Composition: History & Theory: 1970 - 1979
Popular Rhetorical Theory
Description
In Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 (1987), James Berlin notes that there were several major theoretical approaches to teaching writing at this time (many of them with their roots in the 1960s). Berlin states that these scholars were involved in the conversation of teaching composition in classrooms and their works were attempts to respond to the demand for “relevance” in the college curriculum. Covered here in the 60s are the objective rhetoricians, subjective rhetoricians, transactional rhetoricians, classical rhetoricians, cognitive theorists, and the epistemic rhetoricians:
Objective rhetoricians were influenced by behaviorist psychology. They believed that being able to delve into the writer’s mind makes it hard for teachers to recognize the mental process of writing, which results in their inability to reward the right behavior. The teacher focused on the product, not the process itself. Objective rhetoricians that were active in and around this time were Lynn Bloom, Martin Bloom, and Robert Zoellner. Bloom and Bloom offered three activities to improve students’ composition instruction. The first activity was observing the students’ writing process through recording errors, corrections and interruptions while they produced a number of themes. The result was that students followed this pattern of writing: introduction --development--summary. The second activity was the symbolic presentation of the teacher. The conclusion was that writing process should be visible to both students and teachers. The third activity was the teacher’s evaluation of the student’s performance. Bloom and Bloom highlighted that students should be responsible for their work. They shouldn’t rely on the teacher for approval. Furthermore, Zoellner called for substituting thinking with writing because we are unable to perceive thought. He believed that allowing students to talk while they were prewriting could give him access to the mental process of writing. The benefits of this rhetorical approach included the following: developing a unique voice for the student, seeing the writing process as a social activity, engaging the teacher in the writing process, and differentiating between writing as a process and product.
Subjective rhetoricians that were active in and around this time were Ken Macrorie, Donald Murray, Walker Gibson, William Coles Jr., and Peter Elbow. This rhetorical approach encouraged solitary activities, describing group activity as “dangerous” (145). According to this approach, truth was located in the private world. Rhetoricians called for the freedom of writing and the interaction of private vision of the individual and language. From this perspective, writing was seen as art, discovery of the self, and the truth that has been distorted by society, self affirmation, expression of a unique vision, organic process of growth, and self-revelation. Scholars urged teachers to engage their students in free writing activities without editing or revising, and to introduce personal concerns for students in writing classes. Furthermore, they believed that students should be equal participants in the learning process by calling for a reduction in the distance between student and teacher so that students could find their own voices. One example of these scholars is Peter Elbow, who called for a “teacherless classroom” and empowerment of the students for them “to become less helpless” (154).
Transactional rhetoricians (including the classic rhetoricians, the cognitivists, and adherents of epistempic rhetoric) believed that reality was located in the interaction of material, writer, language and audience. The differences between the three rhetorics of this approach could be found in their definition of the interactive elements (material reality, writer, audience, and language) and the nature of their relationship (155).
Classical rhetoricians active during this period include Albert Duhamel, Richard Hughes, Edward P. J. Corbett, Dudley Bailey, and Donald C. Bryant. This rhetoric called for the return of the classical rhetoric to the composition classroom. It offered a systematic, guiding approach to the writing process that included invention, arrangement and style. For classical rhetoricians, “the modern composition course ought to apply Aristotelian principles in taking social problems as its subject matter, providing a purpose and an audience for writing and emphasizing argumentation” (157).
Cognitive rhetoricians included Janet Emig, Janice Lauer, Richard Larson, and Frank D’Angelo who were inspired by the work of Burner, Piaget, Britton, and Moffett. Emig’s contribution to this rhetoric was the idea of writing as a complex, unsystematic and recursive process that varies among personality types and cultures. Lauer argued that using heuristic procedures as a guide for writing teachers provided students with a set of procedures to follow in their writing in order to stimulate their active inquiry. Furthermore, D’Angelo’s rhetoric focused on different modes of thought and feeling, which he saw as the basic units of order in the four elements: world, language, mind, and discourse.
Epistemic rhetoricians included Martin, Ohmann, Bruffee, and Berthoff. Not only did this rhetoric focus on the transmission of knowledge, but also on its generation. Berlin examines this rhetoric by maintaining that knowledge is the outcome of the “dialectic interchange.” He provides the reader with a historical account of the development of this rhetoric from the comparison that Ohmann conducted between old rhetoric and new rhetoric to the similarities that Young, Pike and Becker found between the procedures that a linguist uses in analyzing language and those used by the writer to write a composition (170). He summarizes the aim of this rhetoric by stating that “it is based on mutual respect and is dedicated to discovering shared interpretations of experience” (171). Furthermore, Bruffee suggested collaborative learning and redistribution of power in the classroom since he found that the dominant behavior pattern in the English class at that time was “the authoritarian- individualist mode” – a mode that gave all the power to the teacher (174).
Date of Upload
3/14/09