The Tool I Want

Crowley, Sharon. "Around 1971: The Emergence of Process Pedagogy.” Composition in the University. U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. 187-214. PDF.

Elbow, "Reflections on Academic Discourse.” College English 53.2 (Feb. 1991). 135-55. PDF.
Faigley, Lester. "Competing Theories of Process" (PDF). College English 48.6 (Oct. 1986) 527-42. PDF.

I’d first like to say that Faigley’s article on “Theories of Process” helps me order the last forty years of composition in my mind, and that Elbow’s “Reflections…” comparing Freshmen and Colleagues” in the composition field is fantastic. This last is one of those situations where I can see the audience of the conference paper greatly improving on the author’s rhetoric as he revises the paper for publication. The comparison Elbow makes is funny and fruitful, and I find the correlation of those two audiences quite reasonable. I will react to Crowley’s “Around 1971…” however, because I find that it is less polished and requires more thought to derive use from it.

As a guide for all this reading, I take Crowley’s citation of The Writing Process: Retrospect and Prospect consortium, which Crowley summarizes as a remediating dictum for compositionists to “get back to basics” (213), after two decades of recommendations to ignore the prescriptive rules of composition, adhere to the passion of the author, and solicit writing at the cost of formal instruction. It asks that we renew the study of composition. After reading Berlin, Faigley, and here Crowley, I’ve received the sense that it was composition, not rhetoric, that was taken to task. Aside from several books that Berlin mentions which took on classical rhetoric, most of the discussion of teaching writing in our course readings treats the short essay and the student paper, not early rhetoric. I’m conscious that students need a toolbox to store techniques they have learned for arguing effectively, and I search for those tools—preferably in the form of examples. I teach, for instance, triptychs and syllogisms and aphorisms, but am constantly nervous that I don’t teach enough of these tools. We practice them very little in class. As an example, poetry teachers nearly always have a glossary of terms which is easily copied, circulated, and explained. Logic teachers (and that’s sometimes us) can make a guide to logical fallacies. It’s tougher to accrue a list of rhetorical tropes and technicalities. The expressive school would shudder at teaching these short morphs in language. Crowley bolsters the expression teachers with Emig’s assertion that comp. classes rely “far too much on constraints” (203), while at the other extreme, Murray is “giving sanction for the student in some instances not to write at all” (cited in Crowley 202). He deserves to be picked on for that idea, but without inciting the student to write, we would only have a toolbox and no project over which to wield the tools. Most instructors do give mini-lessons on grammar, though, and those would be better—and appeal to the higher end of a composition class’s students—if they were accompanied by short lessons on rhetorical tools.

My grandfather (reportedly) used to say: 'What you are looking for is within ten feet of you, and it's probably on the ground.' This is where I am looking for tricks and tropes of rhetoric, and I'm trying to disperse them within reach of all my students as well. Can I just make them an iPhone app that works like a thesaurus--e.g. "Hotkey for Persuasive Paragraphs"?