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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Where Are Rhetoric and Composition Going?

Where are their heads at?


The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a professional organization dedicated to composition, pedagogy, and rhetoric in higher education. Its mission statement underscores knowledge, professional development for teachers, and literacy in the United States. These are traditional, straightforward aims, but when you examine the balance of attention paid at the main event of CCCC, the annual convention, several other concerns emerge.

Here is a listing of the 2006 conference, with a breakdown of sessions by topic. Some of the titles are surprising, but more so is the relative distribution of sessions. One might think that the topic “Basic Writing” would attract the largest number of sessions, but the Topic Index lists only six of them (“What to Do Next: Strategies for Helping Underprepared Students,” “Mainstreaming Basic Writing: Addressing Institutional Goals and Students’ Needs,” etc.). The next category is “Disabilities,” and it gathers twice as many (“Inventing [DIS]topia: Rhetorics of Un[DIS]iplined Agency,” “Not by Accident: Doing Something About Suffering,” etc.).

“ESL and Generation 1.5” also collects 12 sessions (“American Academic Writing for ESL Graduate Students in Technical Fields,” etc.). But “Feminism, Gender, Sexual Orientation” dwarfs it with 30 entries (“Alternative Rhetorics: Postcolonial, Race, Womanist,” “Queering the Composition Classroom”; etc.).

“Activist Rhetorics” lists 30 sessions as well, including “McCarthyism, Scapegoating, and Progressive Resistance: New Tensions, New Visions,” “Creating the Radical Center: Addressing Politics, Publics, and Pedagogies,” and “Wars With Words: Rhetorical Strategies for the Justification of War.” But what wins the attention race, with 71 entries, is “Race, Ethnicity, and Culture.” Among the titles: “Confronting Racism and Classism,” “Allying Against Institutional Racism: Teaching About Whiteness in Predominantly White Institutions,” and “Disturbing the Peace: Hip-Hop as Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy.”

Some of the entries receive duplicate listings because of their mixed content, but the balance of focus is clear. At the 4Cs, identity and politics are hot, the technical aspects of language and writing cool. I have no doubt that while many of these panel sessions were interesting and informative, many also ended up as tendentious exercises. But that’s another issue.

From the perspective of people outside the composition establishment, the tilt away from basic writing matters looks troubling not because of problems with bias or politicization or personalization (the heavy racial and sexual identity focus), but because of legitimacy. Do composition/rhetoric experts really wish to ground their place on campus with disquisitions about racial and sexual identity? Do they really believe that people across the disciplines will take them seriously when they deliver talks on “Labor Power: Reclaiming Marxism as a Guide to (Rhetorical) Action”?

Image from Flickr user Ross Angus

Posted at 11:08:30 AM on January 28, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. Please do your homework before posting comments about something outside your discipline. “Basic Writing” is a sub-discipline within Composition Studies and has nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of writing as you imply. Furthermore, I suggest you dig deeper than titles of conference presentations as a basis for an attack on Composition Studies. However, the titles are revealing and yes many of us do ground ourselves in ways you seem to find ridiculous.

    — Trish Jenkins · Jan 28, 03:05 PM · #

  2. Isn’t it a commonsense principle of intellectual integrity that books not be judged by their covers? I’m not sure I learned everything I needed to know in kindergarten, but I’m sure we covered the book covers thing.

    How about a moratorium on the tired practice of lamenting the decline of Western Civilization after a thumb-through of a convention program?

    — Paul Lynch · Jan 28, 03:10 PM · #

  3. Just like any other academic field, members of ours engage in a wide range of research and scholarship. I’m not sure why that’s a problem. I guessing (and yes, it’s just a guess) that Mark Bauerlein is among those who believe the writing teachers should shut up and teach grammar and paragraph skills, and not get too big for our britches.

    Beyond that, what happens at CCCC is hardly the end-all-be-all of our discipline and its agenda—just as with any other meeting of any other professional organization. What happens at MLA (or in any of the MLA publications) isn’t the end of all things for literary study either.

    — Seth Kahn · Jan 28, 03:19 PM · #

  4. One response to where rhetoric and composition are going can be found in Richard Miller’s excellent 7-minute Youtube post, given to the Rutger University’s Board of Governors last week: http://www.youtube.com/watchv=z65V2yKOXxM. You’ll find it an informative complement to your reading of the 2006 convention program.

    — Martha Townsend · Jan 28, 03:20 PM · #

  5. I’m sure if we breezed through the titles of literature conference panels, we could come up with more than a few complaints of irrelevance. But we’d be wrong (as Bauerlein would probably point out), because titles don’t really communicate the scope and aims of a discipline.

    Discussions of race, queer theory, Marxism, etc. have a place in rhetoric and composition, just as they do in literature. Just because Bauerlein hasn’t yet learned what that place is, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to wait for him to catch up.

    Mark, please do some research on the discipline before defining it narrowly and then expressing disappointment when it doesn’t fit your definition.

    — Mike Garcia · Jan 28, 03:24 PM · #

  6. I’m curious why this person choose 2006 for discussion when the 2007 and 2008 programs are available. Do they not support this argument, so he felt the need to dig until he found evidence that did?

    Also, I just want to reiterate that Basic Writing is a particular kind of teaching for a particular kind of classroom. Those in our field know exactly what it means and what it does (and does) not purport to do.

    — Nels P. Highberg · Jan 28, 03:24 PM · #

  7. There is so much in your ‘piece’ upon which to pontificate. But I’ll stick to ‘basic writing’ since you tend to be biased about the purpose of composition pedagogy. When you say: “I have no doubt that while many of these panel sessions were interesting and informative, many also ended up as tendentious exercises. But that’s another issue”…this tendency to be biased that, you said, is exercised at CCCC…leads me to think you have a problem with the ‘race’ for attention to race. However, rather than come to such a biased opinion without proof, as you do about many sessions at CCCC, I choose not to tend to think that about you.

    — Cynthia Haynes · Jan 28, 04:43 PM · #

  8. I heartily second the comments above, and would also remind Bauerlein that the discipline of rhetoric has its roots not (at least not primarily) in the teaching of grammar (historically a separate discipline), but in the teaching of argumentation, persuasion, and critical skills that prepare students to participate in what the Greeks called the agora and what we now variously call the public sphere, democratic politics, or civil society. It is because many of us ground our scholarship in this tradition that we take on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and current events—topics which shape the public sphere in which we encourage our students to participate through their writing. Good writing involves understanding the ideas, concepts, and ideologies that shape contemporary arguments about these and other issues, the audiences that advance these arguments, and possible strategies for engaging in these debates—not just in the proper use of semi-colons.

    — Jordynn Jack · Jan 28, 04:49 PM · #

  9. Very original. I’ve never seen an op-ed piece take conference presentation titles out of context. I applaud Professor Bauerlein and The Chronicle for originality.

    — Bill DeGenaro · Jan 28, 05:05 PM · #

  10. This is about the fourth or fifth jeremiad I’ve read in which the author seeks to prove the decline of some area of the Humanities (including literature) by scanning a conference program and concluding that all’s tragically gone to ruin. Would it be too much to ask that the authors of such lamentations take the novel step of actually going to one of the conferences in question, and perhaps listening to just a few papers?

    That might not change minds, but the critiques would be at least marginally more informed.

    — John Duffy · Jan 28, 05:09 PM · #

  11. 2006 Cs, huh? This wasn’t original or humorous when Bauerlein covered this ground for The Valve back in 2006. I’ve seen way funnier MLA send-ups, for example.
    But I would at least have hoped for material more recent than his last outing on this topic — never mind someone who had actually heard the presentations.
    I’m hoping The Chronicle will encourage its “Brainstorm” to deal with issues and events a bit more timely in the future.

    Or just cross-link their old blog posts.
    But maybe the recycle is meant as a sign of solidarity with the writer’s strike?

    — Melissa Ianetta · Jan 28, 07:08 PM · #

  12. Did you happen to notice that you are referencing the “Selected Topic Guide to Concurrent Sessions,” not a full list of sessions?

    — Charlie Lowe · Jan 28, 10:28 PM · #

  13. Yes, Melissa is right; Bauerlein has made this sorry lament before, down to repeating the titles of the presentations he never heard but finds “tendentious exercises.”

    — Bradley Dilger · Jan 28, 10:28 PM · #

  14. The very linguistic core of writing—topic and comment on topic—involves nearly every sentence every person makes in assuming certain framings of a topic and these assumed framings come out indirectly in the comments expressed on those topics. This hidden layer of assumed framings, not explicitly expressed, but indirectly expressed via how a comment “frames” its topic, causes all writing to feel sneaky. Writing at its core conceals its hidden layer of framings—comments enact frames not made explicit in the same sentence.

    Indeed, you can find, today, in many communities a new way of writing emerging—where frames, topics, and comments are all three made explicit from the beginning of each sentence. This is writing like the following example sentence: “I, being male, seek out and applaud the aggressive mission-oriented nature of the topic—small group dynamics in family celebration settings—that is, I applaud “arranging” seating and celebration events so as to manipulate people present—however, others, not being male like me, find that manipulative celebration arrangements do real harm in that they distract participants from sharing intimacy in bottom up free form emergent formats of interacting.” This type of writing is, at best, clumsy, but it has the virtue of making the writer’s judgement of his/her limiting frames of reference up front, explicit, rather than sneaky and hidden.

    Many of those criticized in the piece above for interest in the gender, racial, professional and other rhetorics in writing, are trying to develop this new way of writing that injects frames into the duo of topic and comment to make a frame/topic/comment trio new way of writing. I think this is a fine and interesting experiment and enjoy watching people actually change how they think and write in response to it.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Jan 29, 06:42 AM · #

  15. Of course, you’re right — “writing” as an area of supposed specialization was always conceptualized by most people as a service activity for important disciplines, because of the trend of modernity to objectify meaning and signification by separating it from its generation. This is why so many now considered to be “literature” professors are reviled by those “writing” instructors who think it’s all just snobbery and vestigial status that works against them. Writing instructors sell out to get a job and then test principles of academic freedom by writing and speaking about matters no one has ever expected them to write or speak about. People who want writing instructors over literature professors want helpmates for casting in language their important yet inarticulate abstractions. They don’t want intellectuals or cultural critics, and this has nothing to do with the quality of intellectul activity or cultural criticism writing instructors at conferences such as the 4C’s may exhibit.

    — Jesse · Jan 29, 07:26 AM · #

  16. When these pieces criticizing Composition and Rhetoric show up in newspapers, they are upsetting, but we’re used to them.

    Others have it worse. No matter where the Pop Culture Association has its conference each year, there is an article in every local paper that looks incredulously through their presentation titles.

    The impact is buffered when these critiques come in a newspaper. In a way, the rhetorical gesture is: we the taxpayers fund education, and this is what we are paying for? We expect that the media should launch such critiques, we want to be held responsible, we respect transparency.

    When this comes from a fellow academic, it’s the same gesture, but it is so much different coming from this location.

    What I get here is a feeling that comes over me every so often — but perhaps altogether too often.
    It’s the feeling that other academics believe that they have some ownership, beyond an interest, in what we do as teachers of writing. We are to provide a service—more than this, we are to do so quietly, given whatever intellectual space we are granted.

    I suppose we can take some satisfaction in the fact that his protesting lands squarely in the realm of “doth do so too much”. Any nervousness about the strength of our field (given our steady stream of jobs, our intellectual growth, our interdisciplinary breadth and depth, and so on) there, friend?

    I repeat this rhetorical question for “Jesse.” And I add a few more:
    Writing “instructors” sell out to get a job? And then test principles of academic freedom? I guess there’s been a lot of selling out in recently in composition and rhetoric, for the nearly three hundred tenure-track lines each year? Will you let us know when you grant us full academic freedom? We’ve been waiting for your okay.

    Finally, we, as rhetoricians, know that Professor Bauerlein has vastly misunderstood his audience. Who, reading the Chronicle, could he have not offended? What good academic would really argue against the legitimacy of feminist, critical race, disability studies, and other critical engagements?

    Jay Dolmage
    Assistant Professor of English
    West Virginia University

    — Jay Dolmage · Jan 29, 09:20 AM · #

  17. Well, we touched a nerve, didn’t we? I am certain that with this much fervor, we will see great progress in student writing.

    — francofou · Jan 29, 09:40 AM · #

  18. Prof. Dolmage: few ‘good academics’ would argue against the legitimacy of feminist, critical race, disability studies, and other critical engagements. Those are not, however, the ‘critical engagements’ that are necessarily of compelling interest to students and others beyond the ‘good academic’ bubble. My students are not disinterested in those topics, but they are more interested, in general, in other things—film, electronic media, athletics, religion, et al. The charges of ‘tendentious exercises’ arise because it is perceived that ‘good academics’ are pressing students to be interested in those things that interest them. To the degree that there is a political consensus on those issues, the perception arises that there is something like indoctrination (whether conscious or not) at work.

    Two questions—is there any evidence to support the notion that our students’ writing has demonstrably improved as a result of the efforts of rhet/comp research? Second, does current rhet/comp research pay due attention to the exciting work in neuroscience/evolutionary biology/language that focuses on the human brain and the ways in which it is constructed, has developed, and functions?

    — Observer · Jan 29, 09:44 AM · #

  19. Mark Bauerlein is correct in suggesting that rhetoric and composition pedagogy has increasingly focused on identity and (overwhelmingly leftist) politics over the last thirty years. Writing instructors who opt for heavy emphasis on rhetoric applied to current events issues can scarcely give adequate attention to remedying student deficiencies in grammar, logic, stylistics, rhetorical and literary figures, introductory classic literature, and the like.

    — J A DeLater · Jan 29, 09:53 AM · #

  20. How distressing it is to read so-called experts in rhetoric descend repeatedly into the logical fallacy of the ad hominem attack. These comments only serve to reify Bauerlein’s thesis and would suggest a highly insulated culture that does not tolerate dissent. While I rarely agree with Bauerlein, I am grateful that he has asked in a public forum the question many of us ask in private: what is the worth and utility of these conferences? I think Bauerlein’s use of the titles of the conferences is instructive. Conference attendees depend on these titles to map out their schedules. These titles also show up on candidate’s resumes. Graduate students and those on the job market look for trends in these conferences to market their niche in the profession. Thus, I would say that it is perfectly reasonable to make judgements both about the rhetors and the audiences based upon the conference programs. While some may not agree with Bauerlein’s conclusions, it is their responsibility to provide evidence and conclusions that further the debate, not shut it down.

    — Andrew · Jan 29, 09:59 AM · #

  21. Observer asks “is there any evidence to support the notion that our students’ writing has demonstrably improved as a result of the efforts of rhet/comp research?”

    Is there any evidence that research is political science has led to greater and more meaningful civic engagement among our students? While it is useful to ask how academic disciplines in the humanities have impacted the lived experience and cultural practices of students (how has literary studies informed reading practices?, etc.), it strike me as less productive to do so in ways that take easy, de-contextualized shots at entire disciplines.

    Observer also asks “does current rhet/comp research pay due attention to the exciting work in…” Great question. Yes, a good deal of scholarship in the field draws on various disciplines, including cognitive science and related fields, to understand complex phenomenon like the composing process.

    — Bill DeGenaro · Jan 29, 10:06 AM · #

  22. Thank you, Mr. DeGenaro. I’m not sure that the purpose of political science research is to promote civic engagement. Certainly that is not the central purpose. Presumably that is to understand political behavior. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we now understand much more about political behavior as a result of political science research. We certainly understand much more about human biology as a result of biological research. We certainly have a far greater grasp of the range, depth, and nature of human art as a result of the work of art historians. Do we really understand the writing process better because of rhet/comp research? My knowledge is limited to seeing rhet/comp c.v.‘s and rhet/comp grant proposals. Most of what I have seen is ephemeral, reportorial, autobiographical, pedagogical (in a very limited sense). There is a general impression that students do not write as well now as they once did. My guess is that that is because they do not write as much or as often as they once did. At the turn of the century Harvard students wrote every day. At the middle of the last century freshman students everywhere wrote every week, with a term paper at the end of the second semester. This is no longer the case. Is it the case that we learn to write by writing? Should the advocacy for more writing be a more prominent part of the rhet/comp faculty’s agenda than the advocacy for writing on specific, often political, subjects?

    — Observer · Jan 29, 10:21 AM · #

  23. The subject of any course in writing should be simply that. If students in the U.S. are ignorant about politics, then let the historians and social scientists strive to dissipate that ignorance. That kind of learning can then be combined with the writing-teacher’s goal, and the student will be rendered not only more knowledgeable and wise but articulate enough to show that she is and thus capable of putting her knowledge to use.

    We who teach writing must, of course, find subjects for students to write about, and so much the better if these topics are provocative and inspire learning and understanding in our students. It is no crime, moreover, if we are interested in these areas, and better yet if we actually know something about them –something in addition to what side we are drawn to in a controversy. Those topics, no matter how compelling and important, however, should not be the focus of a course in writing. Writing itself should be that focus.

    Given my druthers, I’ll prefer teaching Shakespeare to teaching composition whenever such a choice presents itself. When I choose Shakespeare, then I will dutifully teach that subject. When I teach composition, I will do so without transforming that kind of learning into something that I find more ascetically, or politically palatable or personally redemptive.

    — Peter D. Grudin · Jan 29, 10:34 AM · #

  24. One pedagogical tradition in the States (now sadly evanescent) that contributed greatly to students’ command of language and their ability to express themselves clearly and convincingly was the study of classical languages. . . .

    I wonder (yes, a bit facetiously) how many of the attendant 4C’s conference “specialists” in rhetorical theory and practice are even marginally competent in classical languages.

    — J A DeLater · Jan 29, 11:29 AM · #

  25. Mr. Bauerlein’s analysis of the 2006 (!) CCCC program seems to have stopped at page 37, at the end of the section listing sessions on Race, Identity and Culture and Activist Rhetorics. Had he continued, he’d have found more than 150 sessions on Practices of Teaching Writing, 80 on Composition Programs, 90 on Composition Theory, 50 on Research, and many, many more on professional issues affecting faculty and students in this discipline. Instead, he chose to create a straw man fallacy that, fortunately, is quite easy to knock down.

    — Bill Condon · Jan 29, 01:02 PM · #

  26. Observer, I applaud you for acknowledging the limits of your knowledge about rhet/comp. You didn’t really need to, but the gesture is appreciated. When you write about a “general impression that students do not write as well now as they once did,” I wonder when the once was that you refer to. You mention Harvard students writing every day at the turn of the century. One of the reasons they were asked to do so was a “general impression that students do not write as well now as they once did.” After the Civil War, it became increasingly difficult to keep students other than those boys whose wealthy families could afford to have them educated at private preparatory academies from attending college. Harvard responded with written examinations. The first one in English composition, given in 1874, was failed by exactly half of the students taking it (Norbert Eliot [2005], On a Scale, p. 11). The Golden Age of Error-Free Writing, if it ever happened, must have happened before there was ever an examination to support a claim for its existence.

    Of course it’s the case that we learn to write by writing. As a composition instructor, I can assure you that those stacks of papers we carry to and from class each day are indeed student writing. But if you’ve ever tried to write a paper without writing about something, you’ve surely found it a rather stifling exercise. The call to steer clear of political subjects at the close of your last post goes to the heart of this whole conversation. We certainly wouldn’t want the rabble to clutter their minds with political ideas, much less with learning to express them and debate about them, would we?

    — Jared Anthony · Jan 29, 01:33 PM · #

  27. Coming from another discipline entirely (although several close members of my family are/have been English teachers), I’m alternately amused and appalled by the comments made in response to Mark Bauerlein. When I read his blog, I saw it as a perhaps-useful caution to writing teachers to think twice about what they’re doing. Surely that’s in order—-in every discipline and at all times.

    But what I find in the Comments is a perfect storm of defensive invective and ad hominem attacks. He is neither a crank nor a journalist, but a sober and respected scholar. The kernel of truth around which Bauerlein weaves his words is entirely lost.

    There seems to be a consensus here that writing instructors are above criticism, and that the needs of society, of students, and of the university are quite irrelevant to whatever these instructors choose to do. I really can’t buy that—-for any discipline in the university.

    Is my own ox being gored? Well, yes, in a way. My discipline suffers the baneful effects of yours. I am constantly appalled at the writing level of too many students (including graduate students) in musicology. I do not believe that it is asking too much to think that they should be able to communicate clearly and logically in the English language. A generation ago, we said, “They can’t write because they can’t think.” I’m not sure they think much better now, but today there’s an additional cause: “they can’t write because they’ve never been taught.” Students whose writing courses have focused on feminist theory, gender studies, hip-hop, and other fashionable shiboleths can in fact NEITHER write NOR think clearly. Rather, what they have learned is to repeat uncritically the crank phrases and paranoid rantings they were taught.

    If writing teachers glory in a discipline which teaches students neither to write nor to think, if they glory in thumbing their collective noses at the rest of the academy and at society, so be it. As long as somebody is willing to continue funding them on those terms, Good Luck. But don’t be surprised when colleagues in other disciplines don’t take them quite seriously. Or when, in difficult fiscal times, some authority decides that this is a program they can no longer afford. And Bauerlein warned you.

    — bobthe musicologist · Jan 29, 09:31 PM · #

  28. Bob, it’s “if writing teachers glory in a discipline that teaches students neither to write nor to think.”

    So there’s you go. From a former writing instructor straight to you. Check out how to use restrictive and non-restrictive clauses.

    — Lion O · Jan 30, 05:38 AM · #

  29. Thanks, Mr. Anthony, for your comments on the state of university writing in the early 20thc. It may well be that there was never a golden age of writing, though most people are struck by the quality of the writing that they find in civil war-era letters, diaries, and journals. When students are not required to write often and at length, when they are not required to take foreign languages, when literature is studied for what it teaches re: race/gender/class, etc. rather than as artistic expression, and so on, there has to be an ultimate effect on writing. I would have no problem with students writing on political subjects (and I would most certainly not characterize them as rabble) if they were doing so in a politically-diverse environment. When they are asked to write on political subjects in a politically-monolithic environment, however, there is a strong likelihood that they will not engage with the issues, but, rather, tell the instructor what s/he wants to hear. That smacks of indoctrination.

    — Observer · Jan 30, 07:35 AM · #

  30. Lion O: Don’t be so dependent upon that historically specific mark known as the comma, when interpreting the writing of brilliant intellectuals, especially if you’re going to do something humiliating, like offer a silly yet haughtily expressed “correction,” a correction that disfigures the rhetorical force of a delightful and perfectly grammatical sentence. Glad to read you’re a former writing instructor. Do please retire from policing commas and clauses and take up reading — perhaps drawing on or developing further your experience with languages, including the history of modern and classical languages. There’s some writing there, and much of it is “good.”

    — Jesse · Jan 30, 08:06 AM · #

  31. To DeLater,

    I attended the 2006 4Cs conference, and I am competent in both Latin and Greek. In fact, I taught classical rhetoric in my composition courses and held a long track record of success in improving student writing at four different institutions.

    Unfortunately, I also toiled at the bottom of academia as an adjunct. In that time, I never once was offered a full-time position or received even an interview for one- despite my teaching success, despite publications, despite a Ph.D. from one of the top universities in the country. Time and again, I was passed over, not only because of my gender, sexual orientation, and race, but also because of my classical methods of instruction. Even so, you would think that when students were fighting to get in a certain professor’s classes, or that when that same professor was at the top of every statistical measure of teaching, or that when his classes made a noticeable improvement in the level of writing across the university, you’d think that someone would want to find out what exactly this professor was doing right. Instead, my peers were more interested in who gave papers at conferences like the 4Cs and which academic celebrity showed up there.

    You ask how many were competent in classical languages at the 2006 4Cs? Two, as far as I know: myself and some sweet old professor about to retire. We both left the conference, tired and very much depressed by what we had just witnessed.

    Make no mistake about it. The conference program that Bauerlein highlights is very much representative of the field as a whole. No one in good conscience would say otherwise. The same topics are taught in the classroom! But, as you can see from many posts here on this board, there are those in the profession who do not exactly tolerate criticism, nor do they consider viewpoints outside their peer groups.

    No good organization is ever run this way, but sadly I see no end to it, given the growing numbers of identity politicians and social activists. They hire and promote each other. They create their own self-serving standards, not just for hiring and promoting, but for writing as well. Once I started seeing routinely a new social criteria added for evaluating writing instruction, based on the teacher’s ability to instill community and social values in the classroom, I knew it was time to go. I’ve opted out, and there’s no telling how many other good teachers are doing the same.

    — Alan · Jan 30, 11:42 AM · #

  32. Bravo, Bob the musicologist. You use too broad a brush here—there are hundreds of very good composition teachers and even some who combine composition with politics—but you do a wonderful job of clarifying this issue.

    Jesse, I agree. But I don’t think you want to suggest that we ignore punctuation whether it is “historically specific” (whatever that means) or not. Plenty of reading, of course, is indispensable for anyone who wants to write. How can anyone think otherwise? Would we ever even learn to talk if we lived in a mute world?

    Lion, it’s a little rude to correct people’s grammar, but if you must, get it right. Learn something about restricted and unrestricted clauses please. Using“which” without the comma before it, of course, is just as proper and current a way of creating restriction as is using “that”.

    Mr. Delater,

    You are completely correct. Students and writers want a cheap and easy fix for an immensely expensive and complex problem. The study of the Classics is a treasure in itself; reading Latin or Greek or both also illuminates English and the Romance Languages at a level invisible to readers and writers innocent of those seminal languages. There is no real argument against this. The fact is, however, that mastering just one of these languages requires years of study. There is little chance we could convince students to make this sacrifice, and no chance at all that we could persuade many of ,their mentors to go back to school.

    I also agree with your despair. The day that the academy decides to return to the methods that produced writers like Churchill, Lincoln, Kennedy and King, an awful lot of current writing potentates will find themselves without the necessary credentials.

    I was not at the conference in ’06, Alan. If I had been, you might have changed your tally to three.

    NIL ILLEGITIMIS CARBORUNDUM.
    I can be reached at tityretu@gmail.com .

    — Peter D. Grudin · Jan 30, 01:04 PM · #

  33. Alan: Thanks for your illuminating, though predictably disheartening report on the 4Cs conference (would that it were otherwise!), and know that I honor your hard apprenticeship in classical languages as I remember my own. This study should have served you better in relation to your colleagues (though I hesitate somewhat to call them your peers). The study of classical (and several modern) languages has been as invaluable in my teaching of rhetoric and composition as it has been in my teaching of literature and in my scholarship. But like you, the tendency to be a laudator temporis acti and to employ classical rhetorical models in my rhetoric and composition classes seem only to have provoked indifference at best, hostility at worst, from most writing pedagogues I’ve known (though not at all from most of my students). Nevertheless, one of the most useful pedagogical works I’ve read remains Donald Leman Clark’s “Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education” (1957), in which Clark rues the slow attrition of the combined Latin and English teacher in US secondary schools.

    Peter D. Grudin: I agree that the correction of language deficiencies seems difficult the older one gets, but if even the stogy anti-Hellenic Cato the Elder could remedy his lack of Greek in his sixties, there’s hope for most teachers and students alike.

    — J A DeLater · Jan 30, 02:53 PM · #

  34. Dudes, it was a joke. That’s why there’s a grammar mistake in my own comment.

    — Lion-O · Jan 30, 06:16 PM · #

  35. One principle of rhetoric (that we happily teach students, too) is that there’s no possibility of productive argument when the participants all already know what they think, as is clearly evident in these posts.

    Nonetheless, I wanted to offer one correction. Rhetoric doesn’t accept the notion that any personal reference in an argument is ad hominem attack. (That’s philosophy, and there’s a reason philosophy is generally irrelevant in culture: no one actually argues that way.) Rhetoric stresses that a speaker must be credible. Pointing out ways a speaker is not credible is therefore not, in rhetoric, ad hominem attack.

    Rhetoric also stresses history, materiality, context, and situation. When a “scholar” criticizes an entire field of knowledge that they do not know on the basis of a tiny and (I believe we established) unrepresentative sample of that field, they destroy their credibility with other scholars. When, even further, a piece published elsewhere sometime ago is given as a re-run to a different audience, but not updated, then we have legitimate grounds to, again, question their credibility. That’s not ad hominem. It’s how people reason. And it’s accurate.

    — Doug · Jan 31, 12:40 AM · #

  36. Mr. Grudin: Lincoln had 18 months of formal schooling. So sure, it would be great to return to the academy that produced writers like him: the invisible, non-existing academy.

    — Lion-O · Jan 31, 09:45 AM · #

  37. I’ve read the entire thread and have been somewhat surprised at the venom we’ve directed at each other. Perhaps the stakes really are that small. I wonder, though, what the purpose is of complaining about the quality of writing instruction without offering constructive and possible solutions. “Why, in my day, we learned taught them disputation and thrashed them with birches if they displeased us!” Uh huh. We fight for every penny of funding—all of us, in comp/rhet and in biology, in Lit and in cognitive psychology. At the risk of sounding like Rodney King, we should work together to incorporate written communication and critical thinking in all of our disciplines. I am a writing teacher who left the corporate world to teach, at first thinking I would solve the problems I saw in business from underprepared college graduates. Soon after my indoctrination by the monocultural marxists of the CCCCs, I realized that in 15 weeks (all you’ll allow us to teach them EVERYTHING about writing well) I couldn’t solve all the grammatical problems, and that the most grammatically competent writing absent of analysis, ideas, or insight does the student and her chosen disciplinary focus a grave disservice. I thought Bauerlein’s op-ed was a reflexive trope employed by many a newspaper columnist facing a deadline with a paucity of ideas: Let’s pull something out of the file and toss off a negative screed. Takes little thought, serves little but to attack rather then to build. Bravo.

    — deconstructo · Jan 31, 06:07 PM · #

  38. Though I sympathize with deconstructo’s justified lament about the laborious and time-consuming nature of conscientious comp teaching, I think Mark Bauerlein’s point about the trendy distractions of identity politics into rhetoric and composition pedagogy worth heeding. But venom? Is that what some in an English sub-specialty apparently won over to “Rogerian” rhetoric think when they sense a whiff of good ol’ “agonistic” kind? Destructo rather tempts me to submit my proposal to the next 4Cs conference establishing a crucial link between the fields of classics and of evolutionary biology—for what’s a backside for but to facilitate the study of Latin and Greek?

    — J A DeLater · Jan 31, 07:03 PM · #

  39. correction: add def. art.: “th’ good ol’,” etc. Now, back to the stack. . . .

    — J A DeLater · Jan 31, 07:17 PM · #

  40. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student is in its fourth edition. Googling the title brings up countless syllabi using the book as a text for writing courses. Maybe we need some real empirical research on what methods are being taught before we mouth off about the subject?

    — Lion-O · Feb 1, 01:36 PM · #

  41. “The kernel of truth around which Bauerlein weaves his words is entirely lost.”

    That’s because he cannot clearly express something which he neither knows nor understands. Looks like he should have taken more of those “political” writing classes. Lesson one is to actually have something to say. Lesson two is to stop recycling papers that failed in earlier attempts (like, say, The Valve).

    I shed not one tear for all of those poor, benighted classics non-professors that cannot land a tenure-track job over a “lesser” woman, minority, or member of a former-chattel group.

    — Andrew F. · Feb 7, 03:26 PM · #

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