Archive for the ‘Rhetoric and teaching’ Category
Writing For Busy People
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: faculty development, time management
Comments (4) Today I facilitated a workshop for faculty called “Writing for Busy People,” otherwise known as the “Professional Writing Institute.” We had ten participants: three people from the library, one from kineseology, one from computer science, one from education, one linguist, two engineers, and the Director of the Faculty Center. It turns out that we all have the same problems. We all have a need and/or a desire to write, but not enough time.
We started by reading a piece by Kim Stafford, Director of the Northwest Writing Institute in Oregon. Stafford describes adjusting the spark plug gap on the Chevy Malibu he owned in the 80s, the “hot, perfect blue” spark representing the leap of creative insight or inspiration. He then describes his father’s practice of getting up at 3:00 or 4:00 every morning to fill a blank page with writing, starting with prose and then leaping into poetry. From 1950-1993, Stafford’s father generated 20,000 pages following this routine.
The routine is the key. A writer needs a routine that makes a place for writing in daily life. Otherwise, other tasks, responsibilities and activities will fill the time. Our families, jobs and friendships have an almost irresistible pull. Now that the computer is our writing tool, we even struggle against the myriad distractions that it provides–email, texting, chat, websurfing–all displayed in the margins of the writing surface. The page is never quite blank.
The routine is not the same for every writer. Nick Schenk, an unknown writer who wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, wrote after work in a bar called “Grumpy’s” in Minneapolis. Haruki Murakami suddenly thought of writing a novel one afternoon at a baseball game, wrote the novel and sent the only copy of the manuscript off to a writing contest, which he won. He also wrote in a bar, a jazz bar he happened to own. When he decided to write full time, he sold the bar, but needed another routine, so he started running.
Anthony Trollope, author of Barchester Towers and 47 other novels, wrote on the train on his way to work at the post office. He kept close track of how many words he wrote every day, and one morning when he finished a novel, he still had some time left so he started another one. When Hemingway was in Cuba, he wrote standing on the skin of an antelope with the paper on top of a book case, from the early morning until noon, whereupon he went fishing.
However, the fishing was undoubtedly part of the writing. Even for academic writers writing journal articles, reading, thinking, teaching, talking, researching, and even driving on the freeway are all part of the writing process. We must not mistake the act of inscription for writing, as if we could sit down and have words pour out of us on command. Our insights come from living in a way open to learning and discovery, and our disciplines help us focus and communicate those insights in meaningful ways. Our lives don’t get in the way of writing. They are the substance and purpose of our writing.
Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, which we gave to the participants, basically takes the Trollope approach. Boice recommends making writing a regular, habitual activity, and motivating oneself by setting writing goals, tracking progress, and employing devices such as writing a check to an organization one hates, to be sent if the goals are not met. This works for many people.
Jack Fong, a sociology professor with a recently published book who came to speak to our group, reported a process very different from that recommended by Boice. Fong thinks deeply about the material for a period of weeks, and then writes in marathon sessions. What is important is finding a process that works for the writer.
For academic writers, there are so many potential pitfalls. There is always one more book or article to read. When does one know enough to have authority on this topic? How does one write in the appropriate style for a particular journal when one is more comfortable in another style? How does one deal with harsh criticism from reviewers? What does one do if one knows that the reviewers are wrong?
For writers in technical fields, does the data speak for itself? Do I need anecdotes and examples to make the concepts clear? Will that seem unscientific? What if my readers are a little out of my specific field? Will they understand?
These last questions are about audience. Developing a good sense of audience is perhaps the most important and difficult aspect of writing. Knowing one’s readers is crucial to knowing what one needs to say and do to help them understand. Writing is more about communicating ideas than expressing one’s self. Writing is a social process. And that is where workshops like this one come into play. We all need to share our writing and get constructive feedback from people we respect. We all have similar difficulties. We can help each other.
Breath, Grammar, and Proper Punctuation
Today’s post is a reworking of a newsletter article I wrote several years ago.
In the Writing Center we field a lot of questions about punctuation, and we see a lot of punctuation problems. Most writers, even professional writers, feel uncertain about proper punctuation on occasion. We expect punctuation to be governed by rules, but taste, style, and even breathing patterns also have influence.
Punctuation practice is rooted in oral language. Oral face-to-face speech is a multimodal, multichannel event that encodes a lot of redundant information. In addition to speaking words embedded in grammatical structures, we vary the intensity of our speech; we pause for effect; we modulate the intonation, making the voice rise and fall; and we use physical gestures, body language and facial expressions.
In a telephone conversation we are no longer in a face-to-face situation, and we lose the visual channels. Generally, we compensate well by attending more closely to words, intonation and syntax and the design of the telephone tends to help us focus on these things.
A Significant Disadvantage
However, in a speakerphone conference in which some of the participants are physically present to one another while another only has access to aural information, the latter party may feel that he or she is at a significant disadvantage. And when the two parties to a telephone conversation have different cultural backgrounds, or when one party doesn’t speak the language of the conversation well, we feel the need of information from the missing channels to confirm our interpretations.
When we write, we lose all visual and auditory channels, leaving only words and grammatical structures to carry the message. Rather than a broad array of redundant channels to rely on, when we write, we have only two. Or perhaps I should say two and a quarter, because we also have punctuation.
Bringing Back Intonation
The punctuation system is designed to bring back into writing some of the information encoded in pauses and intonation. As a substitute for the living voice, it is a pale shadow only. Instead of shouting and shaking a fist, we have the exclamation point. Instead of a conspiratorial whisper we have . . . well, we don’t have anything, because there is no mark for whispering. In fact, there are many common devices of speech that have no equivalent in the punctuation system. What marks we do have—commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, question marks and the rest—are generally seen to indicate pauses of varying lengths and are historically associated with the breath. However, they are also associated with the grammatical structures, and thus there are grammatical rules for their use.
Contradictory Conceptions
These two conceptions of punctuation—to indicate pauses for breathing and for rhetorical effect, and to delineate the grammatical boundaries of the text—are to a certain extent contradictory, opposing the creative, living, breathing, individual voice with an analytical, logical, rule-driven structure. These conceptions co-exist in our society, making punctuation both difficult to teach and confusing to learn.
The earliest work on punctuation in English is the anonymous Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, published in London in 1680. The theory of punctuation presented in this work is based entirely on breathing and rhetorical pauses. Clearly designed for classroom use, it contains the following verses for easy memorization:
A comma is a breathing stop: no more,
Stop at it while you may tell one, therefore.
Where semi-colon placed is; there you,
May please to make a stop, while you tell two.
A colon is a longer stop; therefore,
Stop at each colon, while you may tell four.
The author of the Treatise is also aware of the intonation patterns implied by certain punctuation marks, as is illustrated by the following couplet on the question mark:
When e’re a question you shall propound,
An interrogation’s made: but raise the sound.
Indeed, the Treatise is valued by linguists today more for what it says about the pronunciation and intonation of seventeenth-century English than for the author’s insights into the use of punctuation marks (and certainly not for the author’s poetic ability!). Still, it is a good example of the relationship between breath and punctuation in the historical tradition.
Modern authors are likely to attempt a compromise between the two views. G.V. Carey, author of Mind the Stop: A Brief Guide to Punctuation, writes: “I should define punctuation as being governed two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste. I shall endeavor not to stress the former to the exclusion of the latter, but I will not knuckle under to those who apparently claim for themselves complete freedom to do what they please in the matter.” Carey’s position is probably an accurate statement of the case, but we might ask, “What kind of rule applies only two thirds of the time?”
The Harbrace Handbook
Even the Harbrace Handbook hedges its position on the comma: “The use of the comma depends primarily on the structure of the sentence and signals a small interruption. Inflexible rules governing the use of the comma are few, but there are several basic principles.” So far, so good.
The Harbrace then lists four principles, stating that commas: a) precede coordinating conjunctions when they link main clauses; b) follow introductory adverb clauses and, usually, introductory phrases; c) separate items in a series (including coordinate adjectives); and d) set off nonrestrictive and other parenthetical elements.
A Morass of Jargon
For the average handbook consulter, in the move from the general statement to the basic principles the Harbrace has leapt from cogent wisdom into a morass of grammatical jargon. The four principles are constructed almost entirely of complex grammatical terminology, and one gets the feeling that those who understand this terminology probably already know how to use a comma.
For the reader with a little more understanding, the principles appear to contradict one another. For example, “a” says that commas precede coordinating conjunctions, while “b” puts a comma after a conjunction (which is not, in fact, “coordinating” in this instance). Similarly “c” contains a parenthetical element (set off with parentheses) while “d” says that commas will be used to set off parenthetical elements.
There is nothing incorrect here, just potential confusion. The Harbrace comma principles conform to the condition known in technical writing as C.O.I.K: Clear Only If Known.
The Handbooks are Wrong
John Dawkins, writing in a recent issue of College Composition and Communication, advises us to disregard handbook advice on punctuation anyway. In “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool” he says, “Manuals of style and college handbooks have it all wrong when it comes to punctuation (good writers don’t punctuate that way).” He proposes that there is “a system underlying what good writers, in fact, do; it is a surprisingly simple system; it is a system that enables writers to achieve important—even subtle—rhetorical effects; it is, even, a system that teachers can teach far more easily than they can teach the poorly systematized rules in our handbooks and style manuals” (CCC December 1995 533). Let us hope that Dawkins’ system is simpler than the punctuation he uses in that last sentence.
A Simple System
As it turns out, Dawkins does have a fairly simple and logical system. He points out that “all discourse, written or spoken, consists of independent clauses or underlying independent clauses.” What Dawkins calls “underlying” independent clauses are clauses that would be sentences on their own were it not for a subordinating word, such as “although” or “because,” or missing elements that make it necessary for the clause to be attached to a main clause, which could stand by itself. Dawkins sees the various punctuation marks as encoding different degrees of separation between independent clauses, or between elements in independent clauses. This perspective is different from either the breath-related or the grammatical perspectives already discussed, in that it is based on the writer’s perception of the conceptual relationships.
Three Patterns
Dawkins argues that independent clauses either have extra words, phrases or clauses attached to them, or they don’t. If they do, there are three patterns: the attachment can come at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle. In each pattern, the question for the writer is “Do I punctuate, or don’t I?” If punctuation is used, it is chosen on the basis of the degree of separation or connection the writer wishes the ideas to have, or in other words, the “meaning and intended emphasis.”
Three Possibilities
Dawkins articulates three rules for the three possibilities listed above. If the attachment comes at the beginning, only zero, comma, dash, or colon are permissible. If the attachment is at the end, all functional marks are permissible. If the attachment comes in the middle, only paired marks (commas, dashes, zeros, and parentheses) are possible. In this case, with the added material in the middle, the choice boils down to “two marks or none.”
Dawkins then introduces the concept of raising or lowering. By “raising” he means using a mark that is higher in the hierarchy than would normally be used. Here is a sentence with a single independent clause and material added at the end. The basic marks are zero or comma:
1) Gerald promised to write the paper when he had the time.
2) Gerald promised to write the paper, when he had the time.
Example 2 gains more emphasis for the attachment. The higher up in the hierarchy you go, the greater the separation, and the greater the emphasis for the added materials. Thus:
3) Gerald promised to write the paper—when he had the time.
4) Gerald promised to write the paper. When he had the time.
The likelihood of Gerald actually writing the paper diminishes, and the irony of the tone increases, as the punctuation marks get stronger. This is Dawkins’ main point—that good writers use punctuation not to indicate breathing points, not to satisfy grammatical rules, but to create rhetorical effects. Example four creates a sentence fragment, violating a basic handbook rule that is often violated by published writers. Dawkins’ system explains why this rule is so often broken.
It should be said, however, that novelists and short story writers are much more likely to punctuate in the manner Dawkins describes than writers of business correspondence or scientific reports. There is insufficient space to summarize Dawkins’ whole article here. However, perhaps it is enough to know that punctuation cannot be reduced to rules of breath, counting, or grammar, and that there are good reasons to be confused about it.
Assessing English
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: outcomes assessment, WASC
Comments (3) I just spent two days at a WASC-sponsored conference on “Teaching and Assessing the English Major.” WASC is our institution’s accrediting agency, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, so we have to listen to what they say. A WASC review is a six-year process culminating in an evaluation of “educational effectiveness” which largely derives from an analysis of the program assessment measures in place throughout the campus. This conference was the first discipline-specific assessment workshop offered by WASC. Clearly they think there is something lacking in the enthusiasm and expertise of English departments for assessment.
We were supposed to send a team with a specific project to work on. However, for the most part the presenters presented to us. When they gave us time to talk at our tables, it was usually for only five minutes, which meant that one person got half way though presenting an issue, and then we were interrupted.
I came to the conference with more enthusiasm for assessment than when I left. Originally, I saw program assessment as a simple, commonsensical endeavor based on four questions:
- What are we trying to do?
- How are we doing it?
- How do we know that we are doing it?
- How can we improve?
The first question is answered with a series of outcome statements about what the department wants its students to be and do when they complete the program. The second is about pedagogy and curriculum. The third is about data gathering and analysis, and the fourth is about applying what was discovered in that analysis to address any gaps or problems that were revealed. Faculty are generally very focused on the content and effectiveness of the courses that they teach. They don’t often think about the cumulative effect of the entire program on the student. An assessment plan that inspires regular conversations about the design of the whole program and its results will improve the coherence of a department markedly. It just makes sense.
The WASC representative at the conference stated that WASC is primarily interested in program assessment, not course assessment, and not assessment of individual instructors. However, much of the material presented at this conference was about course assessment and student self-assessment. One of the handouts was a chart that every instructor at Alverno College is required to fill out for every course, listing the mission statement of the college, the major outcomes, the course outcomes, and the plan for assessing those outcomes in the course. This goes far beyond setting some goals, gathering some data, and discussing it at a yearly retreat. This is putting the plan and the outcomes in the professor’s face on an almost daily basis.
I don’t know for a fact, but they probably put these outcomes on every syllabus too. Words that are simply duplicated everywhere become invisible. As scholars of language, we should know that.
I think it is important to define outcomes and have conversations at the program level, where such conversations do not usually occur, and leave instructors the freedom to teach as they will. If program outcomes become too rigid and ubiquitous, they will become the material of an elegant cage. Higher education used to be a refuge for brilliant eccentrics. If we drive them all away we will have an institution of competent drones.
I can imagine a future in which universities create a non-assessment college in order to attract the best students and faculty.
Our department is fairly well along in developing an assessment plan. We have nine outcomes, with rubrics for four of them, and a capstone course that helps students develop a portfolio of their work over their career in the program. They collect papers from previous courses, write a new critical paper, and write a reflective essay about how they have grown in the program. We also do an exit interview. We have been assessing two outcomes a year, and developing one new rubric per year. This year the new one is “Research Skills.”
I do think that English departments must change to survive. People forget that English departments are only about 100 years old. What can appear, can disappear. The traditional program covers literature, as they say, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, divided into historical periods, sometimes with genre and major author courses. Faculty specialize in specific periods and authors. That coverage model is severely threatened now because departments are so understaffed. Professors are routinely asked to work up courses outside of their specialties. The coverage is thinner, and the quality less.
However, is coverage of traditional periods, genres, and canonical authors really what English majors need to have? Most departments also include practical disciplines such as linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. We train language teachers and writing teachers. Faculty in all disciplines agree that students should speak and write English well. In fact, they think that is what English departments do, the primary purpose. Perhaps they are right.
Our nine current outcomes are heavily weighted toward coverage of period and genre knowledge. However, when we designed the capstone course, we realized that there would be gaps in coverage, so we focused on interpretive strategies. The current instructor for the capstone assigns works by Italo Calvino which the students have never read before, and asks them to use what they have learned from the program to interpret these texts and write about them. I think we are on to something here. We are assessing the intellectual tool kit that our students have acquired from the program, and their ability to use these tools to analyze new texts.
Focusing on interpretive strategies instead of coverage is necessary in the reduced circumstances we find ourselves in today. However, I think that these skills are also more marketable for students. Necessity may have pushed us in a productive direction. In order to complete this transition, I think we need to revisit our outcomes statements to reflect this new emphasis.
But let’s leave some room for eccentricity and brilliance and some holes in the elegant cage. We are, after all, the English Department.
What are we teaching when we teach literature?
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: literacy, Pedagogy, reading pedagogy
Leave a Comment This week my seminar has been reading Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader, The Text, The Poem. After several weeks of analyzing everyday texts, the literature students in the course were happy to finally get to what they saw at the beginning of the course as the important stuff–analyzing literary texts. However, Rosenblatt’s argument that the poem is a product of a transaction between a reader and a text, and that a new unique poem is created by each reader and each reading, took some of them aback. While it is easy to see that a literary text might have multiple meanings, most of us instinctively feel that there must at least be a stable set of “correct” meanings that can be derived from expert, well-informed analysis. From this point of view the student of literature is being trained to provide reliable interpretations within a consensus of opinion.
Rosenblatt sees the text of the poem as being like a musical score to be performed by the reader. Different readers bring different experiences to the performance of the text, so each performance is unique. One could see a literature degree as a way of filling in the background experience so that most literature majors bring a similar body of reading experience to the canonical texts, constraining the types of readings that will occur.
Rosenblatt makes a distinction between aesthetic and efferent reading, the latter being reading for information. In her view, one reads a poem for an aesthetic experience, but reads a medicine bottle purely for facts. She cites an example of a third grade teacher having her students read a poem about cows, and then asking, “What did you learn about cows from this poem?” The question is wrong because it triggers an efferent reading instead of an aesthetic one.
Reading the Cliff’s Notes version of a novel does not produce an aesthetic reading. The reader is looking for facts about the novel, the characters, the plot, the themes, etc., and is looking to avoid the aesthetic experience, the imaginative work of creating a literary work from the text.
Rosenblatt is rigorously trained in philosophy, and her arguments and methods are steeped in phenomenological approaches. I designed an in-class experiment to explore her theory. I divided my class into four groups and gave each group a poem, face down. The poems were “Introduction to Poetry” and “Consolation” by Billy Collins, “To a French Structuralist” by David Kirby, and “Introduction” by Ann Carson, from her book Plainwater. First I allowed the students to read their assigned poem for only 30 seconds. When they stopped, the had to answer three questions:
- What does this poem seem to be about?
- What connection do you feel between this poem and your own experience?
- What questions does this poem make you ask?
The students wrote quite a bit in response to these questions, even after a 30-second reading. In this part of the activity, I was trying to model the kind of reading one might do flipping through a book of poetry looking for something that might be interesting.
Then I asked them to read the poem for 10 minutes and revisit the questions. Again, they wrote a lot.
Finally, they shared their experiences with the members of their groups. The discussions were lively, and the readings various. There were looks of astonishment when certain interpretations were offered. In general, it seemed to me that literary training may have interfered with more natural readings of the poems. For example, the Kirby poem is about the poet sitting in a park in Paris trying to read Todorov’s Poetics, but distracted by the women in the vicinity who hike their skirts and open their blouses to better enjoy the sun. A number of the readings were based on strained metaphors and almost allegorical interpretations, discounting the possibility that the poet might actually be in a park trying to read a book. But that’s just my reading.
So what are we teaching when we teach literature? Are we trying to open up the possibility of unique aesthetic experiences, an ability to use and enjoy literary texts? Or are we trying to constrain the scope of readings within acceptable limits? I am afraid that far too often, it is the latter case.
The last question in the exercise was: “Is Rosenblatt right? Does each reader create his or her own poem?” I think that the consensus was that Rosenblatt is certainly right. However, the question of how much the reading should be constrained, and by what, remains open.
Reading RIAP
“RIAP” stands for “Reading Institute for Academic Preparation.” It is a California State University initiative to improve the teaching of reading in high school. My campus was funded to run an institute this year, so I spent the past two days in Sacramento at a leadership meeting.
The idea is to recruit 20 local high school teachers and give them a year-long seminar in reading theory and practice. We got two three-inch thick binders and four heavy boxes of books. And that was just for us. The materials for the participants come later!
The RIAP institute introduces the participants to the ERWC assignment template and selected modules (see a previous post on the ERWC), shows them how to assess the needs of their students through a “College Access Study,” teaches then how to design their own lesson module based on the assessed needs, and introduces a generous amount of reading theory and class room practice. RIAP teachers are then expected to become leaders on their campuses, helping to introduce new thinking and practices. In our RIAP, we plan to recruit 3+1 teams consisting of one English teacher, one science teacher, one math teacher, and one administrator, although the administrator will not attend every session.
Including content-area teachers is an important feature of our plan. Science and math teachers often don’t recognize that literacy issues are part of the reason that students struggle in their classes, and if they do, they often blame the English teachers. Reading and writing are important aspects of any course, and each discipline has its own stylistic and organizational peculiarities. Science and math teachers need to teach reading and writing too.
In the past, up to third grade was about “learning to read.” Fourth grade and beyond was about “reading to learn.” We now know that we can’t stop teaching reading in the third grade. Our expectations are simply too high.
We are confused, too, by those who take to reading naturally. There is no substitute for the voracious self-directed reading that some of us do at an early age. When I was young, my mother went to the library every week. I always came home with stacks of science and history books, and science fiction novels. Later, I started reading the L.A. Times every morning. Fifty years of books and thirty years of daily newspaper reading lead to a large vocabulary and a lot of general background knowledge about many things.
Would I have become addicted to books and newspapers if YouTube had been available? I don’t know. It is hard to imagine. However, much of the reading instruction we do now is an attempt to bring fluency and comprehension to those who did not acquire it naturally through voracious reading. In fact, most of our students have no appetite for reading at all. Reading is an acquired taste.
At the RIAP leadership meeting there was a presentation by Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey, both from San Diego State. Doug talked about brain scan research that suggests that knowledge of vocabulary is associated with memory, not with the language center. An ambiguous word like “bug” lights up different parts of the brain if it is associated with “Volkswagen,” “insect” or “spy device.” This is scientific confirmation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia,” the idea that the words we use resonate with the voices that spoke them to us. The connotation of a word continues to echo the places we heard or read it in, and the contexts in which we found it.
Will a word that came out of a vocabulary list in a classroom, a product of drills and sentence-making exercises in a regimented and coercive environment, ever provide pleasure in a natural setting? Can a teacher’s well-intentioned scaffolding and structuring ever match the joy of words first encountered after bedtime, hiding under the covers with a flashlight? Well, sometimes the joy of reading comes late, and sometimes a teacher can inspire it. But it has to be a special kind of teacher, and that is where RIAP comes in.
Letters to Shareholders
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: discourse analysis
Leave a Comment Last night the seminar looked at Chapter 2 of Glenn Stillar’s Analyzing Everyday Texts in which he lays out a system of discourse analysis based on M.A. K. Halliday’s social semiotics. We actually had a good time.
Last time I taught this book it was pretty much a disaster. This time I did some analysis of my own to figure out why. Stillar’s text is readable at the paragraph level, but because there are lots of terms, and lots of overlap, it is hard to put the whole system together. The subhead styles used by the publisher don’t help much either. I made the students an outline. This helped immensely. And then we worked through lots of examples.
Stillar’s main insight is that texts simultaneously construct worlds, construct relationships between participants in the discourse, and create coherence by referencing things within and without the text. His top-level terms are ideational, interpersonal, textual, and contextual. Context seems to be added on at the end because for most of the chapter he is talking about three terms. Context refers to the world outside the text that activates the functions of the other three terms. Got that? To further confuse things, there are lots of sub-categories and esoteric terms under each main heading.
However, once you start thinking along these lines and looking at texts, new insights abound. We began by looking at a sign posted at Bagam airport in Mynmar. At the top it says “PEOPLE’S DESIRE.” Under that, it reads:
- Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.
- Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation.
- Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State.
- Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.
Here’s link to a photograph.
The first category under the ideational function in Stillar’s system is “Process Types and Participant Roles.” We had some discussion about whether the bullet points were intended as commands to the people, or statements addressed to the foreign reader to the effect that “The People’s desire is to oppose . . .” The ambiguity is perhaps by design. It seems to work both ways. The roles of the participants are complex but clear. The writer of the sign claims to speak for the people. The foreigner is a potential disruptive element, and is being warned off.
Further analysis can tell us more about how the sign creates its world and constructs it participants. Our own reaction is interesting and complex. We resist the role constructed for us by the discourse.
We went on to discuss and analyze four other texts. One was a statement from a web site about a university writing test. Although the writer is anonymous, the essence of the message is that the Trustees and the faculty make us give this test and dictate its design, so don’t blame us. The other three were letters to shareholders from Enron in 2000, Berkshire Hathaway in 2000, and Lehman Brothers in 2007.
The Enron letter creates the impression that the company and its leaders are omnipotent, omniscient, and raking in tons of money. They have the skills and connections to overwhelm the competition, no matter what market conditions prevail. This is quite ironic because the company went spectacularly bankrupt only a few months later. The Berkshire Hathaway letter, written by Warren Buffett, is folksy and self-deprecating. He says, “I told you last year that we would get our money’s worth for stepped-up advertising at GEICO in 2000, but I was wrong.” He says they are investing in “such cutting edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation, and paint. Try to contain your enthusiasm.” Berkshire Hathaway is, of course, one of the most successful companies in the history of the world.
The Lehman Brothers letter touts the company’s strength and experience, even in difficult market conditions, its four pillars of strength, and its customer service, but finishes up by noting that the share price went down. In a few months, Lehman would be bankrupt too.
I chose these letters for analysis because the circumstances surrounding them make the rhetorical nature of the discourse more obvious. The letter writers strive to construct a world, in some cases largely imaginary, and situate themselves and their readers in their construct. Stillar helps us see how it is done. And this time around, my students didn’t complain. I think they are getting it.
The Reading Conundrum
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: reading pedagogy, reading rhetorically
Comments (6) The book for last week’s seminar meeting was Reading Rhetorically by John Bean, Virginia Chappell, and Alice Gillam. As I noted in another post, this is designed as a freshman text, but I tend to use it as a teacher resource. It is full of reading strategies for students approaching unfamiliar material. Students are taught such things as pre-reading, descriptive outlining, reading with and against the grain, rhetorical questioning, and techniques for integrating and citing quoted and paraphrased material. Fluent academic readers do nearly all of these things by habit and instinct. However, these strategies are rarely taught overtly because freshman composition courses generally focus on writing, not reading. Reading is a skill that is pretty much taken for granted after third grade. If students struggle with reading after third grade, the most common solution is to review phonics and other “learning to read” techniques.
Something is not working because university faculty complain a lot about student reading behaviors. When I do Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) workshops these days, I usually start out by asking the participants what sorts of problems students have doing the reading for their courses. Here is a typical list (I posted this previously to the WPA-L discussion listserv):
Students
- Only read material directly connected to grading
- Will not read before class
- Skip difficult material
- If they don’t see the relevance, they won’t read it
- Form an incorrect hypothesis of the meaning and misread
- Decoding problems
- Unknown vocabulary
- Expect to read only once
- Take everything at face value
- Highlight everything
- Can’t understand written directions
- Are egocentric, can’t see another point of view
- Are unable to reserve judgment until an argument has been completed
- Lack reading practice
- Have a limited range of ability, can read textbooks, but not other books
- Have no background schema to take in learning
- Can’t understand irony or understatement
- Believe everything they read
The “Will not read before class” complaint comes up every time. I finally realized that students were telling us something with that behavior. They do not like to read difficult material cold. They don’t know what to attend to until after the discussion. In my own classes I now give them reading questions and instructions, including things like, “What are the author’s three main points about x?” and “Pay special attention to the paragraph at the bottom of page 47.” Given some guidance, my students usually read the material before class.
If students habitually practiced the strategies presented in Reading Rhetorically, most of these problems would be solved. Most students have not had such training, however, so it is up to the instructor to provide guidance, most often in the form of guide questions and pre-reading activities. In my experience, such measures significantly improve the quality of the discussion and student performance on quizzes and papers. Instructor evaluations also improve.
However, the observation in the list above that students “can read textbooks, but not other books” is telling. Textbook publishers are knowledgeable about reading theory and pedagogy. Textbooks have illustrations, graphs and charts, sidebar guide questions, subheads, summaries, and even CD roms with animations and simulations. A whole arsenal of reading pedagogies is deployed for every style of learning. Have students become dependent on this reader-friendly, learner-friendly style of presentation? And when instructors create similar scaffolding and support for an ordinary book, are we improving learning while also fostering that dependency?
This is the often unasked question at the heart of all “learning-centered” pedagogies. When does the enabling of the learner become too much? When does nurturing the student in a learning-centered environment end up disabling the student for learning in the real world?
I am not asking these questions with curmudgeonly intent. I am not asking “What’s wrong with our students?” The students are great. I am also not trying to dodge the work involved in creating guide questions and thinking about why we are reading this and what students should take away from it. I am asking how we can best serve them in the long run. I think we have to be careful to design our reading assistance with an eye toward strategies that can be internalized over time, so that the student can begin to approach unfamiliar material with his or her own questions and purposes. Reading Rhetorically does that well. Like that book, we need to teach strategies, not do the work for the students. It’s harder than it sounds.
Students as Pundits
More than 30 years ago the California State University implemented the English Placement Test (EPT) as an instrument for placing students in appropriate composition courses. The test was innovative at the time because it was one of the early large-scale implementations of “holistic scoring,” a method by which essays could be scored quickly and reliably. The test contains a 45-minute essay and two multiple choice sections: Reading Skills and Composing Skills. The cutoff score was originally set so that about 50% of the students were required to take at least one extra composition course.
Over 30 years the percentage of students testing into these so-called “remedial” courses has remained about the same. However, a decade ago the Trustees of the CSU became interested in “reducing the need for remediation.” It also became apparent that while scores on the essay were going up slightly, scores on the “Reading Skills” portion were going down. CSU implemented a number of outreach and tutoring programs to make scores go up, but the English placement thermometer appeared to be stuck on 50%. Finally they developed something called the “Early Assessment Program” (EAP), based on a test attached to the California Standards Test (CST) that students take in the eleventh grade. The idea was that students would find out in the eleventh grade that they would not pass the CSU placement test, giving them time to remediate themselves.
There are lots of problems with the scenario outlined above. Why is the passrate stuck on 50% over many years of changing demographics and curriculum? Does the EPT really establish what “college-level” writing is? What is it really testing? Are students below a certain score actually “remedial”? If students don’t do well on the EAP test, what can they do? CSU English Council, an organization representing all of the English departments in the CSU (I was president at the time), chose to address the latter question. A delegation went to the Chancellor’s Office to argue, “Early assessment without intervention is useless.”
It took several meetings, but ultimately we were charged with creating a twelfth-grade course in expository reading and writing. We put together a task force of CSU faculty and high school teachers and over a period of two years designed a full year course with fourteen teaching modules. The course was designed to prepare students to do the reading and writing they would be required to do at the university and it was carefully aligned with the California English Language Arts Standards. This course, now known as the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC), is taught in hundreds of California high schools, either fully or with modules inserted in existing courses. More than 4,000 teachers have been trained to teach it.
One of the tools that the ERWC gives students is Aristotelian rhetorical analysis. Aristotle argues that there are three ways to persuade an audience: through the presentation of character (ethos), through words and arguments (logos), and through evoking the passions (pathos). Students in the course learn to apply these terms to speeches, essays, and op-ed pieces. The ability to see the tools of rhetoric at work in the text appears to give the students a feeling of power over it, or at least that is what they report in focus groups.
An ERWC teacher recently sent me an email describing the class she taught the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration. When the students sat down at the beginning of the period, each desk had a copy of Obama’s speech. The students were asked to annotate the speech, looking for examples of Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals. The students immediately began sharing examples of ethos, logos, and pathos, and their teacher found that they were saying some of the same things she had heard pundits say on television the night before. She was so proud of them that she had to email me to tell me about it.
I think this is the best sort of English education. The students are learning tools that, while 2,000 years old, can be applied to their own lives and society, and that give them something to say in the larger conversation. In no time, some of these classroom pundits will be undoubtedly be in the media themselves, explaining the ways of the world to the rest of us.
For more information about the ERWC:
A New World of Orality?
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: literacy, orality, Walter Ong
Comments (7) In my seminar last night we discussed Walter Ong’s concepts of primary and secondary orality. Primary orality is the state of a society that has never known or developed literacy. The history of the group, lineages, myths, stories, and customs are all passed down orally from person to person, generation to generation. Religious belief, ritual, and everything relating to tribal identity depend on training and memory.
Secondary orality is the state of being illiterate, but knowing of literacy and its powers. Most of the population of medieval Europe existed in this state. When an individual in a state of primary orality encounters literacy for the first time, it appears magical, as if something inanimate can speak. Books such as Claude Levi Strauss’ Triste Tropique and Jack Goody’s Domestication of the Savage Mind contain such events. On the other hand, an illiterate person in a literate society knows much of what literacy can do, and is not so easily amazed.
Because much of our communications technology functions as a substitute for literacy, some argue that we are entering another period of secondary orality. The telephone substitutes for letter writing. The television substitutes for the newspaper. The DVD substitutes for the book. The video camera stands in for the diary. I believe that an illiterate person actually has more access to information than at any previous time in history.
One could argue that much has been lost with these substitutions. The Ken Burns documentary of the Civil War contains numerous letters home written by ordinary soldiers, letters that are as articulate and beautifully expressed as anything in literature. Not long after seeing this film I saw videos sent home by soldiers in the first Iraq war. They were waving, grinning, and shouting “Hi mom!” The contrast was great. However, video tape and literacy are just different communications and data storage technologies. Each can be used well, or poorly.
In class we talked about the possibility of creating a totally text free web interface with clickable icons that spoke aloud when the user rolled the mouse pointer over them. Some have argued that computer technology has actually increased the use of literacy, but this is really a matter of bandwidth. As bandwidth increases, the visual content increases. Images, audio, animations, and video all take up more storage and bandwidth than text. Once the bandwidth was there, along came YouTube. YouTube changed the way people use the internet. Text on the web is already decreasing.
When everything one needs to do to excel in society can be done without recourse to literacy, will the average person learn to read? I think not. In Proust and the Squid Maryanne Wolf argues that the brain was not designed to read. To read, the brain draws on pre-existing visual, auditory, and linguistic processing systems and coordinates them, sometimes rather inefficiently. It may be that rather than evolving to read, we are using technology to create modes of communication that are more natural for the brain as it exists. It will be fascinating to see what develops.
Is Literacy a Good Thing?
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: Derrida, literacy, Plato
Comments (4) Our culture associates high levels of literacy with intelligence, civilization, and knowledge. Much of our educational system is devoted to teaching and developing literacy. We admire people who read quickly and who have read many books. We scorn those who move their lips when they read. “Illiterate” is a term of disapprobation that implies many social deficits beyond an inability to decode letters. And because we believe in progress and corporate slogans such as “continuous improvement,” we imagine that reading will become ever faster and more efficient. We long for a nearly instantaneous transfer of information from page to brain.
Thus when our students don’t read the texts we give them with ease or interest, when they resist reading Shakespeare or even Young Adult novels, when they appear to want to read nothing longer than a cell phone screen, we declare a literacy crisis. Perhaps, however, it is we who are mistaken. Perhaps the form of literacy we practice does not suit the needs of our time, or literacy itself is problematic. It may be that Plato was right after all.
Plato’s Phaedrus is unlike any other Platonic dialog. Socrates and Phaedrus are the only participants in the conversation, except for Lysias, who is represented by the text of a speech. Phaedrus is walking toward the city gates when Socrates encounters him, apparently intending to practice reciting the speech he has just heard by Lysias. Socrates agrees to accompany him, noting that Phaedrus has the text of the speech hidden in his cloak. Socrates characterizes the speech as a “charm” to lure him out of the city walls, where he does not usually go.
Jacques Derrida makes much of this “charm” in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” noting that the word translated as “charm” here is “pharmakon,” which can mean either “drug” or “poison,” and is associated with witchcraft and sorcery. Derrida argues that Plato intends for us to see writing as a pharmakon, a drug which once ingested, alters the body and the mind. My graduate students, after reading this essay, become cautious, at least for the moment, about what they choose to read.
The Phaedrus is such a strange work that the question of what it is really about is controversial. It contains three speeches–the written speech by Lysias, and two by Socrates–all about love. The last speech by Socrates takes us into metaphysical realms of knowledge and truth, and describes the soul as a charioteer attempting to control a winged chariot and two horses, one good, and one bad. One can argue that the dialog is about the nature of truth, or even about psychology. There are also sections about whether rhetoric is an art, when it persuades to belief rather knowledge.
However, there are many details which point to the problems of writing. Phaedrus hides the text of Lysias in his cloak. Later, when giving his first speech, Socrates hides his head under his own cloak. The rambling, disorganized speech by Lysias begins with the word “listen” and ends by saying “I think I have covered everything, but if you have any questions, just ask.” One of the main points that Socrates will make is that written texts can’t answer questions. However, the most important questions about literacy are raised in the myth of Theuth and Thamus, which comes after the last speech.
Theuth has invented many different arts which he demonstrates for Thamus, the king of Egypt. When they come to the art of letters
This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Thamus makes a number of points here. Literacy is not an aid to memory, but a reminder. Written letters are an externalization of thought, no longer within the body or the mind. But the most powerful and disturbing argument is that reading books leads to knowledge of many things without wisdom, without really knowing anything. Plato’s model of learning is a dialog between one who knows with one who does not, the so-called “Socratic” method of question and answer. If texts cannot answer, they cannot teach.
Clearly, Plato is not against literacy. After all, he wrote many dialogs, which continue to provoke fundamental questions today. However, the questions he raises about the role of literacy are not easy to dismiss out of hand. Perhaps we rely too much on literacy. Perhaps there are other ways to learn besides reading many books, becoming “tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
