Composition: History & Theory: 1865 - 1899
Professional Writing
Description
Robert Connors, in Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (1997), writes about how after the Morrill Act colleges broadened their focuses. Students were learning to work in offices, mines, and schools, marking a new need for professional writing. He also explains how consolidation composition-rhetoric saw the advent of written entrance exams (Harvard 1874) and the resulting “literacy crisis,” the creation of “English A,” and the codified, hierarchical, rhetoric-poetic split. External forces dictated “teachability” as the “criterion of [pedagogical, theoretical] choice” for faculty coping with high student loads; the “radically simplified” result for composition-rhetoric courses was the four-discourse-mode-dominated curriculum (12). Connors notes that it is “only after 1870 [after Harvard’s exam] that we begin to hear bitter complaints about paper-grading overwork from teachers of rhetoric” (51). In the late 1800s, there was a move back toward more mechanical texts, which seems to align with steadily increasing enrollments, a need for skilled instructors, and the 1885 birth of the freshman writing course. Composition was viewed less as a cultural problem and more of an individual problem; there was no longer a concern about illiteracy that plagued American children. Quickly after the birth of freshman writing came an influx of younger, less skilled instructors (graduate students) in 1890. Texts were filled with exercises and grammatical rules which catered to new instructors. Instructors eventually started using readers in courses. They generally cost 50 cents (a bargain compared to $2.00 rhetorics).
Date of Upload
3/13/09