Echoes of Old

Reading Bain and Hill this week felt as though I was reading an introduction or background information in our composition texts--and in essence, I was. Although it was very interesting to trace some of our current pedagogical "roots" to these rhetoricians, some of the foundations that have carried over are a bit stifling--or maybe we have interpreted or implemented the ideology so that it is stifling.

On one hand, I like Bain's modes: description, narration, exposition, oratory, and poetry. I think they are valuable tools to help students examine the variety of ways they can express themselves within one medium. Certainly, writing purely in only one of these rhetorical modes at a time is not practical, but choosing the form that may best showcase an idea or argument is a skill (or maybe art) that students can learn. On the other hand, some of Bain's ideas appear to lead to a more skill and drill mentality. He points out that one purpose of English teachers is to "obtain suitable exercises for practice in writing English" (B&H, p. 1146). He continues praising how the "sustained practice . . . or applying of the designations, principles, and rules of Rhetoric . . . would eventually form, in the mind of the pupil, an abiding ideal of good composition" (B&H, p. 1146). Despite the amount of research proving otherwise, this apparent traditional constructivist approach still reigns in many English classrooms--especially those grooming developmental writers.

Dovetailing with Bain, Hill cites four requirements for efficient communication: Grammatical Purity, Clearness, Force, and Elegance (B&H, p. 1149). His explanations appear to focus more on the current Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity approach to style in writing. Hill, though, anticipates the need for the criteria to meet his terms to evolve as the audience changes. In describing Grammatical Purity (Correctness), Hill explains that these expressions must meet the criteria that "are accepted by the consentient practice of the speakers or writers of the present time who enjoy the best national reputation" (B&H, p. 1149). This concept reminds me of Hume's touchstones, which in his definition are "works of art [that] are clearly better than others, a judgment about which nobody would disagree" (p. 829). So the rules are there, but they are iterative in the sense that they may change as the audience's taste changes.

Someone brought up the 5 paragraph essay in class last night, and there is clearly an audience that still sees its merit, but its criteria certainly no longer meets the touchstone standard. Composition is definitely still evolving. The relatively predictable pendulum swing from oral to written expression and back will somehow have to adapt to what technology offers as alternative forms of expression. I wonder what we will first judge as stifling or "traditional constructivist" in the technological realm (or is PowerPoint already there?)