TEACHING COMPOSITION

Composition, or formal writing, is often a drag.  Thomas Edison never said that good writing is 2 percent inspiration, 98 percent perspiration, but he could have.  When I retired to rework my dissertation into a book on Shakespeare, as my friends in academe had encouraged me to do, I had a huge task ahead of me.  I had to start over.  I had to write three new chapters to explain the originality and foundations of my topic, to replace two chapters which I knew were G*d-awful, and to revise two others in light of new ideas and for a better focus on old ones.  And I had to rewrite everything in a style more attractive than the stilted style required by that academic exercise.  It took me three years, but I think that little in my life has been as much fun as that labor of love.

 

I doubt that I read the final version from cover to cover at the time, in 2003, but I did when I prepared to revise it for a second edition in 2014.  I have just re-read it just to see what I think of it now.  By gum, by golly, I knew a lot and wrote well.  Experienced in writing well and trained in reading critically and self-critically, I still feared that vanity prompted my good opinions.  I asked a mentor about self-appraisals and self-approvals.  He upheld retrospective self-judgments and, knowing my book, thought my judgment solid and my satisfaction in good results from hard work deserved.

 

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For high-school students, however, expository writing is usually a drag.  Interests are often undeveloped, information often scanty, energy in short supply, and rewards few and far between.  Making matters worse, the teaching of composition focuses on form, not content.  In general, it amounts to this: paragraphs with a topic sentence and three sentences of “supports,” themes with an introduction, three paragraphs of “supports,” and a conclusion.  Writing better, are you?

 

A better approach to teaching composition begins with the fundamentals, set forth in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Modern Rhetoric (out of print but available at Amazon).  A college textbook for a first-year writing course, its subject is non-technical writing, especially the theme (an early section is “Finding a Subject”).  But its guidance is good for technical writing as well.  I used it to teach myself almost everything important about composition, to teach my students, and to improve my writing.

 

Most valuable is their focus on four fundamentals:

Unity—relevance to the topic

Coherence—sensible order of ideas with connecting or transitional devices

Emphasis—relative importance of different information

Development—patterns for presenting the information suited to the topic

I add three others: completeness (not just unity) within the scope of the topic, accuracy, and cogency, the latter the overall effect of a rational presentation with good reasons and fallacy-free logic.  To judge your writing, turn these fundamentals into questions.

 

Of their four fundamentals, I place greatest importance on development, with its six basic patterns—definition, description/identification, exemplification, classification, contrast-comparison, and analysis (including process)—for two reasons.  One, these patterns are the basic ways of analyzing a subject, and selecting and organizing information about it.  Two, teachers basing assignments on one or more of these patterns help students in “Finding a Subject.”  A process paper teaches students how to explain making a dress, changing a flat tire, or cooking a dinner.  A contrast-comparison paper teaches students that they must “measure” two items by the same “yardsticks” and that the comparison must have a point.  An imaginative student might compare worms and stars; assess them in terms of molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic particle components; and thus show that atomic structures are the same throughout the universe.

 

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Some teachers and students believe that writers are born, not bred.  Differences in acquisition—speakers learn from imitation; writers, from instruction—mean that there are no born writers (also, no born speakers, crying excepted).  As they mature, speakers learn better how to communicate their message to listeners and readers.  They learn to consider their purpose and approach, their audiences’ abilities, interests, and opinion of them and their message. What is learned unconsciously for speaking can and should be taught formally for writing.

 

Writing, like speaking, is a person-to-person act.  The big difference is that writers, unlike speakers, cannot make real-time, mid-course adjustments in reaction to their audiences’ responses.  So, with no feedback loop, with no second chance to make a first impression or correct a false one, writers must use “critical thinking” about purpose, approach, and audience; and carefully plan the execution of the fundamentals to get their intended response.  Teachers should teach these inter-acting factors by giving students opportunities to learn from experience.  In my day, the custom was the weekly theme; fallen by the wayside, it should be revived (crucial need: more and better English teachers, smaller classes).  A few themes a term satisfies a formal requirement only.

 

Moreover, because writing, like speaking, is a person-to-person act, it is also a social act and thus has ethical and moral dimensions.  Writing should be taught as behavior requiring civility and respect for others.  As the 17^th-century French intellectual prodigy Blaise Pascal wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”  Brevity is one courtesy; order is another.  In my professional capacity as an analyst and editor, I too often reviewed word salads from technical specialists whose defense was that “it’s all there,” as if they would be pleased with a dinner at a restaurant serving cocktails, appetizer, salad, soup, sirloin steak, baked potato, string beans, and ice cream mixed in a large bowl.  Such writing not only makes for hard reading, but also conveys the writers’ disregard of their readers.

 

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My last word is that studying to acquire knowledge of and skill in grammar and composition can help achieve effective communication and promote better relations with others.  I would venture that grammar and composition effectively taught may be able to do more to promote better inter-personal relations than courses in multiculturalism and diversity have done thus far.  Indeed, it may be that the decline in literacy corresponds to, if it has not contributed to, the increase in belligerence and bigotry.