph.
--A paragraph by definition is a series of sentences, but now and then
it turns out to be one sentence only. If the sentences-series seems too
long for presentation as a unit, it can be subdivided into several paragraphs
without loss of unity. Conversely, a series of short paragraphs can be
combined into a single unit, sometimes with the original components identified
by number or letter.
--Moreover there are certain very useful and common paragraph types that
show little interest in amplifying topics: transitional, introductory,
directive, summary, and concluding paragraphs. (40)
Such exceptions render paragraph rules absurd, and point to the fact that
the paragraph is a much more flexible structure than freshman composition
texts tend to admit. In fact, it is rather odd that although the paragraph
is a much more complex unit than the sentence, current-traditional rhetoric
defines it by more rigid prescriptions. It is perhaps even odder that
it took a century for rhetoricians to question the validity of Bain's
prescriptions, and I suspect that the reason for this oddity can be found
in the current-traditionalist's implicit attitude toward both audience
and invention, both of which are formally defined to a large extent by
the insistence on a topic-led paragraph.
When Bain likened the paragraph to the sentence, he was thinking of a
specific type: the loose sentence. Just as the loose sentence begins with
the main clause, which is supported by subordinate elements that follow,
Bain's description of the paragraph begins with the main idea, which controls
the paragraph. Such a structure, on both the sentence and the paragraph
level, can be labeled deductive, or analytical. Rhetorically, the deductive
form, whether on the sentence or paragraph level, implies an expectation
that the audience will readily accept the idea proposed at its most general
level (the topic sentence). If the audience is expected to resist one's
conclusions or generalities, the composer will proceed inductively, or
synthetically; that is, she will take care to begin at a lower level of
generality, offering reasons for her conclusions before she states them.
Thus the deductive paragraph is useful in rhetorical situations wherein
the composer need not consider audience resistance.
In addition, the deductive quality of the current-traditional paragraph
model poses some problems when we ask our students to use their writing
as an occasion to think through ideas. We think inductively, proceeding
from the particulars to a generalized conclusion. We explain deductively,
or analytically, and the ability to present an idea deductively presupposes
a good deal of inductive thinking, which is undertaken in the invention
phase. In an attempt to resurrect invention in the composition classroom,
process theorists emphasize such invention heuristics as brainstorming
and freewriting, as well as dialogue between students and instructors.
But invention goes beyond pre-writing strategies, continuing throughout
multiple drafts, and the writing process itself is seen as an inventive
act.
For a process pedagogue, writing in the classroom is primarily exploratory
rather than explanatory. Bringing a concept to distinctness is the work
of writing, at least according to Gage, William Irmscher and others who
have opposed the competency model, and writing can be used to this end
more effectively than other means because, by the very nature of the writing
act, thoughts are slowed, examined, and reassessed in a way that they
rarely are otherwise, either in conversation or in our own internal thoughts.
The act of writing forces us to slow down and examine our ideas, test
them for validity and logical connections to other ideas. As Irmscher
noted in 1979, some two hundred years after Blair but in perfect concord,
"Because writing is so much more deliberative than talking, it helps
us determine what we know and what we don't know. In our minds, we can
fool ourselves. Not on paper. [. . .] Mental fuzziness translates into
words only as fuzziness or meaninglessness." (20)
Thus for the process pedagogue, the real work of invention occurs in the
actual composition, not before it, and fuzzy thought on the page is often
the beginning of independent thought, simply because of a natural desire
to understand what we are forced to acknowledge that we don't yet understand.
Well developed, original and logically structured writing rarely springs
full-formed onto the page, unless the ideas that inform it have come pre-packaged
from without. Most commonly, it requires a great deal of work to develop
a germ of a thought to its final fruition, and that work will proceed
inductively, from particulars that lead up to a conclusion.
In the contemporary composition handbook, process pedagogy has found its
place, listed under such titles as "pre-writing," or "generating"
or "discovering" ideas, but the inquiry-led nature of process
pedagogy is not carried into the drafting of the paper. Instead, drafting
is still characteristically taught using the current-traditional model.
The Bainian paragraph is the standard and the basis of the total form,
which is often taught as a structure of paragraphs which, like the paragraph
itself, proceeds deductively. As a consequence, despite our hope that
our students will think synthetically, we expect them to draft analytically.
This is fine as far as it goes, for the essay should often proceed from
inductive inquiry in early drafts to deductive presentation in the final
product. However, the bottom line is that the final product, the essay
turned in for a grade, and even the rough drafts, are often evaluated
primarily by their success in deductive presentation, as well as by their
adherence to grammatical and usage norms on the sentence level. Because
these are the evaluation priorities, they are what count for the student.
As long as structure and form are dominant considerations in the evaluation
of papers, we cannot expect our students to value the quality of their
content, and thus to see composition as an exercise of independent thought
and inventiveness. We ask one thing, but grade another. We dutifully reward
the dull, predictable paper with a decent grade, noting that it is coherent
in purpose, with a clear thesis statement and paragraphs that begin with
topic sentences and demonstrate unity, coherence and proportion, more
or less.
Unfortunately, in a classroom informed by the competency model, the work
of developing a germinal thought to its fruition is often never undertaken.
This is the danger that Gage expressed well in his criticism of the competency
model, and which any number of writing instructors can relate to in trying
to encourage students to explore and clarify their ideas.
[I]f students have been taught to view success on such assignments as
fulfillment of the technical requirements, however these may be defined,
then it will no doubt occur to them that the best way to ensure success
is to keep the ideas as simple and meaningless as possible. If successful
writing is defined as technical skills only, then students may be learning
an unspoken lesson that is unintended by the pedagogy, namely, that ideas
do not matter. (721)
If an instructor notes that a paragraph is unclear, illogical, or undeveloped,
the student can do one of two things: develop and clarify it, or cut it.
With the pressure of a deadline and an imminent grade, the student more
often than not chooses the latter path, and more than a bad paragraph
is at stake. Students prefer simple and relatively meaningless ideas because
they are relatively easy to explicate in a coherent, well-structured form;
a complex idea, after all, can make a linear pattern of thought-and of
writing-difficult, or even impossible, to attain. A complex idea, if pursued,
could necessitate a divergence from the thesis statement as originally
conceived. An unclear, undeveloped or illogical paragraph is sometimes
more than a sign of improper structure, or a call to return to the topics
or modes to develop it; such a paragraph can be a sign that the thinking
that has prompted the act of writing needs to be reconsidered. In other
words, as Blair noted, loose arrangement is a sign of indistinct conception.
The question is, are we as writing instructors making clear that the real
work of writing is to bring concepts to clarity?
The Historical
Context
No doubt we judge professional writing primarily by the quality of thought
behind it, and agree with Blair that rhetoric and logic are inextricable.
How have we gotten to a place where writers such as Gage feel it necessary
to suggest that we make the same judgments concerning our students' compositions?
For Gage, as for Blair, the tantamount skill learned in writing is the
skill of thinking. Writing instruction is valued because it develops independent
thought, or as Gage dares to call it, philosophy, or rhetoric in the Aristotelian
sense-that is, the discovery of good reasons in situations where conclusions
can never be more than provisional. Where did we get off track, to the
point that we often fail to make the connection between good writing and
good thinking; and to the point that university administrators, students,
and even composition instructors believe that in the course of one or
two composition classes, students will have "gotten" writing,
that writing is a skill akin to following a cooking recipe?
Bain's rules persist because they imply that learning to write is much
like following a recipe, and also because the conditions that ushered
in their acceptance are still in place. An investigation into the pressures
that came to bear on the American university in the late 19th century
can help to explain why Bain's paragraphing rules came to be seen as undisputed
truth, despite all evidence to the contrary in actual writing samples;
and can help us to better see our own situation.
Bain's students in Aberdeen, Scotland, were not especially well read,
many came from rural areas, and many spoke in nonstandard dialects; and
perhaps the most immediately obvious reason that Bain's theories took
hold on American soil was that he had developed easily teachable, prescriptive
lessons in essay structure. Bain designed his rhetoric in order to quickly
bring poorly educated students up to a writing competency standard (Ferreira-Buckley
and Horner 200). In America, universities were increasingly challenged
with just such students. Following the American Civil War, enrollment
in the nation's universities mushroomed, and universities were increasingly
serving not just an elite student body whose classical education could
be assumed, but a rapidly growing population of students who aspired to
join the middle class. Many of these students possessed little in the
way of classical education or practice in composition. Composition had
formerly been guided by the rhetoricians of the late 18th and early 19th
century, including Hugh Blair, George Campbell and Richard Whately, whose
tenants were derived from classical rhetoric and assumed an education
steeped in the classics. The American universities of the late 19th century
needed to find another way. For these students, the study of Blair's belletristic
rhetoric was untenable, and universities were responding to the needs
of their students by developing English departments that could not only
emphasize English literature, but answer to the needs of a student body
largely unschooled in the classics.
Consequently, nascent English departments were faced with a sharply rising
student body-all in need of composition instruction, but essentially unequipped
with the intellectual and literary background which had formerly been
assumed. The student-teacher ratio was crushing. For example, in 1894
the University of Michigan's English department served nearly 1,200 composition
students with four faculty members and two graduate students. The student-teacher
ratio in Harvard's composition courses was 100 students per teacher (Berlin
60)-somewhat more manageable, but as those of us who have attempted to
attend to the compositions of 100 students can attest, still extremely
taxing. Clearly composition could not be taught on a student by student
basis, and some form of pragmatic and time-efficient basis for evaluating
student writing needed to be employed.
Doubtless, interest in the paragraph in composition theory also coincided
with a large-scale shift from oral readings in the classroom to silent
reading, and concomitantly, from composition as intended for oratory to
writing intended mainly for the page, all made possible by increasingly
available and affordable writing tools and books. Bain was innovative
in developing a rhetorical model that answered to needs of a textual,
as opposed to an oral, rhetoric (Corbett and Conners 525). Although paragraphing
as evidenced by indentation has been found in manuscripts dating as far
back as the sixth century,3 a need for a theory that could govern paragraph
development was not perceived until the emphasis in composition shifted
toward silent reading. That is, as compositions were more frequently received
by the eye instead of the ear, the appearance of text on the page increased
in importance. An extremely long paragraph could make a reader hesitate
to plunge in, even if the same discourse might not spark the same foreboding
if presented orally.
While composition shifted away from an emphasis on oratory, the mid-19th
century American university was also experiencing a major transformation
in educational purpose, as James Berlin has emphasized. Prior to the Civil
War, American universities had been dominated by clergymen, who taught
rhetoric as a central component in the education of future clergy and
an elite class expected to hold political power. The major figures in
rhetoric through the late 18th and early to mid-19th centuries, including
Hugh Blair, George Campbell and Richard Whately, were clergymen, all of
whom adapted classical rhetoric to the requirements of moral leadership
and the development of refined taste. A central task of education was
to develop the art of oratory, as it would be used to inspire and instruct
from the pulpit and to persuade in the political realm.
The centrality of classical rhetoric was gradually displaced as universities
increasingly responded to the practical needs of a burgeoning industry.
Education was opening up to all members of society, and the majority of
new students were not interested in becoming clergymen. Neither were they
preparing for political leadership, as were the elite students of the
early 19th century. Instead, they were seeking entrance into the middle
class through careers in industry and agriculture, and their interests
were decidedly secular. In response to the needs of such students, American
universities adopted the German model of education, wherein scientific
and technological information took precedence over religious and moral
concerns.
The aims of composition shifted as a result. When composition was geared
to the clergy, all the elements of classical rhetoric came into play,
as emotional and ethical appeals were as important as logical ones. The
purpose of oratory was persuasion. The rhetoric of the late 19th century,
as it pertained to composition classrooms, had no need for all of that.
Sharon Crowley notes that consideration of arrangement in classical rhetoric
in large part ensues from the need to persuade an audience, and the skill
in this arrangement lies in predicting the audience's attitude toward
the message. The emotional disposition of the audience was one of utmost
importance, and the composer shaped his discourse to appeal to the emotions
and ethics of his audience, as well as to logic.
This is an essential point, because Aristotle's rhetoric, and classical
rhetoric after him, dealt only in probable truths, for these are the ones
that cannot be demonstrated beyond refutation. The realm of rhetoric,
as it was classically defined, concerned how humans should act in a situation
that presents alternative possibilities; and the purpose of rhetoric,
in Aristotle's model, was for the composer to discover the best possible
reasons for provisional actions, and to persuade his audience to accept
his point of view. However, the rhetoric developed by the current-traditionalists
was not interested in probabilities, for the subjects of compositions
were perceived as essentially factual; and the goal of the writer was
not to persuade her reader to any provisional conclusions, where other
conclusions could be countered. Crowley notes that this had a marked effect
on the tone, and arrangement, of the compositions written in the current-traditional
classroom, both of which arose from its pedagogical attitude toward the
audience:
Current-traditional discourse theory [. . .] painted listeners and readers
as curiously docile. They were never hostile or inattentive-they were
just interested. Writers needed only to arrange their discourse, then,
in a fashion that would ease the reading process-that would, in fact,
reflect the way any reasonable person might have written it, according
to the natural dictates of the rational mind. (267)
Arrangement in such a situation is deductive, and easily managed by rigid
formulas. The writer is not seeking to convince her audience of her conclusions,
or seeking to prompt her audience to a particular course of action in
the moral or political spheres. She is not encouraging her audience to
follow the train of thought that would lead to these conclusions, and
is expecting no resistance, no alternative possibilities. She is merely
arranging and reporting preconceived, unassailable facts, by the most
efficient means possible, to an interested audience in need of instruction.
In such a writing situation, consideration of audience shrinks considerably,
with the main consideration becoming the reader's knowledge base, which
indicates the level of explanation required in the composition. The expectations
and requirements of an educational system geared toward science, technology
and business encouraged a composition based on reporting. As Berlin notes,
composition topics assigned during the late 19th century encouraged a
composition based on "either close observation, in the scientific
sense, or the use of research material, the thinking of others. In both
cases, the student was asked to report on [. . .] either empirical data
or the work of better observers than he himself" (68).
Neither Bain, nor the modern-traditional school as it developed in American
colleges, had much to say about invention. For Blair, invention presupposed
and involved a protracted intellectual inquiry guided by belles lettres-for
which the student preparing for a practical career serving industry had
little need. Corbett and Conners suggest that the neglect of invention
in composition was a "conscious move away from the complex or mechanical
invention systems that were a necessary part of trying to use the old
abstract rhetorical assignments in a world where wide reading-especially
in the classics-could no longer be assumed" (525). While invention,
as well as attendance to audience response, was of great significance
to students of theology, it was simply unnecessary to students preparing
for careers in business or technology. The conclusions that formed the
outline of their compositions had been developed for them, in the scientific
inquiries that had coalesced into unquestionable dogma, or in the equally
unquestionable cultural assumptions that prevailed in the middle class,
to which they aspired. Essentially, the work of invention was outside
of their area of responsibility, and the worth of their composition rested
in large part on their comprehension of and assent to the conclusions
of their culture, whether received from the scientific textbook, the political
speech, or the pulpit. If, as Crowley notes, the reader was assumed to
be docile and merely interested, the writer was expected to be so also.
In such a writing situation, the paragraph as described by Bain, with
its unwaveringly deductive logic, could easily be construed as the superior,
and even the only, form for the paragraph. To ease comprehension, and
to facilitate quick reading, the paragraph must begin with the declaration
of the main fact, which is then clarified by one or more of the modes.
The flow of attention in such a paragraph, from the conclusion in its
generality to the specifics leading to that conclusion, meets the criteria
for the expository essay designed to inform. Issues of audience and invention
proved largely unnecessary to the student of current-traditional pedagogy.
Both the reader's and the writer's attitudes toward the material for the
composition were largely a moot point, as the content was unassailably
true, as long as it aligned with the accepted scientific fact and middle-class
moral norm. As Berlin puts it, composition was reduced to technical writing
(63).
Rules of paragraphing flourished as a primary rhetorical focus under these
conditions, and Bain's prescripts were adapted in America, most prominently
by John Genung of Amherst College and A.S. Hill and Barrett Wendell of
Harvard, forefathers of the current-traditional approach to writing instruction.
All the factors discussed above paved the way for current-traditional
paragraph theory, but their practical necessity was perhaps most obviously
caused by the Harvard Reports of the 1890s, the first of a continual wave
of "why Johnny can't write" studies that persist to this day.
Beginning in 1891, the writing abilities of Harvard's incoming freshmen
were investigated by a committee of three men unschooled and inexperienced
in writing instruction, Charles Francis Adams, E.L. Godkin, and Josiah
Quincy. Under the direction of this committee, Harvard's composition instructors
assigned their students themes concerning their preparatory school training
in composition. The committee read these students' essays, as well as
freshmen entrance exams, and concluded that students were coming into
Harvard with poor writing skills. The fault, and responsibility, was laid
on preparatory schools; as a result, entrance requirements related to
writing skills stiffened at Harvard and at colleges across the country,
and secondary schools began to take English composition more seriously.
As Berlin notes, the Harvard Reports were beneficial in that preparatory
schools began to take writing skills more seriously; on the other hand,
the criteria used in deciding the value of compositions tended to accentuate
details of style, increasingly construed as matters of superficial correctness,
rather than content. (61). Bain's rules had laid out a clear rubric by
which structure could be identified nearly as easily as a comma splice.
In investigating the ascendancy of the paragraph as the significant unit
of composition structure, one cannot omit mention of Paragraph-Writing
(1891), written by Fred Newton Scott of the University of Michigan and
Joseph V. Denney of Ohio State University. Answering to the pressures
of an overburdened faculty and generally unskilled student body, this
text proposed the practice of composition through the writing of paragraphs,
and thus encouraged the concept of the paragraph as something very close
to a mini-composition. Between 1900 and 1930, according to Corbett and
Conners (535), over 90 percent of textbooks used some version of the paragraphing
theories developed by Scott and Denney. Given the practical conditions
of the time, it is not surprising that Paragraph-Writing proved to be
seminal: the paragraph was easier for the beginning writer to handle,
and easier for the instructor to grade.
Some Alternative
Voices
To assert the above is an unfortunate and misleading oversimplification
of Scott's contribution to composition pedagogy-contributions that were
largely ignored as current-traditional pedagogy took hold. While Scott
doubtless saw the exercise of writing paragraphs as a lightening of the
burden of teaching composition, and thus presented the paragraph as a
discrete unit of discourse, he emphasized the development of the paragraph
in the context of the entire essay; and of the essay in context to the
rhetorical situation. Paragraph-Writing encouraged the student writer
to experiment with options in developing paragraphs-options guided by
the content which the writer intended to express and the context of that
expression.
As such, Scott's paragraph theory is strikingly similar to those proposed
by process theorists during the 1960s, when such writers as A.L. Becker
and Paul C. Rodgers, Jr., first challenged the current-traditional concept
of the paragraph with significant force. Like the process theories, and
unlike Bain and the current-traditionalists, Scott saw form as inseparable
from content, and subordinate to the rhetorical situation of the moment.
William Irmscher expresses the difference between process and current-traditional
concepts of arrangement thus: "we discover as we write; it means
that the writer writes more like a sculptor who finds form while sculpting
than like a bricklayer who piles bricks to construct a wall" (99);
in looking at Scott's concept of the paragraph, it is clear that he would
agree with the first analogy rather than the second.
Scott's paragraph theory thus holds strong affinities to the tagmemic
concept of the paragraph, as developed by Becker, Kenneth L. Pike, and
Richard Young, who also understood paragraphing in terms of the larger
rhetorical situation. In tagmemic theory, any behavior needs to be examined
from three perspectives: as a discrete unit of behavior, or particle;
as part of an unsegmentable flow, or wave; and in context to the surrounding
situation, or field. Tagmemic analysis reveals that the paragraph cannot
be considered merely in its existence as a particle, or unit, as current-traditional
theory tends to do. The paragraph also needs to be considered in the context
of the larger situation, both the essay and the larger communication-situation
that prompted it. In doing so, the relationship between form and meaning
is respected, and Becker expresses the significance of this approach:
"this means that a whole is not the sum of its parts (if by 'parts'
we mean only the isolated segments), but only of its parts plus their
relationships" (33).
Scott's analysis was also very like Rodgers' theory of "stadia of
discourse," or semantic structures that can operate independently
of paragraph indentation. In fact, regarding Rodgers' stadia theory, affinity
is too weak a word, as Scott had identified such stadia by nearly the
exact definition, and for the exact reasons, that Rodgers did some 70
years later.4 Both Rodgers and Scott viewed the paragraph as it was originally
conceived, as a punctuation device more emphatic than the period, but
which, like the period, can be inserted in a variety of places within
the flow of the discourse. The decision to punctuate with a period is
not dictated by grammatical mechanics, as a writer may choose to group
any number of ideas within a sentence by means of coordinate and subordinate
clauses, and in doing so interprets that group of ideas as unified. So
it is with paragraphing. Rodgers stated that the paragraph works, "as
does all punctuation, as a gloss upon the overall literary process [.
. .]. To compose is to create; to indent is to interpret" (43), and
we might add that all punctuation fulfills a rhetorical role of interpretation,
aside from its grammatical role. Both Rodgers and Scott perceived the
essay as a flow of thought, which is interrupted at certain points through
paragraphing in order to signal what Rodgers called "a noteworthy
break in the flow of discourse" (41), and which Scott explained thus:
The essay is the result of a sustained movement of the writer's thought
toward a definite goal, but within this large development several intermediate
steps are discoverable. The thought, on its way to the main conclusion,
passes through many stages of transition, attains many minor conclusions,
pauses for many retrospective glances. (28) (italics mine)
I italicize "discoverable" in this quote because, for Scott,
segmentation of the flow of discourse through paragraphing is not governed
by the discourse itself, any more than the decision to end a sentence
is necessarily governed by the end of one idea and the beginning of another.
The writer discovers where he wants to indent, given his interpretation
of the level of import of each stadium of thought, just as an orator pauses
in order to emphasize a point he considers especially cogent to his larger
intentions. That is, he wishes to give certain ideas emphasis over others,
and this decision is not always based on any logical necessities in dividing
ideas into discrete units, as Bain and his followers would have it, but
rather on the importance of the content within it, as it pertains to the
purposes of the larger composition. Thus Rodgers reaches this conclusion:
About all we can usefully say of all paragraphs at present is that their
authors have marked them off for special consideration as stadia of discourse,
in preference to other stadia, other patterns, in the same material. "At
this point," the writer tells us with his indentation, "a major
stadium of discourse has just been completed. Rest of a moment, recollect
and consider, before the next begins." But his decision to indent
may be taken for any one (or more) of at least half a dozen different
reasons. (42)
Thus the function of the paragraph is to signal what both Scott and Rodgers
termed "stadia" of discourse, but as both noted, these stadia
do not necessarily correspond to indentation. As Rodgers noted, the reasons
to indent are manifold, and can be located outside of the decision to
mark prose with paragraphing according to the logical laws of a "unified
idea." They can be guided by the physical requirements of a print-era
rhetoric, such as the need to break up a long unit of discourse into shorter
paragraphs to satisfy the reader's eye, who might be put off by the sight
of a long paragraph; or alternatively, a number of short stadia might
be grouped into one paragraph, in order to prevent the development from
appearing anemic. Rythmic considerations may also prompt an author to
indent, as may shifts in tone. In addition, Rodgers definition makes clear
the original concept of the paragraph mark as it appears in Greek manuscript-a
mark intended to show closure, a place to pause, rather than a beginning.5
Scott made clear that paragraphing is used to mark the closure of "intermediate
steps" within the flow of thought (which he also referred to as "natural
articulations"). However, as did Rodgers, he also noted that "[t]he
mechanical paragraphing does not always represent every joint in the structure
of the essay" (28). It is up to the writer to decide just which "joints"
he wishes to accentuate by indentation, just as it is up to the orator
to decide when to accentuate a point by a changing his intonation or pausing
for emphasis. Scott illustrated the paragraphing options open to the writer
with the following diagram and explanation:
______________________________________
(will place
diagram here)
______________________________________
A, B, and C here represent the more important stadia of the developing
thought, the small letters, the partial conclusions. The vincula above
show the three methods of paragraphing. Many variations of the third method
might of course be adopted, according to the kind of discourse and the
varying degrees of subordination of the minor articulations. (29)
This examination of the discourse stadium reveals the nature of the paragraph
as more than a discrete unit that can be analyzed via "some Procrustean
formula for governing the behavior of sentences between breaks, and to
insist upon applying it over and over again throughout written discourse,"
to quote Rodgers' assessment of Bain's paragraphing rules (41). Instead,
the paragraph is developed according to the needs of the larger composition,
or as Scott expressed it, "[i]t is the business of the paragraph,
as a section of the essay, to develop a specific subject by bringing particular
facts into their due relation to the theme of the whole essay" (29).
Ironically, although Paragraph-Writing served to cement the current-traditionalist
curriculum, Scott can be seen as a forebear of the process view of composition.
As one of the founders of the National Council of Teachers of English
(NCTE) in 1911, Scott fought against the practice of issuing entrance
exams, which had been enacted as a result of the Harvard Reports; and
criticized the rigid pedagogies that such exams encouraged, insisting
that an emphasis on error-hunting and technical competency elevates matters
that are subsidiary to the central role of composition. Unlike the current-traditionalists,
who saw technical correctness as the litmus test for middle class status,
Scott saw the development of thought and communication through composition
as central in preparing students for participation in a democratic society.
As Corbett and Conners remark, "Scott drew a strong distinction between
a system that tests or grades a composition for administrative purposes
and that which evaluates it as a stage in a pupil's progress"; and
Scott asserted that the "lay[ing] hold of the student as an individual
is, for composition work, simply indispensible" (Corbett and Conners
534). His preferred solution to the exceedingly high student-teacher ratios
of his time was to lower the ratio, but given the realistic situation
of composition instruction, offered Paragraph-Writing as a pragmatic instructional
path.
The end of Scott's participation in rhetoric essentially curtailed any
significant intellectual interest in composition theory. Scott's rhetoric
department was dissolved only two years after his retirement, and English
departments did not seriously attempt to develop a rhetoric doctorate
for some time Instead, the task of composition instruction fell mainly
to graduate students and service employees, a situation which persists
in many universities to this day (Corbett and Conners 535).
Fittingly, the current-traditionalist view of the paragraph did not meet
any serious scrutiny until the 1960s, when academia's acquiescence to
the needs of corporate America was becoming uncomfortable, and political
dissent was increasing. At this time, the humanities were steeped in existentialism,
rendering the practice of extracting ethical maxims from literature and
philosophy exceedingly problematic. And, this was the Cold War era, and
a time when increasing globalization was taxing communication among disparate
cultures. Meanwhile, the secular pieties of scientific dogma were being
undermined by Thomas Kuhn, who proposed that science is hardly pure of
cultural and political concerns.
Composition theorists were hardly immune to the tenor of these times,
and if the scientistic university of the late 19th century prompted a
change in teaching composition, so did questions raised against it in
the 1960s. The precepts of current-traditional rhetoric-that the composer
is in possession of unassailable scientific and ethical truths, which
she can set forth to a merely interested audience-were increasingly perceived
as untenable. The two theorists who most powerfully shaped the philosophy
behind process theory, Kenneth Burke and Kenneth Pike, reassessed the
classical considerations of rhetoric that had been ignored by the current-traditionalists.
Burke and Pike's concerns regarding rhetoric were political and social,
and as such they took seriously the need to develop communication techniques
that could bind together peoples of disparate concerns and cultures. Both
perceived the need for a new rhetoric capable of addressing the communication
challenges of an increasingly global, post World War II climate, and both
perceived the need for a rhetoric capable of surpassing even the Aristotelian
goal of persuasion. Burke was highly suspicious of the prevailing notion
that science is objective and pure of social and political agendas. Burke
named the goal for a 20th century rhetoric "identification"
rather than persuasion, and the difference between the new rhetoric and
the classical one can be located in the need to not just move an audience,
but to move the speaker as well. That is, the goal of communication, and
thus composition, became one of inquiry, and as such, invention took on
greater import.
The catch-word of the 1960s rhetorician was "discovery," as
opposed to the reporting role that Berlin notices in current-traditional
writing assignments of the late 19th century. The rhetorical role of the
writer in the discovery process is altogether different from that of the
reporter, and his audience is not the passive audience looking to be informed.
Nor is the audience conceived of as in classical rhetoric, that is, as
an other to be persuaded. In process rhetoric, the audience can often
be identified as none other than the writer herself, who looks for the
best possible reasons for reaching a provisional truth, as in Aristotelian
rhetoric, or even as a Platonic quest for truth, as Gage asserts. As such,
the writing, as an investigation, becomes increasingly inductive by necessity;
and the role of writing shifts from a finished product designed to inform,
persuade, or argue a point with an audience as other; and toward a synthetic,
or dialectical, search for truth in the author's own mind.
The attack of Bain's paragraphing rules in the 1960s resulted, on one
level, from the long overdue recognition that his rules do not adequately
describe the varieties of paragraphs that are used in good writing. On
another level, however, they can be perceived as a recognition that an
insistence on the deductive paragraph is unsuitable to a rhetoric that
emphasizes identification between composer and audience, and which views
the act of writing as inquiry-led, rather than setting forth. In an "identification"
rhetoric, the insistence on deductive paragraphing, and thus deductive
form, is ill-suited for two reasons. For one, inductive form is more persuasive
to the audience, particularly for an audience who does not share the social
and political assumptions of the author. For another, induction is the
process by which the writer discovers her own meaning, and such meaning
is increasingly seen as something that is developed through the writing
process, not prior to it. In such a view, writing as process is writing
as invention; it is epistemic in itself, rather than the vehicle for setting
forth knowledge.
The Contemporary
Situation
From the perspective of our times, current-traditional theory can thus
be seen as a sort of dark age in rhetoric, and since the 1960s, a number
of approaches have been developed to address writing as a more vital,
epistemic activity. In his Writing Instruction in the 19th Century American
College, Berlin identified three contemporary approaches to composition
theory which attempt to overstep the current-traditional approach, and
to move writing instruction away from the limitations of teaching form.
They share an awareness, according to Berlin, that "[w]hen we teach
students to write, we are teaching more than an instrumental skill. We
are teaching a mode of conduct, a way of responding to experience"
(86). Each in their own way work to derail the paragraph prescriptions
that continue to dominate freshman rhetorics. These three approaches are
1) the classical, 2) the expressionistic, and 3) the new rhetoric.6
The first of these approaches-the classical-attempts to return writing
to its aims in classical rhetoric; specifically, as an art of public discourse
that readies the student to participate in the decision-making processes
of a democracy. While the current-traditional approach considers the audience
only in terms of its rational capacities, classical rhetoric considers
the audience's emotional stance and social reality (Berlin 88). Corbett's
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student7 is a composition rhetoric based
on the classical approach, which analyzes choices in writing according
to their effect on the audience rather than accentuating correctness in
grammar and structure, and as such differs radically from most composition
textbooks on the market. This difference extends to the consideration
of the paragraph. For one thing, its section dealing with arrangement
does not break down formal requirements by paragraphs, as most contemporary
rhetorics and handbooks do. The modern-traditional prescripts of unity,
coherence and development are conspicuously absent. Instead, paragraphing
is relegated to a small subsection of style, and is explained in its original,
pre-Bainian sense; that is, as a typographical device-a punctuation mark
more pronounced than the period-and like all typographical marks, conceived
as the written equivalent of intonation and used to facilitate reading,
or to "mark the shifts in the development of thought and indicate
the relationship of the parts" (369). Thus paragraphing functions
as a guide to interpretation, recalling Rodger's dictum, "To compose
is to create; to indent is to interpret" (Rodgers 43).
For Corbett, paragraph length, or "density," is primarily a
stylistic consideration. "Many considerations, of course, dictate
whether paragraphs will be long or short-the subject matter, the occasion,
the audience" (369). The need for paragraph development, however,
is not ignored. While Corbett attends to the various justifications for
the one- or two-sentence paragraph, such as the need for transition or
emphasis, he does note the probable reason for many short paragraphs in
student essays: "Many of the one- and two-sentence paragraphs that
students write have no rhetorical justification whatever. Such short paragraphs
simply reveal that the students have not developed their thoughts adequately"
(369). His answer is to return to the topics, which is, of course, one
point on which the current-traditionalist and the classicist agree. And
as such, paragraph pedagogy becomes an occasion for invention in both
approaches. The difference lies in Corbett's concept of the paragraph
as a rhetorical marker, with the level of development dependent on the
occasion it serves, rather than on any requirements of the paragraph per
se.
While Berlin distinguishes between the "expressionist" and "new"
rhetoric approaches to writing instruction, he does admit that the distinction
can become tenuous at the ideological level, and imperceptible in the
classroom (91). Both are concerned primarily with writing as a vehicle
by which the writer discovers her own truths, and as such both are less
concerned with the audience's response to the composition than is classical
rhetoric. Adherents to the new rhetoric as identified by Berlin have all
been identified as process pedagogues, and he names Becker, Pike, and
Young as proponents of this approach. Here, the writing process is seen
as a dialectical "means of arriving at truth," as Berlin puts
it, and the role of language in this arrival is crucial. (91) In the expressionistic
approach "[t]he focus is on the individual's private struggle to
arrive at truth" which is "conceived as a result of a private
vision that must be constantly consulted in writing" (88-89).8 The
difference between the two in Berlin's schema is the role of language:
in the new rhetoric, truth is essentially constructed within the language
act; in the expressionistic rhetoric, language leads us to a truth that
exists outside of language. But the pedagogical ramifications of both
are similar, and for my purposes they can be united in that, first, composition
is seen as essentially inductive, or a search for conclusions; and second,
the primary audience is the writer. As such, the two approaches tend to
disregard the prescriptive teaching of structure, and have done little
to address such issues as paragraphing rules.
These three composition approaches, the classical, new, and expressionistic,
offer ideological stances regarding the teaching of composition that return
to the emphasis on good writing as good thinking. But as anyone who teaches
composition knows, current-traditional pedagogy is still very much alive.
The circumstances in which the topic-led, or deductive, paragraph became
the norm are still in place. The "why Johnny can't write" inquiries
that solidified the current-traditional approach to writing in the late
19th century still abound and are the subject of political debates and
pressure on secondary schools in the form of proficiency exams, and thus
students entering the university have usually been trained via a current-traditional
approach. Prospective employers, and even many professors both inside
and outside of English departments, still expect the same outcome from
composition classes: that the students be prepared to expound upon bodies
of information that they receive more or less passively, and to organize
that information into a given, largely formulaic structure. The scientistic
model of education still prevails, with education seen largely as an accumulation
of knowledge. As long as this model persists, composition will remain
marginalized.
Even in the university English department, the advantages of the current-traditional
approach are much the same now as they were in 1900. Composition classrooms,
often the only places where freshman university students are treated as
individuals, are still led mostly by graduate students or service employees,
who are given the task of attending to a large body of student writing
for very little money or prestige, and who are expected to raise their
students' writing to a competency standard in the course of a semester
or two. The current-tradition's prescriptive rules are highly teachable,
and freshman English textbooks still include them. Maxine Hairston's Contemporary
Composition, for instance, contains a 37-page chapter on paragraphs that
follows current-traditional rules quite faithfully.
Yet however much Hairston's composition textbook emphasizes a current-traditional
approach to paragraph development, she also understood the problems inherent
in the approach. In an 1986 article, she addressed the split personality
evident in many composition classrooms by identifying two different types
of writing, which she calls Class II and Class III writing (Class I writing
being "short memos and brief notes"). She defines Class III
writing as "[e]xtended REFLECTIVE writing in which the writer discovers
much of his or her thought during the writing process." Class II
writing includes "research reports, technical papers, laboratory
reports, case studies, or summaries and analyses of assigned readings";
and such writing is "SELF-LIMITING; that is, before the writer begins
to write, she already knows most of what she is going to write or she
can easily retrieve the content from memory or known sources" ("Different"
95). Clearly, Hairston is making a distinction between the current-traditional
and the new (or expressionistic or process) approaches.
Hairston notes that while composition instructors often prefer to assign
Class III writing, it is inevitably less teachable. In Class II writing,
one can "show students how to outline a paper for which they know
the content, show them how to start a paragraph with a topic sentence
and downshift into examples [. . .]"; however, she believes that
this sort of advice is not applicable to Class III writing: "Class
III writing is much harder to teach because we have no working prescriptions
for it and often cannot describe [. . .] just how one goes about discovering,
organizing, and then restructuring material" (ibid. 100-101).
As Hairston correctly notes, many students prefer Class II writing. It
is more practical, as it will be used throughout their academic and professional
careers, and it follows, after all, the structuring advice of their composition
rhetorics. Further, as Hairston also notes, students don't like Class
III writing because it's risky. Moving from inductive investigation to
deductive presentation is much more time consuming, and there's no guarantee
that the writer will make it to interesting and coherent conclusions,
no guarantee of a good finished product at the end. It's a lot more work
with a lot less surety of a decent grade.
While it is true that sometimes, when a student ventures to write well
by thinking well and reaching her own conclusions, the writing structure
actually improves, perhaps because her thinking has deepened, and the
connections made among ideas are often more carefully and strategically
considered. However, this is not always, or even often, the case. Papers
appear that seem to be honest attempts to fulfill the assignment, but
the work is, on the whole, inchoate and structurally incoherent. The writer
has attempted to think through the topic and develop a stance, but has
not been able to, in the week or two that she has been given to complete
the assignment, create a clear and linear explication of her position.
One might say that the writing has succeeded as a process, but failed
as a product; or that the student has made some progress in regard to
invention, but has failed to reach any certain conclusions, and has therefore
been unable to proceed to effective arrangement.
In speaking of Class III writing, Hairston uses adjectives such as "romantic,"
"original, "expressive" and "creative"; as with
the term "expressionistic," such language makes it sound like
something very artsy is going on in the classroom, and we cannot blame
our students, few of whom are interested in becoming artists, for shunning
such work. Given Irmscher's analogies of the writer as either "a
sculptor who finds form while sculpting" or "a bricklayer who
piles bricks to construct a wall," most students prefer the bricklaying
approach. Compared to Class II writing, the whole process of bringing
Class III writing to completion is described in mystifying terms.
Perhaps for this reason, Berlin proposes renaming "new" writing
"epistemic," and "expressionistic" writing "Platonic"
("Rhetoric" 88-89)-that is, the point of such writing is not
to produce some beautiful work of art, after all, but to return writing
to a central role in an educational process that emphasizes the ability
to decide the best reasons for a particular stance on issues that have
alternative stances. The lingering association of "Class III"
writing (to sidestep the various and constantly proliferating terms for
writing that is essentially reflective and investigative) with artistic,
or literary, writing is perhaps the most debilitating point against it.
Most likely the association persists because Blair conflated composition
with the study of belles lettres, and because composition instructors
are trained in literature more than anything. This association prevents
writing teachers, as well as professors throughout the university, from
recognizing such writing as central to the educational process, and as
central to critical thinking skills as it is to "creativity"-at
least to creativity as defined in a narrow, artistic sense.
Instead of viewing composition instruction as a "how to" course
to produce a competent final product, which is, essentially, the purpose
behind current-traditional instruction, composition can be viewed as a
workplace in which students develop stances on issues that have no clear-cut
answers. In such a classroom, reading and classroom discussion is not
geared to imparting facts, but to identifying controversies and exercising
critical thinking, which the students work out in the writing process.
Evaluation of writing is geared less to the final product, and more to
its role in the student's progress in developing and refining independent
thought-an insight that we can attribute to Scott, or for that matter,
Blair or Aristotle, or even and more particularly to that ancient enemy
of rhetorical study, Plato. Thus instructors such as Gage would evaluate
a thick stack of drafts instead of a thin stack of finished products,
and writing could be assessed as documentation of the student's progress
as a thinker first, and a writer second.
When such an approach is proposed, the final product is devalued by necessity.
First of all, accentuating the final product booby-traps the process:
if the bottom line is to find a stance and explicate it, and yet evaluation
emphasizes structural considerations, few students are going to go after
the hard work of developing one to any extent: easier to take a ready-made
stance, whether that be the instructor's or the student's own knee-jerk
response. And second of all, what is the practical purpose of developing
such critical thinking into a finished product? After all, in the real
world of industry, where most of our students are going, they won't be
asked to produce finished products that entail much "Class III"
writing. They'll be writing memos and progress reports and technical reports,
and all that is covered under technical writing, and rightly so. Class
II writing is also largely sufficient for research reports written for
classes outside of the freshman English class. If the purpose of freshman
English is to develop such skills, then we should be having our students
do technical writing, as composition theorists such as Linda Flower propose.
In all such writing, Bain's paragraph is ideal, and the current-traditional
approach is sufficient to the task.
So why ask for Class III writing? It's the same question that Gage asked
when he titled his essay "Why Write?" One answer is that the
scientistic model of education is showing signs of wear. As Stanley Fish
notes in "Rhetoric,"
As I write, the fortunes of rhetorical man are on the upswing, as in discipline
after discipline there is evidence of what has been called the interpretive
turn, the realization (at least for those it seizes) that the givens of
any field of activity-including the facts it commands, the procedures
it trusts in, and the values it expresses and extends-are socially and
politically constructed, are fashioned by man rather than delivered by
God or Nature. (128)
Composition was once the cornerstone of education because it developed
the ability to enter into the decision-making responsibilities of citizens
in the social and political spheres, who needed to form stances in situations
where knowledge could only be provisional. Rhetoric was central because
it dealt with knowledge that is socially and politically constructed,
and education involved the consideration of such provisional knowledge.
As even scientific knowledge is increasingly seen as provisional and culture-bound,
and created within the purview of language, university departments outside
of English are increasingly emphasizing the value of writing in their
own disciplines, evidenced by movements toward across-the-curriculum writing
programs. As education in all departments increasingly accentuates critical
thinking over the accumulation of information, the connection between
writing and learning must, or at least should, strengthen. Holding to
the view that composition has a primarily expository purpose, taught by
current-traditional prescriptions that emphasize style over content, is
insufficient to the task that writing instruction needs to hold throughout
the university. What we do in freshman composition classes could well
define the position of English departments in the future.
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Rodgers, Paul C., Jr. "A Discourse-Centered Rhetoric of the Paragraph."
College Composition and Communication, XVII.1 (Feb. 1966). Rpt. in The
Sentence and the Paragraph. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English,
n.d. 39-48.
Scott, Fred N. and Joseph V. Denney. "Laws and Theory of the Paragraph."
Paragraph-Writing. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1894. Rpt. in The
Paragraph in Context. Ed. Virginia M. Burke. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1969. 23-29.
Notes
1 As Virginia M. Burke pointed out in her 1967 essay, "The Paragraph:
Dancer in Chains," expository prose from the 17th through the 19th
century shows an unclear distinction between the paragraph and the sentence
on the one hand, and the paragraph and the section on the other. In the
18th century, writers such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson often composed
in one to two sentence paragraphs; along with earlier prose stylists such
as Lyly, Spenser and Walton, they often devised paragraphs of one extremely
long sentence, and it is perhaps this practice that led Bain to consider
the paragraph as analogous to the sentence. However, other writers, including
Richard Hooker of the 16th century through James Russell Lowell of the
19th, tended to conceive of paragraphs as analogous to entire sections,
and wrote extremely long paragraphs-sometimes over 2,000 words in Lowell's
case (38).
2 See "A Tagmemic Approach to Paragraph Analysis," in which Becker extends the tagmemic approach to sentence analysis to the paragraph, and identifies a variety of patterns possible in paragraph development.
3 In her
introduction to The Paragraph in Context, (5) Virginia M. Burke cites
E.H. Lewis, the late 19th century historian of the paragraph, who found
a sixth century manuscript that included paragraphing in quotations. However,
according to Lewis's findings, the modern paragraph, with the printers
em marking the beginning of the paragraph, was not in evidence until 1482.
4 Interestingly enough, Rodgers did cite Scott and Denney, along with
a great many other paragraph theorists in his essay, "A Discourse-Centered
Rhetoric of the Paragraph," but he did not cite Scott as the originator
of the concept of stadia of thought as distinguishable from the paragraph.
Yet Rodgers' theory of discourse stadia is identical to Scott's, and this
fact is obvious when one compares Scott's diagram, p. 23 above, to one
illustrating Rodgers' stadia of discourse theory, as explained by his
colleague, Francis Christensen (53). (In this diagram, "S" groups
stand for stadia and "P" groups stand for paragraphs.)
______________________________________
Case I SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
PPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
Case IIa
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS or IIb SSSS SSSSS SSSSSS
PPPPP PPPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
Case III
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
PPPPP PPPPPPPP PPPPPPPP PPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPPP
______________________________________
5 Virginia M. Burke points this out in her introduction to The Paragraph in Context (5): "The paragraph graphic mark or signal, the oldest in Greek manuscripts, first appeared as a horizontal stroke, sometimes with a dot over it, just below the first two or three letters of a line to indicate that a sentence or some larger unit of discourse was closing in the underscored line."
6 In his 1988 essay, "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class," Berlin renames "new" rhetoric "social-epistemic," and emphasizes in this approach the writer's realization of her standing in her economic and social situation.
7 The fourth edition, which I am using, is co-authored by Robert J. Conners.
8 Berlin cites William Coles, Jr., Ken Macrorie, James E. Miller and Stephan Judy, and Ronald Stewart, as proponents of such an approach.