syllabus
calendar
blackboard
student.email resources

last.updated 9.16.07

 



Early Composition Pedagogy

Purpose

We will examine the rise of the composition course at Harvard and consider how it responds to the rhetoric of the Common Sense Realists, as well as influences some current practices typical of the composition classroom.

Before Class

  • Read Brereton
    • "Introduction" pp. 3-25
    • Chapter 2: pp. 26-57, 127-131
    • Chapter 3: pp. 132-157
    • Chapter 5: pp. 313-316, 320-353
  • Submit PAB #2 to the Blackboard Discussion Board by the beginning of class

FreeWrite

We have seen how the Common Sense Realist's rhetoric has influenced the pedagogy at Harvards, what rhetorical theories influence your own pedagogical practices. Or based upon the rhetorical that you know, what practices would you develop?

Questions and Discussion (by Heather Lettner-Rust)

  • According to their brochure, Virginia Military Institute’s has an “Institute Writing Program” which “seeks to equip cadets for both academic success and participation in the full range of rhetorical occasions they will encounter in their lives as citizens and professionals.” The brochure describes their program as “[linking] a rigorous two-course sequence in English Composition (EN 101 and 102) with a thriving Writing Across the Curriculum initiative, which requires cadets to complete two additional ‘writing-intensive’ courses prior to graduation.”

    Every spring, they hold a “Post-wide writing contests [which] honors cadet winners of the Blackstone Drummond Ayres 1916 Award for Excellence in Writing.” Note: Blackstone Drummond Ayres is the name of a graduate who entered VMI in 1911 and saw action (successfully) in WWI. I’m unable to find out why it’s named for Ayres other than (possibly due to the fact that) his son is currently teaching at VMI after a 30 year writing career at the New York Times.

    The question is this: Based on our reading of Brereton, what kind of writing was probably awarded Excellence in 1916 (if we imagine that the award is that old)? What might have been the prompt or requirement for submission? And what writing instruction did they receive most likely?
  • Brereton introduces a critical shift in composition by reviewing the historical arguments regarding the “nature” of writing instruction. Is it an art or is it a science? “Adams Sherman Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric (1878), like most other nineteenth century rhetoric texts, argued that rhetoric was an art, not a science. . . .To argue that rhetoric was not a science, not a way of knowing, was to consign it to training, to an introductory level of college, to pedagogy. If it was an art, its instruction depended upon the skill of the teacher, not on a knowledge base built upon by concentrated study, by research. There was nothing to discover, only some pedagogical arrangements to be worked out, some teaching methods to be made more efficient” (p.10).

    To what extent does your institution negotiate the art/science dichotomy? Would you like to see your courses (that you’ve taken or taught) do a better job with this division in composition and how would you justify the “revision” to your self, colleagues, or administration?
  • Adam Sherman Hill (1879) in “An Answer to the Cry for More English” justifies his arguments for change with the initial examples of poor writing. His claim is that since Johnny can’t write, we need to 1) require “ample opportunities for practice in writing and speaking the language they will have to use all their lives” (p. 47, see also p.52-3), 2) study of the classics which “cultivate a faithful student’s powers of expression” (p. 56, see also p.48), 3) raise the admission standards with a more complete exam (see p. 49), and 4) improve the quality of teachers (p.52).

    But what else could explain the two types of writing that Hill refers to here:
    “Those of us who have been doomed to read manuscript written in an examination room—whether at a grammar school, a high school, or a college—have found the work of even good scholars disfigured by bad spelling, confusing punctuation, ungrammatical, obscure, ambiguous, or inelegant expressions. Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges, has known men who could not write a letter describing their own Commencement without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old.”
  • What pedagogical foundation (or persuasions) does your institution have? How can you tell?
  • What pedagogical arguments or writing instruction methods in John Franklin Genung’s 1887 excerpt (Ch 3, p. 133-157) do you still see at work today?
  • Although the recursive pattern of early composition history may forecast/foreshadow a continual spiral of the same arguments (art/science, process/product, praxis/theory), what do you think about making writing the subject of First Year Composition? Instead of “teaching ‘how to write in college’” we’d “teach about writing.”

    Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs have introduced this concept and practice in an article in CCC (57.4) “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions.”
    Their premise is this:
    • Teaching FYC as a rhetoric-based course is too close to the assumption that writing is a basic, universal skill (teach once, apply often).
    • “Writing cannot be taught independent of content” (p. 10).
    • Writing is studied as a situational activity (conventional and context-specific) vs a universal skill as scholars describe it in the texts read for class (studies by Berkenkotter, Sommers, Perl, Flower and Hayes, Murray, Swales etc), and students produce research and writing which further explore the ideas they are studying.
    • Teaching FYC as Writing Studies makes it a “discipline with content knowledge.” The study of writing (practice and theory) seeks to “improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and encouraging more realistic understandings of writing.”