Gone Engfishin'

Macrorie's excerpt from Telling Writing had some great, but not entirely applicable, things to say.

"Phony, pretentious language of the schools--Engfish" (297). A catchy word to discuss the stilted language of developing (maybe even fossilized) writers. Well said.

This excerpt is what got me going:

"They spend many hours in school mastering Engfish. The fact that the teacher and the textbook sometimes employ Engfish suggests to them that it's the official language of the school. They're learning a language that prevents them from working toward truths, and so they slide into telling lies" (299, italics mine).

"Working towards truths...." Sounds familiar, like, Truth: Plato::Aristotle: truth.

Our good friend, Eudora Welty points out, "The trouble with bad student writing is the trouble with all bad writing. It is not serious, and it does not tell the truth" (299).

Huh. This makes sense: stilted language is stilted because it isn't entirely true. If I were to suddenly stop making sense while talking in class, then I'm lying to everyone, including myself, that I am certain of what I am speaking about (see Samuel Butler's quotation at the bottom of 301 for further affirmations of honesty).

That awkward, lanky language is a result of simply trying too hard, to show off, or as Macrorie says, placing ones "vocabulary on exhibit [...] rather than putting it to work" (300). A remedy for this is an unself-conscious exercise to just write and write something true.

I couldn't agree more. Be more honest. Let me know who you are and things will get done quicker.

But what about analysis? Where is this writing going to be accepted in an Eng. 101 or 102 class, let alone an upper division literary studies seminar paper? I point to this passage as an explanation for my concern:

"This is the first requirement for good writing: truth; not the truth (whoever knows surely what that is?), but some kind of truth--a connection between the things written about, the words used in the writing, and the author's experience in a world she knows well--whether in fact or dream or imagination" (300).

Let's break that down:

-"...truth; not the truth but some kind of truth--" So not Platonic Truth but Aristotalean truth. Students who are to become better (or just simply be good) writers must differentiate between the Truth and the truth, an objective universal Truth, and the truth of a murky, multi-faceted reality, two things they have no concept of. Maybe students have encountered moments where they must define ethics in terms of a situation, but it is a rare student who has knowledge of the philosophies of the capital-T and the little-t.

-This little-t truth must coalesce from "a connection between the things written about [topoi?], the words used in the writing, and the author's experience in a world she knows well." When a freshman composition student is conducting a rhetorical analysis of her first academic journal article, those connections between things written and words on a page (how what is written is an effective argument) are what's important. The connection to the "world she knows well" may be made internally but must not make it on to the page. We are, after all, looking for objectivity (Truth). We are also looking for objective analysis, not a personal narrative (truth).

-The world this writer knows well has license to be relative to any aspect of the writer's experience, "whether in fact or dream or imagination." Imagination can have no role in Truth, and has a small part to play in truth. Truth is the way it is. truth is a perspective of the way it is. Imagination has a minimal, if even existent, contribution to analysis of a limited topic like a single academic essay and its application of rhetorical appeals.

So I wonder, how do we expect to cultivate writers' abilities in their first year in a college, in a single academic year (ideally), by essentially just having them write? And the majority of what they write is not as free-spirited as what Macrorie advocates. There are discussions of terms that are applied to the analyses students conduct and write on but this is the extent of their foraging in the forest of rhetoric.

They learn of ethos, pathos, and logos, but not of the Truth and the truth, which is what they are driving at in their studies and analyses, and what Macrorie repeats is the key to improving a person's ability to write effectively.

I was introduced to rhetoric, its history, and its concepts as a graduate student, as if I were finally ready to understand and tackle rhetoric for what it is: the strategic use of language, the art of communication. We are asking incoming freshman to invest in becoming better writers without understanding the reason for writing academically in the first place. What is to gain for a student who does not know that there is a discussion on Truth and truth and that that discussion still carries on? What reason do they have to care if they do not know that they can be a part of that discussion and have their voices heard and considered?

I point now to Christensen's conclusion on page 296:

"The teacher who thinks that writing is an art and that art cannot be taught, that the teacher can only inspire and then keep out of the way, will not find anything he can use. But the teacher who believes, as I do, that the only freedom in any art comes from the mastery of technique, may find here the means both to kindle and restrain."

There seems to be no clear way to teach "good" writing or find a time-tested way to make writers "better." But if there is anything that remotely shows, without the tests of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer, that writers can understand how to shake off that gnarly Engfish, it is through the understanding, and possibly eventual "mastery" of the art of communication. Rhetoric and the search for Truth or the resignation to truth is what must be understood before any writing can be developed.

Descartes before the horse

I've never taught before, EVER, and I am teaching not one but two Eng 101 courses this semester. In addition to never teaching before, I have never taken composition 101 or 102 at a university.

I am in a unique situation.

So I put myself in the students shoes and think, "Who is this guy?" "I'm taller than he is." "How young is he?!" My ethos is in major need of reinforcement.

So I dress the part and speak differently but that does nothing for the fact that these students are not entirely interested in the subject that I am teaching. I could be a forty-year-old doctor of literature or rhetoric or whatever and still not break through the wall of "this doesn't matter to me."

So I devote my time more to making this subject relative to them than I do to tying my tie (which does take more time than it should).

These students are not on some other plane of existence than I or anyone else is: they just simply don't know what I know yet. Maybe they understand the fundamental concepts of rhetoric but just don't analyze them or know the terminology. In fact, the only thing the students and I have in common, philosophically speaking, is that we are thinking, living, breathing entities in the same room. The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" mantra is something that never escapes me suddenly. But that's just me; we all think in vastly different ways.

Although he was talking about his attraction to the theatre, Thomas Sheridan said something that made me realize I can not be so cerebral about my approach to teaching: "At length...I found that theory alone would never bring me far on my way; and that continual practice must be added to furnish me with lights to conduct me to my journey's end" (17).

I'm beginning an attempt at getting a room full of people who have believed in and/or attached a stigma to composition to see that rhetoric is inherent in all of us. The one thing that we all have access to is language and we have language for a reason: to communicate. If students understand that our means of communication contain more ideas than just grammar or whatever else they believe to be dry and boring, then they can see rhetoric living and breathing through them. If they can identify it in themselves and the world around them, then they should certainly be able to identify those ideas in the reading for class and be better writers for it.

That's my theory. We'll see how idealistic I am in believing in a (Socratic) collective rhetoric that needs only be drawn out of students to be understood.