composition theory: a child grieving for its broken home

Composition Theory: A Child Grieving for its Broken Family

Jacqueline HettelResponse Paper #2January 13, 2011

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross proposed in On Death and Dying that when a

person is affected by bad news that he or she will go through a series of

five stages.

Composition Theory, the child of Elocution and Linguistics’ broken marriage, is too trying to return

to meaningful life after the traumatic bad news regarding its

parents’ divorce.

This journey becomes most clear through the classification and organization of our Comp Theory readings thus far in the

semester.

Shock and Denial

Shock and DenialAuthor Title

Steven Fraiberg “Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual Framework”

Anne R. Gere “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition”

Richard Leo Enos “Ancient Greek Writing Instruction” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

Richard Braddock “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose”

James A. Berlin “A Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”

Linda Flower and John R. Hayes “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”

Sondra Perl “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers”

Patrick Hartwell “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”

Favorite Quotes from

Shock and Denial“This remixing of the disciplines is key for moving composition and rhetoric intothe twenty-first century, in which we find ourselves with an increasingly heterogeneous student body for whom traditional categories of second language do not neatly fit.” --Steven Fraiberg

“Participants in groups like the Tenderloin Women’s Writing Workshop and the Lansing,Iowa Writers Workshop represent a tiny portion of the enormous number of individualswho meat in living rooms, nursing homes, community centers, churches, shelters for the homeless, around kitchen tables, and in rented rooms to write down their worlds.”--Anne Ruggles Gere

"There is little doubt that writing instruction aids oral discourse by 'freezing' speech so that it is stable. Yet, stabilizing oral discourse through writing offers many more benefits than merely holding the language still and in place."—Richard Leo Enos

"While helping students use clear topic sentences in their writing and identify variously presented topical ideas in their reading, the teacher should not pretend that professional writers largely follow the practices he is advocating."—Richard Braddock


Shock and Denial

"While it is established practice today to speak of the composing process as a recursive activity involving prewriting, writing, and rewriting, it is not difficult to see the writer-reality-audience-language relationship as underlying, at a deeper structural level, each of these three stages."—James A. Berlin

"To most of us it may seem reasonable to suppose that all of these forces--'purposes,’ 'relationships,' 'exigencies,' 'language'--have a hand in guiding the writer's process, but it is not at all clear how they do so or how they interact."—Linda Flower and John R. Hayes

"This analysis has two implications. First, it makes the question of socially nonstandard dialects, always implicit in discussions of teaching formal grammar, into a non-issue.Native speakers of English, regardless of dialect, show tacit mastery of the conventions of Standard English, and that mastery seems to transfer into abstract orthographic knowledge through interaction with print.”—Patrick Hartwell

"Teaching composing, then, means paying attention not only to the forms or products but also to the explicative process through which they arise."—Sondra Perl

AngerName Title

Kathryn Fitzgerald “A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition in Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Normal Schools”

Paul C. Rodgers “A Discourse-Centered Rhetoric of the Paragraph”

David Bartholomae “Inventing the University”

Ann E. Berthoff “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning”

Favorite Quotes from Anger

“When the [Normal Schools] teachers talk about the linguistic competence of their normalschool students, we see explanations for poor performance based on prior experienceand learning with none of the ad hominum descriptors like ‘vulgar,’ ‘illegitimate,’ and ‘slip shod’ that we heard from Harvard men….”—Kathryn Fitzgerald

"I have been concerned mainly to demonstrate that the paragraph is just one of several kinds of stadia, and that the logical partitioning of complex discourse into paragraphs can occur at so many junctures that additional non-logical criteria often have to be invoked to account for a given decision to indent."—Paul C. Rodgers

"The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community."—David Bartholomae

"Rather, in our pedagogy of knowing, we will encourage the discovery of mind by assuring that language is seen not as a set of slots, not as an inert code to be mastered by drill, but as a means of naming the world; of holding the images by whose means we human beings recognize the forms of our experience; of reflecting on those images, as we do on other words.”—Ann E. Berthoff

Depression and Detachment


Author Title

Melissa Ianetta “Disciplinarity, Divorce, and the Displacement of Labor Issues: Rereading Histories of Composition and Literature”

James J. Murphy “Introduction” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

Marjorie Curry Woods “The Teaching of Poetic Composition in the Later Middle Ages” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

John C. Brereton “The New Writing Curriculum, 1895-1915”

Robert J. Connors “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse”


Authors Title

Sharon Crowley “The Evolution of Invention in the Current-Traditional Rhetoric: 1850-1970”

James J. Murphy “Epilogue” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

Janet Emig “Writing as a Mode of Learning”

James Britton “Spectator Role and the Beginning of Writing”


Depression and Detachment“But reviewing the histories recounted here has persuaded me that the traditional paths to prestige in academe—publication, tenured faculty, PhD programs, and the like—may actually be the challenges, not the means, to the resolution of the labor problem at theroot of many problems we face.”—Melissa Ianetta

"It is our belief here that we cannot understand the present state of affairs unless we also understand how that state of affairs came to be."—James J. Murphy

"Nevertheless, the medieval approach was pedagogically sound...."—Marjorie Curry Woods

”Harvard’s establishment of a large composition program had inaugurated the startof similar, though less ambitious, programs nationwide. Meanwhile traditional rhetorichad continued its steep decline, to be replaced by a different model of composition.”—John C. Brereton


Depression and Detachment“Our discipline has been long in knuckling from its eyes the sleep of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, and the real lesson of the modes is that we need always to beon guard against systems that seem convenient to teachers but that ignore the waywriting is actually done”—Robert J. Connors

”The paradigm of discourse recommended by current-traditional composition textbooks, with its neat formula for roping off a topic, stating a thesis, listing and developing (usuallythree) supporting ideas and repeating the thesis can only be described as a bizarre parodyOf serious discourse and the process by which it is produced. –Sharon Crowley

"The history of writing instruction in the twenty-first century, though, must necessarily be written by some scholars not yet born."—John C. Brereton

"To be a teacher of a process such as this takes qualities too few of us have, but which most of us can develop."—Janet Emig

"We give and find shape in the very act of perception, we give and find further shape as we talk, write or otherwise represent our experiences."—James Britton

Dialogue and Bargaining


Author Title

Douglas Hesse “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies”

William Riley Parker “Where Do English Departments Come from?”

Don Paul Abbot “Rhetoric and Writing in the Renaissance” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

Carol Dana Lanham “Writing Instruction from Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

James J. Murphy “The Key Role of Habit in Roman Writing Instruction” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

Linda Ferraira-Buckley and Winifred Bryan Horner

“Writing Instruction in Great Britain: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” in A Short History of Writing Instruction


Author Title

Jayne C. Harder “Thomas Sheridan: A Chapter in the Saga of Standard English”

Winifred Bryan Horner “The Roots of Modern Writing Instruction: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain”

Thomas Miller “The Formation of College English: A Survey of Archives of Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Theory and Practice”

Edward P. J. Corbett “The Cornell School of Rhetoric”

Wallace Douglas “Rhetoric for the Meritocracy: The Creation of Composition at Harvard”

S. Michael Halloran and Elizabetheda Wright

“Teaching Writing in America to 1900” in A Short History of Writing Instruction

Catherine L. Hobbs and James A. Berlin

“Writing Instruction in School and College English, 1890 -1985”


Author Title

Robert P. Parker, Jr. “From Sputnik to Dartmouth: Trends in the Teaching of Composition”

Richard Fulkerson “Four Philosophies of Composition”

Maxine Hairston “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing”

James Kinneavy “The Basic Aims of Discourse”

Andrea A. Lunsford “Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer”

Walter Ong “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction”


Author Title

Lisa Ede and Patricia Lunsford “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy”

Kenneth A. Bruffee “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”

Patricia Bizzell “William Perry and Liberal Education”


Dialogue and Bargaining“To share, to learn, to feel valued. Here is where creative writing now intersectscomposition.”—Douglas Hesse

“English needs still to learn something from its mother. And even more from itsfather.”—William Riley Parker

"'Nothing so marked the difference between the Middle Ages and the Rennaisance,' says Paul Grendler, 'as the revival of classical rhetoric.' Medieval scholars 'dismembered ancient rhetoric' retaining 'discreet technical elements such as definitions of rhetorical figures....'"—Don Paul Abbot

"Remarkably, the essence of Quintilian's educational program survived the fragmentation and decay of civic life and the painful transition to a multiplicity of Christian societies in which the imperial system of publicly supported schools and teachers deteriorated and in some places apparently disappeared altogether."—Carol Dana Lanham

“The remarkable thing about Roman education is that it took the comparatively loose ideas of Greek educators and molded them into a coherent system, which instilled in its students a Habit (hexis) of effective expression."—James J. Murphy


Dialogue and Bargaining"During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the sovereignty of the classical languages was increasingly challenged, and writing instruction in English evolved in response to social, political, religious, and economic developments." —Linda Ferraira-Buckley and Winifred Bryan Horner

“Practically every native speaker of English has his own cherished opinion as to "right” and "wrong" pronunciations. Different individuals base their opinions on different things: some depend on oral tradition, some on dictionaries, some on spelling, and some on the authority of people who are supposed to know about such things. ”—Jayne C. Harder

"Writing instruction within any society is subject to social and political influences, and nowhere is this more true than in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Britain, that territory that encompassed England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In addition, strong religious movements and a special linguistic situation during this period shaped whereand how writing was taught. "—Winifred Bryan Horner



“Histories of English as a specialized discipline can tell us some things about our past, but such histories often assume that academic disciplines are shaped by scholarlydebates within the field, rather than by broader changes in education and society. As both teachers and rhetoricians, we need to attend more carefully to specific changes in educational and social practices, especially if we want to understand the historical relationship between the two. ”—Thomas Miller

“But most teachers and students in English and other humanities disciplines, even those interested in rhetorical studies, are only vaguely aware—if they are aware at all—of this important event in the history of ideas in this country. I want to acquaint interested members of this latter group with some of the details about the so-called Cornell School of Rhetoric.”—Edward P.J. Corbett

“Channing’s Lectures can be seen as a nearly final stage in the long devolution of classical rhetoric, or--more usefully here--as a second stage in the development of the idea of composition"—Wallace Douglas


Dialogue and Bargaining"The movements from classical to vernacular and from scripted speech to silent proseare nonetheless both sufficiently distinct in historical fact and sufficiently distinguishable in concept to be useful in organizing the history of writing instruction in America.”—S. Michael Halloran and Elizabetheda Wright

"Arthur Applebee characterizes the history of English teaching as a struggle between tradition and reform; periods of movement backward toward traditional concerns alternate with periods of movement forward toward new issues and new priorities.”—Robert P. Parker, Jr.

"If Education in a democratic society is a site of contestation over the kind of economic, social, and political formations we want schools to endorse, it is no wonder that English studies, with its concern for the literary and rhetorical texts students are to read and to write remains near the center of curricular decisions. So in English studies, writing instruction has remained at the heart of curricular decisions as to the kind of societywe should advocate and the kinds of individuals we should encourage to make up that society."—Catherine L. Hobbs and James A. Berlin



"the determination of the basic aims of discourse and some working agreement in this area among rhetoricians would be a landmark in the field of composition. For it is to the achievement of these aims that all our efforts as teachers of composition are directed.”—James Kinneavy

"In fact, it is possible and, I would urge, highly profitable, to build an entire basic writing course on exercises like the ones described above, assignments which 'march ahead of development and lead it.' If we can do so successfully, and if we can find valid ways to substantiate our success, certainly we will have put all our theory to the best practical use."—Andrea Lunsford

“So it is important for us to preserve the best parts of earlier methods for teaching writing: the concern for style and the preserva- tion of high standards for the written product."—Maxine Hairston

"My research has convinced me that in many cases composition teachers either fail to have a consistent value theory or fail to let that philosophy shape pedagogy.”—Richard Fulkerson



"A full elaborated view of audience, then, must balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important, creativity of the reader. It must account for a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences.”—Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford

“The common denominator among both the poorly prepared and the seemingly well-prepared was that, for cultural reasons we may not yet fully understand, all these students seemed to have difficulty adapting to the traditional or 'normal' conventions of the college classroom."—Bruffee"Given that we do not have this moral investment in the objects of knowledge and the ways of thinking that we teach, it seems hypocritical to pretend that academic activity is value-neutral, that we are merely teaching 'thinking,' not thinking in a certain way."—Patricia Bizzell

"Context for the spoken word is simply present, centered in the person speaking and the one or ones to whom he addresses himself and to whom he is related existentially in terms of the circumambient actuality. But the meaning caught in writing cones provided with no such present circumambient actuality, at least normally.”—Walter Ong

Acceptance

AcceptanceAuthor Title

Bronwyn T. Williams “Seeking New Worlds: The Study of Writing Beyond Our Classrooms”

Frank J. D’Angelo “An Ontological Basis for a Modern Theory of the Composing Process”

Mina P. Shaughnessy “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing”

Patricia Bizzell “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing”

Nancy Sommers “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”

Stephen P. Witte and Lester Faigley

“Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality”

Donald M. Murray “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product”


Acceptance"If the claim of rhetoric and composition is to study student writing, it must be in conversation about how writing happens before and after students step on to university campuses.” —Bronwyn T. Williams

"I believe that a modern theory of the composing process can be based directly on evolutionary theory as it relates to the origins and history of consciousness. The composing process, being an aspect of consciousness, must necessarily develop along the same general lines as consciousness itself."—Frank J. D’Angelo"DIVING IN is simply deciding that teaching them to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy.”—Patricia Bizzell"Good writing disturbs: it creates dissonance. Students need to seek the dissonance of discovery, utilizing in their writing, as the experienced writers do, the very difference between writing and speech--the possibility of revision."—Nancy Sommers


Acceptance"All this is to suggest that analyses of cohesion may be potentially useful in distinguishing stages of writing development....Cohesion analyses also give us some concrete ways of addressing some of the differences between good and poor writing, differences which heretofore could not be explained either to ourselves or to our students in any but the most abstract ways."—Stephen P. Witte and Lester Faigley"We work with language in action. We share with our students the continual excitement of choosing one word instead of another, of searching for the one true word."—Donald M. Murray

Now, back to meaningful life with Composition Theory…