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Milic, Louis T.; And OthersTheories of Style and Their Implications for theTeaching of Composition--and Other Essays.National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign,IlloMay 6523p.; Articles originally published in "CollegeComposition and Communication" (May 1965)National Council of Teachers of English, 508 SouthSixth Street, Champaign, Ill. 61820 (Stock No.32805, $0.75, prepaid)

EDFS Price MF-$0.25 HC-$1.25Communication Skills, *Composition (Literary) ,

Composition Skills (Literary) , Direction Writing,Dogmatism, Educational Theories, *EnglishInstruction, Expository Writing, Linguistics,Literary Analysis, *Literary Styles, Rhetoric,Semantics, *Technical Writing, Twentieth CenturyLiterature

Four articles deal with approaches to style, theusefulness of contemporary literature, the danger of dogmas, and theplace of technical writing in composition courses. Louis T. Milicdiscusses three "real theories of style"--classical rhetoricaldualism, psychological monism, and Crocean aesthetic monism--and theeffect of the theories on the teaching of composition. Thomas W.Wilcox, who takes up the difficulty of teaching structural form incomposition when both teacher and students are confronted with theopen-ended or deliberately ambiguous structures of successfulcontemporary literature, indicates that teachers may have to modifytheir concepts of composition if they incorporate "fresh examples ofverbal art" in their courses. A. M. Tibbetts presents "a shorthistory of dogma and nonsense in the composition course." Specificdogmas discussed are semantics, communication skills, linguistics,and composition research. W. Earl Britton discusses four definitionsof technical writing and differentiates between "imaginative" and"functional" writing through an emphasis on technical writing's"effort to limit the reader to one interpretation." (LH)

cr%rescore\ Theories of Style and Their Implications

for the Teaching of Compositionand Other Essays

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00uJ

THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS Louis T, 2FOR THE TEACHING OF COMPOSITION

COMPOSITION WHERE NONE IS APPARENT: Thomas W. Wilcox 7CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND THECOURSE IN WRITING

A SHORT HISTORY OF DOGMA AND NONSENSE A. M. TibbettsIN THE COMPOSITION COURSE

WHAT IS TECHNICAL WRITING? W. Earl Britton 20

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1

Iheories of Style and Their 3mplications

for the 3-leaching of CompositionLOUIS T. MILIC

IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH, the termstyle comes up far too often, I think,The teacher tinkers with the student'sstyle in something like the way an old-fashioned doctor, an empiric, tinkeredwith his patient's organs, using surgery,bleeding, and drugs, haphazardly andwithout reference to a general theory ofhealth or illness, The net result is oftenthat ascribed by Lesage to the famousDr. Sangrado, who reduced many ahealthy man to the last extremity. Theprecise applicability of this analogy Ishall not insist on pointing out, buttherapy old and new has always re-

quiredtheoretical foundation if it was

to be useful to more than one patient.A theory of style, therefore, would

seem to be an important need for anyteacher of composition, though this ishardly ever made clear. In fact, a teacherof composition (like any teacher) mustalso have a theory of learning, but inthis too it is unlikely that the beginnerat least has much idea of what histheory is or could state it formally.Those who undertake the teaching ofcomposition in college have not usuallyhad courses in educational psychologyor learning theory, behaviorist or other.Yet they obviously operate on the basisof some intuitive theory of how learningtakes place. The sources of this intuitionhave a rather unscientlIc and disorderlyappearance. The most potent is surelyimitation of one's own learning experi-ence and of one's own teachers, A cer-tain amount of theory is also quarriedfrom commonplaces with the force ofreceived truths: practice makes perfect;if you don't work hard, how do you

2

expect to learn, etc. . . Information maybe picked up from one's colleagues orarticles in Harpers about the sorry stateof American education or in CollegeEnglish about the dangers of teachingmachines and programmed instruction.

There is no guarantee that this miscel-laneous collection of data could profit-ably be replaced by systematic trainingin the psychology of learning: teachersrequired to take such courses are notnotably more successful than their un-trained colleagues. It is probable thatthe ingredients of the theory informallyheld by most teachers, consisting ofdemonstration, repetition acid examina-tion, are as effective as anything moresophisticated would be, in view of ourmore or less general ignorance of thefactors constituting the process of learn-ing. Since it is not certainly known whatwould be better than intuition, it isperhaps just as well that time is notwasted on acquiring methods that mightprove fallacious, Surely, the main reasonwhy theory is at a discount here is thatstudents, almost regardless of the ob-stacles interposed by the teacher, cannotbe prevented from learning. It is intheir natures to learn and this is just astrue in composition as in other subjects,as was evidenced in one experimentwhich showed that students taking phys-ics instead of composition improved asmuch in composition in their first termin college as students exposed to theregular freshman course. But this shouldnot be taken to imply that students can-not be helped to learn faster or better.

If we are to take the Kitzhaber reportseriously, nothing can help; there is no

I

THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICA'2IONS 3

agreement on what good composition is,nor what the subject matter of coursesought to be, nor about the texts, teachers,grades or anything else, except that thelevel of writing must be brought up. Inview of the seriousness of the situation,I am reluctant to call attention to whatseems to me a fundamental deficiencyof all the approaches to this problem. Noconsistent theory of style seems to under-lie the several efforts to teach composi-tion. By this I mean that the relation-ship of thing to idea and idea to word isleft unexpressed, to be interpreted ac-cording to the fashion of the moment.Whatever interpretation is favored, theconsequences are formidable for therelated question: to what extent and bywhat means can the writing behaviorof the student be influenced to change.It is obvious that the choice between astylistic monism and dualism will givevastly different answers and consequent-ly imply vastly different strategies fordealing with our patients.

Though I may be accused of beingprecipitous in thinking of a collegefreshman as possessed of a mind andpersonality in some degree 2ormed, I amspeaking advisedly. The problem isclearly different in the earlier formativestages, in grammar school and in highschool, when the material is still plastic.But in college we have on our hands arather intractable entity, chock-full ofhabits with the force of a dozen yearsof practice. Thus, in a sense, the prob-lem may be insoluble before we addressourselves to it.

There are only three real theories ofstyle, though there has been much em-broidery on the basic fabric. The mostfamilia: is the theory of ornate form, orrhetorical dualism, From the classicalrhetoricians who originated it to therhetoricians of the moment who are still

v using it, this dualism view has alwaysimplied that ideas exist wordlessly andcan be dressed in a variety of outfits,

depending on the need for the occasion:the grand style, the plain style, the mid-dle style and the low style and the like.

A second theory, the individualist orpsychological monism, which finds itsmoss common expression in the aphor-ism that the style is the man, may haveoriginally sprung from Plato's concep-tion of the vir bonus, the good manwhose goodness would express itselfequally 4.n graceful dancing and gracefulexpression. The modern version is per-haps descended from Montaigne, whoclaimed to write in the way that wasnatural for him, following his own bent,and disdaining affectation. Broughtwholly up-to-date, it means that a writer."cannot help writing the way he does,for that is the dynamic expression of hispersonality, illustrated in his handwrit-ing, his walk and all his activity.

The most modern theory of style,Crocean aesthetic monism, is an organicview which denies the possibility of anyseparation between content and form.Any discussion of style in Croce's view isuseless and irrelevant, for the work ofart ( the composition) is a unified whole,with no seam between meaning andstyle. Thus, in the organic view, thereis no style at all, only meaning or intui-tion. It is an elegant solution which hasbeen widely adopted by enthusiastsquite unaware, it seems, that it left themnothing to do. It is so widespread thatthose who practice it hardly find itnecessary even to say that style is notan isolable quality.

Now, how do these recondite theoriesaffect us as teachers of composition?Although the connection between thedabblings of our freshmen and the ideasof Plato and Croce may seem remote,the implications of these theories haveimportant consequences for the teachingof composition. It is in the nature ofbasic theories to generate implicationsand for opposed theories to produce con-tradictory implications. Thus it is evi-

4 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

dent that eclecticism will not really workand that a choice among these theoriesmust be made by the teacher of composi-tion. He cannot espouse one theory andteach on the basis of another, or, likemany a handbook of composition, a con-flation of all three.

If the teacher adopts the theory ofornate form, he must be prepared toaccepteven to hail enthusiastically - -itsinevitable implications. The theory isbased, as everyone knows, on the beliefin the separate existence of content andform. Like any frankly dualistic view,it has attracted the disapproval of thosewho espouse a hard (or positivist) line,That is, though you can see words, youcannot see ideas or content. If you can-not see (feel, hear, etc.) content, youhave no proof that it exists. What youcannot prove the existence of, they say,you have no business theorizing about.Yet, despite its unprovability and per-haps its scientific unsoundness, the dual-istic theory has many attractions andadvantages. But its implications must beaccepted or at least accounted for.

To begin with, the disjunction of con-tent and form permits a belief in a realintended meaning behind every utter-ance. The writer intends to expresssomething (idea) and he struggles withpossibilities until he finds the formula-tion which best expresses it. Becausethis seems to many to correspond withevery writer's experience, it is readilyaccepted by everyone, including thecritically naive, who proceed to sew itonto one of the monistic theories. Peda-gogically, this makes it possible to en-join the student to clarify his thought(without reference to the possible diffi-culty that this may be impracticablewithout the aid of language ), to make itlogical, before actually embodying it inwords. The inelegancies and errorswhich occur can be treated as correct-able by consulting the intended mean-ing. Correction and revision are done

according to some absolute standard ofrightness perhaps related to the hier-archy of styles; casual, informal, formal,ceremonial ( also known as levels ofusage). And if revision and correctionare done sufficiently long and diligently,the expression of the intended meaningcan become complete. It can reach thepoint where the reaction of a readerwould be "There seems to be no otherway to say it."

It should be evident that this theoryof style corresponds pretty well with thepractices of the old rhetoric. The theoryof rhetorical dualism justifies certainclassroom procedures. Students can beencouraged to write imitations of Swift,Addison, Johnson, Macaulay, Shaw orE. B. White. They can be set to writethe same paper in a variety of styles,from the low to the grand. They can betaught the mysteries of anaphora, brach-ylogia, hypallage and epichireme. Theircompositions can be tested for the suit-able presence of the seven parts, fromexordium to peroration. But, conversely,emphasis on subject and on personalitymust be excluded. Students should notbe told to write naturally, to expresstheir personalities, that is, because sucha concept contradicts the fundamentalassumptions of the theory of ornateform. Nor should any particular atten-tion be paid to the substance of thewriting for the theory explicitly deniesany link between substance and formexcept for logic. The uniformity of thewriting of the students which mightresult must be token as a vindication ofthe theory and not as an evil conse-quence.

If the second theory, the individualist,is espoused, the field of activity is great-ly narrowed, In Plato's view, the onlyroute to the improvement of the stu-dent's writing (or dancing) is throughthe general enhancement of his soul.If we wish the writing to be goodPlatobelieves in an absolute standardthe

THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS 5

writer must be a good person. Nothingelse will avail. Thus courses in com-position would become; largely coursesin spiritual self-improvement, perhapswith ethics, religion and psychotherapyas significant components. In the moremodern version of this theory, that styleis the expression of the student's mindand personality, there is not much moreto do. We can exhort him to eschewmannerism and to write naturally, toexpress himself fully and to be as gram-matical as possible while doing it. Butwhat if the student's personality, fullyexpressed, leads to contortion, gibberishor paranoia? What is left except tothrow up our hands? It is evident thatunder the influence of this theory wecannot urge the student to adopt an-other personality or to write more na-turally than he does when his naturalwriting is not bearable. None of theusual tactics used in composition courseshave any real bearing here except per-haps finding a subject on which thestudent can perform competently.

Croce's organic theory of style leavesus even more completely helpless, inas-much as it explicitly disavows any seg-mentation between the subject and itsform. Croce will have no truck withdevices of rhetoric or anything whichcasts the least shadow on the integrityof expression. The consequences of thedisappearance of style which results isthat discussion of the student's writingmust consist almost exclusively of itsphilosophy, so to speak. The emphasiswhich this theory forces on us is thedominance of the subject. For if thereis no form, we cannot discuss, muchless improve, the student's means ofexpression. The powerful trend to thestudy of linguistics and substantive mat-ters in composition courses of late yearsmay find its source in the unconsciousadoption of this unitary view. If wecannot teach rhetoric, we must still teachsomething, but since miscellaneous social

and topical subjects have produced noimprovement, perhaps the final recourseto the subject matter of the languageitself will succeed. Thus the proponentsof the linguistic readers have in a waysolved the Crocean paradox. Substancecannot be separated from form but ifthe substance is the form we can havethe best of both worlds, writing exclu-sively about form. However ingeniousthis solution may seem, the' e is verylittle evidence that it has succeededin improving the level of performancein English composition, if a nascentcounter-trend to the linguistic approachis any guide, not to mention the short-age of qualified instructors.

It is unfortunately true that composi-tion theory has been going in circlesfor the last two or three decades andthat the level of composition amongfreshmen has been declining. Those whorefer to the good old days are usuallyrebuffed with sociological facts, such asthe greater percentage of students incollege now compared to half a centuryago. As the base broadens, the averagemust go down. This is doubtless true,but it is not the entire answer. That, Ibelieve must be sought in an unhappyconfusion in the minds of the teachersof composition. These unfortunates, be-ginning some three or four decades ago,threw rhetoric into the wastebasket,partly under the stimulus of the newCrocean discovery and partly under theinfluence of factors which also resultedin the dismissal of Latin fk om the cur-riculum, and were left with nothing toteach. Until about 1920, compositiontexts were rhetorics. After that, theybecame almost everything else, with re-sults that have borri9ecl all observers.The combination of the individualisttheory Write naturally! and the or-ganic theory Content and form are in-separable! has become a talisman sopowerful that only scorn is reserve I for

6 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

those who would profess to doubt itsmagic power. In fact, it is considered atruth so self-evident that it hardly needsto be stated and thus it underlies thethinking of all or nearly all those whoteach composition by any method, eventhe new rhetoricians.

The welter of theories and panaceascurrently ornamenting the compositionscene results, I believe, from this funda-mental theoretical unsoundness: formcannot be taught by those who do notbelieve in it and the creative expressionof personality cannot be interpreted asa reasonable compromise between formand substance. If we want to teachsomething in our composition classes,it may be that we must return to someform of rhetoric, which is honestly andunashamedly concerned with form andnot with content. 'It seems to haveevaded the scrutiny of interested partiesthat the decline in composition has notbeen a feature of educational systemsstill backwardly tied to old-fashionedrhe' `cal methods, including Italy,F. , Germany, Spain and England.Perhaps there is a lesson in this.

A distinction may need to be made,also, between the best theory of stylefor teaching composition and the besttheory for analyzing literary works. Forteaching, a dualistic theory seems to beessential, at least in the early stages,

until the maturing of the literary per-sonality has had an opportunity to in-fluence the student's style. For analysis,the problem is somewhat different. Afusion of expressive and unconscioustheories seems to conform to the gen-eral practice. Writers, that is, write in acertain way because they select the mosteffective artifices of expression, but alsobecause they are unconsciously boundto the requirements of individual per-sonality.

The monistic view of style, therefore,cannot be allowed, to infect the teachingof our subject, for it vitiates all theavailable pedagogical resources of rhet-oric. In the college composition course,which represents for most students theirfirst formal training in rhetoric, anawareness must be instilled of the exist-ence of alternatives, of different waysof saying the same thing, of the optionsthat the language offers. In this task,the perhaps exhausted vein of she oldrhetoric may need a transfusion fromthe new. To aid instruction in the mech-anism of expression, a systematic studyof linguistics (rather than a helter-skelter travelogue) may also have a sig-nificant place. At the moment, however,only the direction of the journey is clear:the details of the itinerary are waitingto be discovered.

Columbia University

Composition Where None 3s Apparent:

Contemporary Literature and the

Course in 'WritingTHOMAS W. WILCOX

WE ARE TOLD by Milton's Raphael thatto complete the ur-composition thatwhich all of us and our student havebeen simulating ever sinceGod "con-glob'd / Like things to like, the rest toseveral place / Dispared ." The mean-ing of these lines in the seventh bookof Paradise Lostand particularly ofthat intriguing word "conglob'd"maybe debated, but I understand them tosay that at that precise moment Godestablished correspondences, institutedcoherence, and thus in effect sanctionedFreshman English as it is taught today.Most of our textbooks, most of our as-signments, and most of our discussionsin this course are directed towards in-structing students to "conglobe" theirthoughts and experiences into verbalconstructs which partake of an orderand coherence we assume to be appar-ent in life itself. Indeed, had they onlybeen in print at the time He faced Hisgreat task, God might have followedthese directions for composition offeredin a recent and entirely typical rhetoric:

The first step [here the words "in writ-ing an expository paper" occur, but Godwould have understood them to meansomething more] . . is to assemblethe raw material. The second step isto sort out and select. The third stepis to develop each major idea in de-tail. The fourth step is to work outclearly the underlying principle of organ-ization, to give the work both inner unityand outer coherence. [And of course thefinal step is to proofread the work. This

7

God did when he surveyed his creationand saw that it was good.]1

It should not surprise us that this pre-scription for composition describes soexactly both the original act of author-ship as it has traditionally been imag-ined and the auctorial labors of today'sfreshmen. Whether or not our assump-tions are theological, we continue toinsist that our students produce minia-ture cosmos every time they write. Inshort, we conceive composition almostexclusively as an act of ordering, offashioning coherent structures, of per-ceiving and replicating harmoniouswholes.

Those of us who think it legitimate toincorporate some study of literature intothe course in writingand I am awarethat there are many, like Albert Kitz-haber, who consider it an adulterationto do sooften justify this practice byasserting that to perceive design andthe completion of form in a poem, novelor play is fit preparation for the task ofconstructing well designed non-literarycompositions. It is a principle in ourtheory of literaturea theory of litera-ture which many of us acquired fromthe critics of the thirties and which wehave repeatedly tested to our satisfactionon selected literary textsit is a prin-ciple with us that literary works of valueexhibit closed patterns, that they include

1 Hans Guth, Words and Ideas: A Hand-book for College Writing (San Francisco,1959), p. 528.

8 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

no extraneous matter, that they construeand indeed control experience by con-taining it in well designed artifacts.Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar"has been our favorite fable, and wehave thought it entirely proper to prom-ise our students that their ability toplace jars in the wilderness of theirown thoughts and observations wouldsurely be enhanced by learning to ap-prehend coherent structure in literature.In our more euphoric moods we haveeven boasted that training in definingform in literature is training for findingorder and meaning in life. Thus, Wil-liam Van O'Connor asserts in one of histextbooks:

Significant literature enlarges our un-derstanding of the world, of human rela-tionships, of the human situation, Be-cause it creates a world apart from thedisordered flow of daily existence it cangive us an intensified sense of the phys-ical world, of human emotions, and ofconflicts. A sensitive and careful readingof good literature can do much to sharp-en our own perception and awareness ofthe world around iis.2

And Reuben Brower defends the tech-niques of analysis he practices so wellin his semi-pedagogical text, The Fieldsof Light, by declaring that:

Practice in defining the meanings ofwords in literature is an "instrument ofliberal culture" since it is practice inmaking distaiminations. Practice in dis-covering the "masses of implications" ina work of literary art is practice in find-ing relationships, in finding order in ex-perience.8

To this we need only add that findingorder in experience is the first step infashioning well ordered prose, the goalof our freshman course.

It is obvious that our choice of liter-ary texts for that course, as it is now

2 Modern Prose: Form and Style (NewYork, 1959), p. 426.

8 New York, 1951, p. xii.

taught, must be determined very largelyby our desire to help our students tofind significant forms, again on the as-sumption that to discern such forms is tolearn to fabricate coherently formednon-literary statements. Thus, we haveread with our studentsoften examinedrather than read, I am afraidsuch lit-erature as the poems' of Donne, in whichcomplex but nicely closed patterns maybe traced; the plays of Chekhov, whereeverything, we are assured, has its placeand contributes to the meaning of thewhole; and the stories of Joyce, whichare so hermetic as to induce in FrankO'Connor a feeling "akin to claustro-phobia." Most recently we have beenseducedand many of us think that isthe right wordby the well wrought,neatly composed, but finally rather shal-low parable, Lord of the Flies. We wantthe tidy, readily explicable text, whosestrategy may be divined by freshmenand the predictable completion of whoseform must be apparent even to the juniorcritic; how nice to find one which seemsboth topical and profound, which al-ludes to both the atom bomb and thefall of man within a structure whichcan be diagrammed on the board. Wewant such texts, and we seize them withperhaps uncritical relish when they ap-pear, because we are committed todemonstrating an analogy indeed, acontinuumbetween literature and whatis called, by default, "expository prose."Often we take our own assumption forgranted and simply blend the two, aswhen Professor Booth refers to the"rhetoric of fiction" and when ProfessorsMartin and Ohmann give the followinginstructions for composing the para-graph, in their latest rhetoric;

The paragraph is a scene from a play.As a separate scene, it has characters andaction; as one of many scenes in theplay, it has some meaning and functionbeyond itself. The writer is playwright.His concern is to make the scene-para-

COMPOSITION WHERE NONE IS APPARENT 9

graph represent something that is hap-pening. That means distinguishing actorfrom action from acted-upon, It meanssupplying sufficient matter to give theaction appropriate size; it means provid-ing motivation and sequence and result,It means forecasting and concluding andconnecting.4Now, let us infer a play from this

sustained metaphorextricate its vehiclefrom its tenor, as they used to say. Whatkind of a play would it be? What kindof a play must it be to provide ananalogue for paragraphs of the kindMartin and Ohmann want their studentsto fashion? Well, clearly it must be aplay in which early events "forecast"those to come, in which all parts arelogically connected, and in which a con-tinuous action leads inexorably to adefinite conclusion or "result." Only sucha play would make a proper paragraph,only such a play would illustrate theprinciple of composition these Ihetori-clans are promoting. And it is plays ofthis type we seek when we think tointroduce some dramatic literature intoour course in writing.

But suppose we look about us todayto find in the serious literature of ourown age dramatic works which meetthis description. We might want todo so, if only because we might wish toprovide our students with living speci-mens for analysis. We might also feelan obligationand probably we shouldfeel such an obligationto put our faithin the value of literature as an instru-ment for teaching composition to thetest of contemporaneity. For we maysuspect that if contemporary literatureprovides no models for use in our course,if our techniques of analysis seem towork only on the literature of the pastand not on that of the present, it mayno longer be possible to pretend thatmen use the same tactics and devices to

4 Harold C. Martin and Richard M. Oh-mann, The Logic and Rhetoric of Exposi-tion (New York, 1963), pp. 206-207.

represent experience in literature asthey do to represent and interpret it inexpository prose. In short, we may beforced to admit either that our methodsfor teaching composition and the prin-ciples those methods imply are obsoleteor that the writings we require fromour students will bear little resemblanceto the writings of our leading poets,novelists and playwrights those whoseworks we instinctively feel merit ourserious attention.

When we conduct such a search, alleager to find in contemporary literaturecontinuing justification for our insistenceon order and coherent form, we areappalled to discover that almost noworks of literature which may be calledauthentically of the present fit the form-ula for good composition we commendto our students. Almost none of themexhibits a closed design, almost none"provides motivation and sequence andresult" (to recall Martin and Ohmann'sphrase) expressed in logical structureswhich students may emulate to producecompositions of the kind we reward withour "A's." Indeed, if we were perfectlyconsistent and honest, we should haveto write, "Incoherent ( see page 234 ofthe handbook )" in the margins of ninetenths of the literature offered us today.And what ought to be most disturbingto us is the flat assertion of so manycontemporary writers our contempor-aries, mind you, and like us custodiansof the word that they mean to beincoherent, that only by de-composing,only by shattering forms and violatingconventions and exploding language canthey express their vision of life today.

Let us continue for a moment to limitour search to the drama. Would Pro-fessors Martin and Ohmann (whom Iam belaboring unjustly, I know) suggestto their students that they bear in mind,as they write their paragraphs, thesewords of the contemporary playwright,Eugene Ionesco?

10 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

A play is a structure which consists ofa series of states of consciousness, whichbecome intensified, grow more and moredense, then get entangled, either to bedisentangled again or to end in unbear-able inextricability.5

A paragraph may lie a play, but to sat-isfy the demands of our freshman courseit cannot be that kind of a play: a playin which unrelated events occur in ran-dom series, in which meaning is ob-scured or wanting entirely, and in whichnothing but "unbearable inextricability"results. Yet this is precisely the kind ofplay Ionesco and others are giving ustoday; and we have learned to respectalmost to expectthese deliberately con-fused but somehow authentic images ofcontemporary experience. Not to readsuch works with our students would beto suppress important evidence, to denythem opportunities ( I'm quoting Wil-liam Van O'Connor again) "to sharpen[their] perception and awareness of theworld around [them] ." But I do notsee how we can hope to derive fromsuch literature principles and preceptsof rhetoric which, when applied, willJialuce to the well ordered essay which

still seems to be the primary desider-atum of our course. We have been fondin the past of quoting as part of ourremarks on the need for planning andtrict pertinency in such essays Chek-

hov's famous aphorism, "You must neverput a loaded rifle on the stage if no oneis going to fire it." In the plays we mustnow discuss with our students that gunmay fire only blanksor it may be turnedon the audience.

It might almost seem that this litera-ture was written deliberately to subvertthe purposes of our course, and so itwas in the sense that it is dedicated

5 "Printemps 1939. Les Debris du Sou-venir. Pages de Journal," Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, XXIX (February, 1960), 231. Asquoted in Martin Esslin, The Theatre of theAbsurd (New york? 1961), p. 132,

to frustrating expectations and denyingconclusions. Much of modern literature,dramatic and otherwise, has just thisintention. Thus we have "open-ended"parables, characterized, as Richard East-man has said, by a "designed instability"which prevents verification of meaningor even of significant relationships. Wehave fictions of total ambigCty or oftotally equivocal narration. We havecelebrations of the gratuitous act, orwhich no justification can be found andwhich results in utterly unpredictableconsequences. We have novels, playsand films in which realism dissolves intofantasy and fantasy seems terrifyinglyrealistic; in which all is various, abber-rant, and uncircumscribed; and in whichanti-heroes wander senselessly in night-mares of anti-form. Whether we likethem or not, whether we accept or rejectthe view of life they convey, these arethe works, this is the literature we nowhave; and everything about it wouldseem to contradict rather than affirm theprinciples of language and of composi-tion we have confidently endorsed fordecades.

Consider, as a single illustration, thematter of conclusionsor what one mod-ern dramatist has taught us to call theendgame." Every rhetoric with which

I am familiar counsels students to con-clude their compositions with finality,and most of these textbooks urge thisdoctrine in words such as these fromthe Perrin-Smith handbook:

The purpose of the conclusion 's toround out the subject and to give finalemphasis to the paper. The last para-graph

the

sound like an ending, sothat the person who reads it will knowyou have finished your paper and havenot merely abandoned it. . . The readerwill know he has come to the end if thefinal paragraph ties together the ideasyou have bean developing and empha-sizes the main point of the paper, or, in

COMPOSITION WHERE

a narrative sounds like the conclusion ofthe action.6

Once again, the emphasis is on "round-ing out," on containing and sealing thecomposition. But it is notable that fewconclusions of this sort are to be foundin contemporary literature. There anending is likely to be merely a cessation,or it may be contrived to imply an end-less recurrence of the previous action.Thus, Beckett's Estragon says in the finalmoments of Waiting for Godot, "I can'tgo on like this," to which his partnerreplies, "That's what you think" as theybegin the aria da capo with which theplay ends but does not conclude. AndMax Brod writes in a perceptive com-ment of Kafka's The Trial, "In a certainsense the novel could never be termin-atedthat is to say, it could be pro-longed into infinity," because Joseph K.was never to get as far as the highestcourt, and since his quest was infiniteand by definition impossible to complete,the form of the novel could never becompleted, its design never closed. Orrather, it could be closed only in theway Kafka chose to close it: by mean-ingless annihilation, in this case of hisprincipal character. The "open-ended-ness" of these works must not be dis-missed as mere manifestations of capriceor lack of craft: the fact is that thevision of man's lot these authors had toexpress is simply not susceptible to "con-globing," to rounding out in the mannerwe prescribe in our course in writing.

Nor is there much solace to be had,I think, in saying as Professor Boothdoes when he discusses literature of thiskind, "Even the loosest, least conclusiveof works is to some degree an ordered,or at least a selected, whole. And cer-tainly those open structures which we

6 Porter G. Perrin and George H. Smith,The Perrin-Smith Handbook of CurrentEnglish (Chicago, 19G2), p. 359.

7 "Postscript to the First Edition."Trans. and reprinted in the Modern Li-brary Edition of The Trial, p. 334.

NONE IS APPARENT lIS

admire always turn cut, on close inspec-tion, to be 'open' only in very limitedrespects; in so far as we can think ofthem as great works, they somehowweave their various threads into a finalharmony."8 What consolation can therebe, if consolation is needed, in the real-ization that the artist must delimit hispicture, the play must end after someperiod of time, and the novel must havea last chapter if everything within thoseworks testifies to a militant effort toconfound forms and to avoid conven-tional structures? Accommodating con-temporary literature in this way is ratherlike patting an anarchist on the head andsaying, "You vote because you do notvote, and thus you are one of us afterall," a practice which must infuriate bothanarchist and writer because it impliesa refusal to take them and their worksfor what they are. It also implies acertain cravenness on our part and analmost obsessive need to find "a finalharmony" in all the works we read.

Surely it were more candid simply torecognize that such harmony cannot befound in, must be imposed on much ofthe literature our serious writers offerus today. How we can then reconcilethis realization with the procedure ofour freshman course, I am not now pre-pared to say. I have yet to write mygrammar of ambiguity and my rhetoricof existentialism. Nor do I propose thatwe establish a Summer Institute in theAbsurd. It seems clear to me, however,that something must be done, somestrenuous and imaginative efforts mustbe made to effect such a reconciliationif we are not to abandon the readingof pertinent literature as we teach ourstudents to write, or if the assignmentswe impose on them are not to degener-ate into mere artificial exercises, like theprolusions schoolboys contrived in theseventeenth century. I know of only one

8 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago,1961), p. 298n.

THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

textbookWalker Gibson's fine little an-thology, The Limits of Languagewhichprovides materials for a trenchant studyof the relation of contemporary litera-ture to contemporary prose. We willneed many more like it, and we willneed many teachers willing to modifytheir concepts of composition if we areto continue to enrich our course with

fresh examples of verbal art.After all, even Milton could describe

the central paragraph in God's greatwork as "A Wilderness of sweets . .

Wilde above rule or art," Perhaps it istime we took our eyes off Stevens' jarand looked more deeply into his wilder-ness.

University of Connecticut

A Short Nistory of Dogma and Nonsensein the Composition Course

A. M. TIBBETTS

But when a Man's Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagfna-tion is at Cuffs with the Senses, and common Understanding, as wellas common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes,is Himself, and when that is once cornpass'd, the Difficulty is not sogreat in bringing over others; A strong Delusion always operatingfrom without, as vigorously as from within, (Jonathan Swift, "ADigression on Madness," A Tale of a Tub (Oxford, 1958), p. 171.)

SINCE WORLD WAR II, teachers of com-position have had to endure an extra-ordinary amount of dogma and nonsensethat has been sprayed over the composi-tion course by the theologians of com-munication. Teachers have been af-flicted by the fancies of semanticists,communications skillists, and linguisti-cians, singly and en masse. They havebeen pragmatized, scientificated, andsometimes nearly obliterated. Many, ifnot most, teachers got used to this andlearned not to pay excessive attentionto the parade of delusions about theteaching of writing. Like street cars, anew delusion came along every hour.

But a new generation of compositionteachers is coming out of the graduateschool. The bad old days are past, andthe new generation is innocent and un-wary. The times appear relatively freeof freshly printed manifestoes, and tothe uninitiated it might seem possible toteach an eighteen-year-old to write Eng-lish without at the same time teachinghim listening, speed-reading, and datinghabits in Borneo. However, theologiesdie, only to rise again. Since knowledgeis power, I here offer a short history ofthe recent theologies of communication.It is wise to understand and to be pre-pared, for one never knows when hemay awake in the morning to find anew dogma on his linguistic doorstep,snarling and baring its phonemic! fangs.

13

I

Semantics was the first dogma to be-come widespread after the war. It wasalso the least objectionable. It pro-vided an easy way to teach the differ-ence between the cold meaning of aword and its psychological coloring orimplication. It had a masterful popu-larizer in S. I. Hayakawa, from whoseLanguage in Thought and Action ( 1949)semantic notions were borrowed by text-book writers for a decade.

Valuable as his ideas often were,Hayakawa made the fundamental errorof the dogmatist. He claimed too much.He took a partial truth about the sym-bolism and logic of language and tried toturn it into a Weltanschauung. In the"Foreword" to his hook, he wrote ofbringing together the disciplines of lin-guistics, philosophy, psychology, cultur-al anthropology, physiology, neurology,mathematical biophysics, and cybernet-ics by using "some set of broad andinforming principles such as is to befound in the General Semantics ofKorzybski" (p. vi ). Hayakawa's implica-tion was that semantics could be usedto solve many of the problems of humanexistence.

Teachers soon discovered that seman-tics could not deal directly with theseproblems because they are in kind not somuch linguistic as religious and moral.

14 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

Semanticists usually dealt in words rath-er than in good and bad actions. Theythought that they could change men bychanging wordsironically, in holdingthis belief they violated one of theirfavorite tenets; not to be fooled byword magic. For it is not enough tomake men into good users of words;they must also be made into good men.Semanticists, being logical positivistsrather than moralists, had no devicesin their bag for making men good, Itshortly became apparent that they didnot even know it was necessary to makemen good.

Semanticists tried to be cold, scientific,and objective about matters that arereligious, moral, esthetic, and myster-ious. Like many theologians, whethersecular or religious, they found theirwork passed over and ignored becauseit could not explain the infinite varietyof life and art. The man who asked,"What is Truth?" sometimes got non-sense in return: The map is not theterritory, or It is necessary to have amulti-valued orientation. And all of uswho took ( or taught) semantics remem-ber that crushing rejoinder from a mem-ber of the priesthood: "But you're notspeaking semantically!"

When we tried to teach semantics inthe composition course, we soon foundthat it did little good and occasionallymuch harm. The student who usedwords poorly did so because he usedwords vaguely, emptily, pompously, orimprecisely. Semantics usually could nothelp him. In teaching logic and reason-ing, the use of semantics merely provedto be taking the long road around. Ifan error in logic appeared in a student'swriting, we found it better to attack itdirectly than to appeal to semantic jar-gon, which befuddled matters. A fewteachers took the dogma of semanticsseriously and taught it as the ,SevenfoldWay, turning their classes into shrinesdedicated to the tyranny of words. Their

students could orally discuss the affec-tive language of Hitler with alarmingprecocity, but ordinarily they couldn'twrite worth sour apples, having neverbeen taught to,

Semantics in the composition courseperished some time in the 1950's. Itsplace in the theology of communicationwas taken by one of the silliest doctrinesever to exist in American educationcommunication skills. The communica-tion skillist worked according to theFirst Law of Trivia, which says: "Themore ridiculous the idea, the more en-thusiastically people will try to put itinto practice." To the simple three-hourwriting course an army of pedagoguesadded speaking skills, reading skills,listening skills, studying skills, and us-ing-audio-visual-aids skills. The studentwrote themes on dating and maritalproblems, He read newspapers and mag-azines, saw movies and TV plays, anddiscoursed on the "media of communica-tion."

For the experimentally minded, it wasthe best of times. There were clinics,reading labs, writing labs, and speakinglabs. A student could get his lisp re-moved at the speech clinic in the morn-ing, and in the afternoon he might learnto read the Reader's Digest faster andfaster. Skillists experimented with abilitysectioning and gave the sections import-ant-sounding names and numbers. Therewere Exceptional sections, Average sec-tions, and Remedial sections. The Rem-edial students were the lucky ones; theygot most of the attention. It was not agood time to be bright. Skillists taughtthe Remedial students spelling, outlin-ing, paragraphs, capitals, commas, semi-colons, and the use of the dictionary.It is recorded that one individualisttaught the use of the colon, but he wasreprimanded because the colon was notin the syllabus.

The skillists were relatively undog-matic, perhaps because they were too

A SHORT HISTORY 15

busy rushing around and a dogma wouldonly have slowed them down. Theyfound it good to be alive in those days,but to be an administrator was veryheaven. Never before in English studieshad there been so much confusion toadminister. In addition to all thoseclinics and labs and media and acceler-ated courses and decelerated courses,there was a testing program that threat-ened to make the whole thing worth-while. The testing program operatedaccording to the Second Law of Trivia:"Whether you can teach it or nor, testit." There was a test for spelling, foroutlining, for capitals, for commas, forsemicolons, and for the use of the dic-tionary. But not one for the colon, whichwas not in the syllabus.

Everybody was happy with skillismbut the teachers, who found their class-rooms haunted by experimenters de-siring to determine such matters asThe Coefficient of Listening Compre-hension of 8:00 Tuesday-Thursday-Sat-urday Classes. A teacher trying to get tothe front of his classroom might stumbleever an opaque projector, which didn'twork and somehow managed to burnhis fingers; a three-speed phonograph,with a collection of Edward R. Murrowrecordings; or a spanking new tape re-corder with the Dean's latest speechcarefully taped LW it. From admin-istrative offices ct flurry of requests,suggestions, appouls, and blunt com-mands. Groaned one teacher after hehad hauled out of his staff mailbox sevenorders of various sizes, shapes, andcolors addressed to him from four differ-ent administrators: "They are stoningme to death with little pieces of papery"

So long as the skillist course taughttheme writing, it did well enough.Rhetorically considered, some of thesecourses were excellent. But rhetoric wassoon crowded out. There were too manypersons teaching skills who knew noth-ing about writing. And the writing

teacher could not teach speech. Thc,teacher of speed-reading got lost andfrightened when he was asked to teachanything not in the Reader's Digest.The blurring of professional lines tendedto kill professional competence.

The most damaging piece of nonsensein the whole affair was not, so far asI can tell, invented by the skillists, al-though they did push it harder thananyone before them. This was ability-sectioning, which not only did not workbut actually enfeebled the teaching onall levels. The Exceptional sections werefull of talky and bright but sometimeswoolly-minded abstractionists who badlyneeded the earthy and commonsensicalwit of their friends who had been herdedinto the Average sections, The Averagestudents needed in their own classes thevery qualities that had been sectionedout into the Exceptional group. TheRemedial sections needed a firing squad.1

Like semantics, skillism died in the1950's. It was a busy decade. Developedalso during this period ( for general con-sumption, that is) was the most violentof the delusions under discussionlin-guistics. The theology of the linguisti-cians2 is too well known to need dis-

1 Why was ability-sectioning so popularin the 1950's? Perhaps it satisfied the ad-ministrative love for classifying the un-classifiable. More likely, however, the an-swer is more obvious and more political.Sectioning invariably lowers the standardsof the composition course, and a largernumber of students could pass the Averageand Rem"Aial courses. Many state univer-sities h. pretended to drop the Remedialcourse. But the left hand knoweth not whatthe right hand doeth: a great state-sup-ported institution has been created for theRemedial student. is called the juniorcollege.

2 Sometimes called linguisticists, althoughthis term does not make them happy (see,for example, James Sledd, "Grammar orGramarye," English Journal, XLIX (May,1960), 293-303). A philologist, who is alsomy friend, suggests that linguistician ismore apt: "A rounder, fuller, and sweeterterm," he says of linguistician, "one thatbefits the splendor and spirituality of theircalling."

16 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

cussion here. Nor need we try to ascer-tain the truth of the various linguisticposes, except as they relate to the teach-ing of composition. It is said that nianylinguisticians were, and arc, doing splen-did work in the theory of language, com-parative linguistics, dialect studies, andthe like. Perhaps. In composition andrhetoric the linguistician has been a bullin a china shop.

The linguistician began by demandingthat composition teaching had to belinguistically oriented, as witness thisopening paragraph in Harry Warfel's"Structural Linguistics and Composition"(CE, XX (February, 1959), 205):

The science of structural linguistics hasput new tools into our hands. Just asnucleonics has penetrated into the mi-nute operations of the atom, so structurallinguistics has unlocked the secrets oflanguage. The established conclusionsand the emerging theories seem likely toforce other disciplines to reshape currentprocedures wherever they are dependentupon or impinge upon language. Philos-ophy, logic, and psychology in particularmust review much of their methodology.The teaching of composition must under-go a revolutionary change.

The composition teacher did not haveto look far to find nonsense in linguisticaltheory. In search of a definition for asentence, he discovered the following:

A sentence is traditionally defined as agroup of words which expresses a com-plete thought; but the definition is use-less, since it does not tell us what com-plete thoughts may be or what formsexpress them. Since no useful definitioncan be framed to include all and onlythe things which are often called sen-tences, we have provided a definitionwhich will be useful to writers and read-ers of expository prose. We identify thestretches of speech that lie betweenterminals, or sequences of these stretches,either as complete sentences or as sen-tence fragments (nonsentenees). A com-plete sentence will always end in one

of the terminals / / and /4, / (never/>/), and it may or may not containoccurrences of / / or />/ within it-self; but it will also contain, in everycase except that of the subjectless im-perative, at least one independent com-bination of complete subject with com-plete predicate, expanded or unexpanded.(James Sledd, A Short Introduction toEnglish Grammar (Chicago, 1959), pp.246-247.)

Adapting a line from Pope, the teacherof composition might well have ex-claimed of the linguistician that he "ex-plain [s] a thing till all men doubt it."3

The linguistical dogmas were adheredto by true believers with exquisite ten-acity. They were fond of making lists oftheir beliefs, and thus one saw every-where in the canonical works numerouslists of unequivocal declarative utter-ances; for example: ONE, ALL LAN-GUAGE IS SPEECH: TWO, ALLLANGUAGE CHANGES. The theologyof linguistics still customarily requiresbelief in these and other commandments,which are yet hashed over wheneverthe pious meet. Perhaps the day is notfar of when a congress of exegeticallinguisticians will meet to debate thequestion: How many morphemes can

8 Samuel Johnson anticipated the lin-guisticians' "bugbear style," which "hasmore terror than danger, and will appearless formidable, as it is more nearly ap-proached." Wrote Johnson: "A mother tellsher infant, that 'two and two make four,'the child remembers the proposition, and isable to count to four to all the purposes oflife, till the course of his education bringshim among philosophers, who fright him forhis former knowledge, by telling him thatfour is a certain aggregate of units; thatall numbers being only the repetition of anunite, which, though not a number itself,is the parent, root, or original of all num-ber, 'four' is the denomination assigned toa certain number of such repetitions. Theonly danger is, lest, when he first hearsthese dreadful sounds, the pupil should runaway; if he has but the courage to staytill the conclusion, he will find that, whenspeculation has done its worst, two' andtwo still make four" ("Idler 36," Works(Yale, 1963), II, 113-114).

A SHORT HISTORY 17

be made to crowd on the point of anounhead aggregate?

The composition teacher can rightlycomplain that linguistics has been anintrusion upon his proper domain. In itsintellectual aspects, the linguistical newgrammar belongs in the graduate school,where like other closed philosophicalsystems, it can proliferate without refer-ence to reality. In its practical aspects,it will have to retreat to the grade school,where grammar is properly lerned andforgotten. To the college c )mpositionteacher, grammar is like arithmetic,which is learned by rote in the gradesand then later used unconsciously inmore sophisticated operations. Teachinggrammar to freshmen is rather liketeaching the multiplication table to them.

II

It may be wise at this point to sumup what is known about the theology ofdogma and nonsense in the compositioncourse. The linguistician will not mindif we borrow his technique of listingvital truths:

1. The theologian is usually an out-skier who wishes the insider ( the com-position teacher) to adopt the theolog-ian's views.

2. The theologian is not happy beingon the outside; he wants to be on theinside and run things.

3. In the theologian's views, there isa particle of truth, sometimes many par-ticles. The truth may be hidden by afog of nonsense, but it is there some-where.

4. The theologian, who is addicted totheory, customarily finds reality painful.

5. The theologian is seldom satisfiedwith his theory and often changes it.Like the atheist who becomes a Catholic,then a Communist, then finally an atheistagain, the theologian of communicationmay often be seen trudging from one

faith to another seeking the grail of theperfect (linguistic) system. He may be-gin as a semanticist, later shifting toskillism, to Friesianism, to "pure" lin-guistics, to transformationalismand soon. He is now jumping on the band-wagon of the "New Rhetoric," a thingas imaginary, one experienced observerof the academic scene has claimed, asthe Emperor's new clothes.

6. The theologian believes in Scienceand Research.

Point six deserves some explanation.As we all know, to be scientific is auto-matically to be right and truthful. Aphysicist or chemist, according to popu-lar misapprehension, cannot tell a fibor even make mistakes, for the scien-tific method leads unerringly to verity.Thus when the theologian pours hisnonsense into the test tube of scienceit undergoes a sea-change into "truefacts."4 Research, so long as it is scien-tific, accomplishes the same thing. Ifthe theologian of communication wantsto discover anything about compositionteaching, he does not ask the nearestcompetent teacher in the discipline butturns instead to the questionnaire andthe statistician. A theologian once statedthat he could not inquire of teachers be-cause "there was no way to discoverwho is competent." This man is head ofa large Freshman English program, andit would be amusing to know whetherthe president of his university is awarethat an administrator responsible forhalf a hundred teachers is unable todetermine their competence.

4 Philip Gove, the editor-in.0hief of Web-ster's Third, complains of those who failto bow down to facts made "true" by thedelectable science of lexicography: "Onewould think that a person trained to teachand to put knowledge above ignorance andprejudice would, when shown demonstrablytrue facts objectively gathered and easilyverifiable, accept the evidence and ask whyhe had not realized its significance before"("Lexicography and the Teacher of Eng-lish," CE, XXV (February, 2964), 349).

18 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

;he Third Law of Trivia can now beenunciated: "Don't think about it, re-search it." For example:

Our Council, directly and through itscommissions and workshops, must con-cern itself with American English at alllevels; (1) the training of scholars whocan do basic research; (2) the sponsoringof basic research; (3) the interpretationof basic research in pedagogically viablematerials; (4) the training of classroomteachers who can use those materials. Inrecent years we have done a great dealin the Ipst category, and something inthe third; demand will sooner or laterachieve the first, if we do not use upall our seed corn. The second, the basicresearch, is lagging, and is our greatestchallenge. If we view our language inanthropological terms as a system ofarbitrary vocal signals by means of whicha social group cooperate and interact andtransmit their culture, the opportunitiesare endless. (Raven Mc David, "Amer-ican English," CE, XXV (February,1964), 335,)

One is reminded of Stephen Leacock'shero, who "flung himself upon his horseand rode madly off in all directions."

With a recognition of the science-research syndrome, this his t or y isbrought up to date. The United StatesGovernment has got into the act, and wemay be sure that Freshman English isabout to be declared a Distressed Areaand that President Johnson will shortlybegin a War on Poverty of Knowledgeabout Composition, Already, the gov-ernment, along with the NCTE, hassupported the report by Braddock,Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer, Research inWritten Composition ( NCTE, 1963). Inthis report, the door to academic busy-work is pushed wide open: "If littlehas been proved about the instructionalfactors influencing composition, it isfair to say that almost nothing has beenproved in a scientific sense about therhetorical aspects of written composi-tion" (p. 38).

To reach gloomy conclusions like theabove cost the taxpayers $18,000. ButResearch in Written Composition is anexcellent job of its kind. Cleanly writtenand organized, it is valuable to the pro-fession because it demonstrates onceand for all that "research" of the pseudo-scientific type can tell us little of valueabout writing. Research in WrittenComposition should be the first andlast of its series. Project English, how-everlike most government-inspired in-stitutionsprobably will go on forever,and the American taxpayer can expectmany more studies like the one re-ported in Project English Newsletter(October, 1963), p. 3: "019Quantita-tive Analyses of Endogenous and Ex-ogenous Children in Some Reading Pro-cesses,"5

Before leaving the subject of research,I should perhaps mention one charac-teristic that makes it particularly usefulto purveyors of nonsense, As stated inthe Fourth Law of Trivia: "If you canjust research the problem, you don't haveto act on it and maybe it will go away,"A number of us, when we were younginstructors, used to amuse ourselves instaff meetings by asking a skillist ad-ministrator what we should do aboutcertain problems. "What shall we doabout plagiarism?" someone would ask,"Well, now that is a problem," the ad-ministrator would answer, and then hewould talk for thirty minutes about howbig a problem it was, and how researchwas needed into the psychology of stu-dents who committed plagiarism. Hewould conclude by saying that it cer-tainly was a problem and that he wouldappoint a committee to investigate it.

5 Harold Allen claims that "Project Eng-lish will kill the traditiona: [FreshmanEnglish] course" (CCC, XIV [December,1963], 133). It is too soon to tell. Maybethe Endogenous and Exogenous Childrenwill break their fetters, turn on their crea-tors, and kill Project English. If you playat being a Frankenstein, you never dareturn your back on your own monsters.

A SHORT HISTORY 19

The committee met, investigated, andreported to the department that thewhole affair required further thinking,testing, and maybe some "pre-planning."At last report, the committee was stillpre-planning and the students were stillcopying their themes from Look, Life,and each other.

III

The Fifth Law of Trivia states: "Theo-logies of dogma and nonsense, as pro-duced in the composition course, areinfinite in number and are infinitelychangeable."° In a recent (1964) in-formal study of the freshman programsof about 1000 colleges and universities,it was discovered that semanticists, skill-ists, and linguisticians are now influenc-ing only about five percent of the fresh-man courses. For all practical purposesthe old dogmas in the theology of com-munication are dead- Project English istoo young to have much influence yet.

What will the new dogma be? Theordinary composition teacher will not

6 The latest ploy by the linguisticians isone that operates according to Goldwater'sTheorem: "Say loudly that the thing yousaid you never said in the first place; thisis what you meant when you said whatyou didn't say." In the October (1964)issue of College English, W. N. Francislists certain familiar dogmas of linguisticsand then states: "Here are eight specificdoctrines attributed to American structurallinguists. Every single one of them iswrong; I know no linguist who would sub-scribe to any of them, and the work of mostof those I know refutes them seriatim andin toto" ("Language and Linguistics in theEnglish Program," 13-14).

produce it because life in the greatworld, as he knows it and as it is re-flected in his students' compositions, istoo complex, varied, rich, and interest-ing for dogma to get a foothold in hismind. He is too busy workingteachingand grading papersto preach up anddown the halls of NCTE meetings. Be-sides, he asks, what is known of funda-mental importance about the teachingof writing that was not known to theteachers of Hemingway, Horace, andHomer? ( To what extent were theyself-taught?) The world, it is the oldworld yet.

According to the informal studymentioned above, the big swing infreshman courses is to literature, andundoubtedly the new dogmas will comefrom the symbol hunters and other dis-ciples of the New Criticism. After teach-ing his first freshman class this morning,my office mate entered our office witha Boswellian flourish and announced:"I have Brooks-and-Warrenized theland! I spoke to the class of symbol andtone, of functional foreshadowing andtension and irony ( three kinds), ofmood and myth, of sentimentalism (howterrible ), of tragic efflorescence, andof allegories along the Nile." He strucka pose and added: "Tomorrow they willhand in a theme on the symbolism ofclothes in Hamlet and Death of a Sales-man."

It's going to be mighty critico-literaryhereaboutsuntil the next delusioncomes along.

University of IllinoisUrbana

Vat 3s Technical Writing?W. EARL BRITTON

ALTHOUGH THE DEAN of an engineeringcollege once denied the very existenceof technical writing, many of us areconfident of its reality. But we are notsure that we can convince others of itsuniqueness. This uncertainty deepenswhen we observe the variety of activitiesincorporated under this label, as well asthose that barely elude its scope. Ourschools do little to clarify the situationwith such course titles as technical writ-ing, engineering writing, engineeringEnglish, scientific English, scientific com-munications, and report writing. Nordo the national societies help with theiremphasis upon medical writing, biolog-ical writing, science writing, and busi-ness English, Applying the generalterm technical writing to a field of suchdiversified activities is convenient butmisleading., yet this is the current prac-tice. In view of the confusion, there islittle wonder that a teacher in this fieldshould often be asked, even by col-leagues, "What is this technical writingyou teach, and how does it differ fromany other?"

In addition to satisfying this query, atruly helpful definition should go muchfurther and illuminate the tasks of boththe teachers and authors of technicalwriting. This requirement has been ful-filled in varying degrees by a number ofdefinitions already advanced, the mostsignificant of which form four categories.

Technical writing is most commonlydefined by its subject matter. Blickleand Passe say:

Any attempt . . . to define technicalwriting is complicated by the recognitionthat exposition is often creative. Becausetechnical writing often employs some ofthe devices of imaginative writing, abroad definition is necessary. Definedbroadly, technical writing is that writing

which deals with subject matter in sci-ence, engineering, and business.'

Mills and Walter likewise note that tech-nical writing is "concerned with technicalsubject matter," but admit the difficultyof saying precisely what a technical sub-ject is, For their own purpose in writinga textbook, they call a technical subjectone that falls within science and engi-neering, They elaborate their view byadding four large characteristics of theform: namely, its concern with scientificand technical matters, its use of a sci-entific vocabulary and conventional re-port forms, its commitment to objectiv-ity and accuracy, and the complexity ofits task, involving descriptions, classi-fications, and even more intricate prob-lems.2

The second approach is linguistic, asillustrated in an article by Robert Hays,who, admitting the existence of tech-nical writing without actually definingit, remarks upon its conservativeness, itsTeutonic subject-verb-object word order,and the fact that it shares with otherforms of writing the "common" Englishvocabulary. However, he cites two fun-damental differences between technicaland other prose. The psychological dif-ference is the writer's "attitude of utterseriousness" toward his subject, and hisdedication to facts and strict objectivity.But the greater difference, at least for"teachers and students of technical writ-ing, is linguistic," in that technical styledemands a "specialized vocabulary, es-pecially in its adjectives and nouns."3

20

1 Readings for Technical Writers, ed.Margaret D. Buckle and Martha E. Passe(New York, 1963) , p. 3.

2 Gordon H. Mills and John A. Walter,Technical Writing (New York, 1954), pp.3-5.

a Robert Hays, "What is Technical Writ-ing?" Word Study, April, 1961, p. 2.

WHAT IS TECHNICAL WRITING? 21

The third definition concentrates onthe type of thought process involved.This approach underlies some of theresearch being directed by A. J. Kirk-man, of the Welsh College of AdvancedTechnology in Cardiff, who has beeninvestigating the causes of unsatisfactoryscientific and technical writing. Hisgroup is examining in particular thesuggestion that a distinction exists be-tween ways of thinking and writingabout literary and scientific subjects,The theory postulates two types ofthinking, each with its own mode ofexpression. Associative thought belongsto history, literature, and. the arts. State-ments are linked together by connectiveslike then and rather, indicating chron-ological, spatial, or emotional relation-ships. Sequential thought belongs tomathematics and science. Statementsare connected by words like because andtherefore, revealing a tightly logical se-quence. Professor Kirkman suggests thatthe weakness of much scientific writingresults from forcing upon scientific ma-terial the mode of expression appropriateto the arts. He adds:

The important distinction is that se-quential contexts call for comparativelyinflexible lines of thought and rigid, im-personal forms of expression, whereasassociative contexts permit random anddiverse patterns of thought which can bevariously expressed.4

Finally, technical writing is sometimesdefined by its purpose. This approachrests upon the familiar differentiation be-tween imaginative and expository prose,between DeQuincey's literature of powerand literature of knowledge. Brooks andWarren find the primary advantage ofthe scientific statement to be that of"absolute precision." They contend thatliterature in general also represents a

4 A. J. Kirkman, "The Communication ofTechnical Thought," The Chartered Me-chanical Engineer, December, 1963, p. [2].

"specialization of language for the pur-pose of precision" but add that it "aimsat treating kinds of material differentfrom those of science," particularly atti-tudes, feelings, and interpretations.5

Reginald Kapp pursues a similar lineby dividing writing into imaginative andfunctional literature. Imaginative litera-ture involves personal response and isevocative; functional literature concernsthe outer world that all can see. Func-tional English, he says, presents "allkinds of facts, of inferences, arguments,ideas, lines of reasoning. Their essentialfeature is that they are new to the per-son addressed." If imaginative litera-ture attempts to control men's souls,functional English should control theirminds. As he writes, the technical andscientific author "confers on the we ".sthe power to make those who read thinkas he wills it."

All of these approaches are significantand useful. Kirkman's suggestions arecertainly intriguing, but I find Kapp'sclassification particularly helVul andwant to extend it slightly.

I should like to propose that the pri-mary, though certainly not the sole,characteristic of technical and scientificwriting lies in the effort of the authorto convey one Meaning and only onemeaning in what he says. That onemeaning must be sharp, clear, precise.And the reader must be given no choicof meanings; he must not be allowed tointerpret a passage in any way but thatintended by the writer. Insofar as thereader may derive more than one mean-ing from a passage, technical writing isbad; insofar as he can derive only onemeaning from the writing, it is good.

Imaginative writingand I choose it1110.14

5 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn War-ren, Understanding Poetry, 3rd ed. (NewYork, 1960), pp. 4-5.

6 Reginald 0. Kapp, The Prezomtation ofTechnical Information (New York, 1957),chaps. I-II.

22 THEORIES OF STYLE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

because it offers the sharpest contrastcan be just the opposite. There is nonecessity that a poem or play conveyidentical meanings to all readers, al-though it may. Nor need a poem orplay have multiple meanings. The factremains, nevertheless, that a work ofliterature may mean different things todifferent readers, even at different times.Flaubert's Madame Bovary has been in-terpreted by some as an attack on ro-manticism, and in just the opposite wayby others who read it as an attack onrealism. Yet no one seems to think theless of the novel. Makers of the recentfilm of Tom Jones saw in the novel abedroom farce, whereas serious studentsof Fielding have always regarded it asan effort to render goodness attractive.Varied interpretations of a work of lit-erature may add to its universality,whereas more than one interpretationof a piece of scientific and technical writ-ing would render it useless.

When we enter the world of puresymbol, the difference between the tokinds of communicationscientific andaesthetic becomes more pronounced.Technical and scientific writing can helikened to a bugle call, imaginative lit-erature to a symphony. The bugle callconveys a precise message: get up, cometo mess, retire. And all for whom it isblown derive identical meanings. It canmean only what was intended. But asymphony, whatever the intention of thecomposer, will mean different things todifferent listeners, at different times, andespecially as directed by different con-ductors. A precise meaning is essentialand indispensable in a bugle call; it isnot necessarily even desirable in a sym-phony.

The analogy can be extended. Eventhough the bugle call is a precise com-munication, it can be sounded in avariety of styles. An able musician canplay taps with such feeling as to inducetears, and it is conceivable that a ma-

gician might blow reveille so as toawaken us in a spirit of gladness. Thefact that scientific writing is designed toconvey precisely and economically asingle meaning does not require that itsstyle be flat and drab. Even objectivityand detachment can be made attractive.

Because technical writing endeavorsto convey just one meaning, its success,unlike that of imaginative literature, ismeasureable. As far as I am aware,there is no means of determining pre-cisely the effects of a poem or a sym-phony; but scientific analyses and de-scriptions, instructions, and accounts ofinvestigations quickly reveal any com-munication faults by the inability of thereader to comprehend and carry on.

Objection may be raised to this dis-tinction between the two kinds of writ-ing because it makes for such large andbroad divisions. This I readily admit, atthe same time that I hold this feature tobe a decided advantage, in that it re-moves the difficulty that usually ariseswhen technical writing is defined by itssubject matter.

Emphasis upon engineering subjectmatter in technical writing, for example,has implied that engineering has a mo-nopoly on the form, and that a PhDdissertation in linguistics or even certainkinds of literary criticism and a study offederal economic policy are other kindsof writing When all such endeavorsthat convey single meanings are groupedunder the label technical and scientificwriting, or some other term, for thatmatter, then division of these into sub-ject areas, instead of creating confusion,becomes meaningful. Some subjects willbe far more technological than others,ranging from dietetics to nuclear fission,and in some instances being related toscience only by method of approach;some subjects will offer more linguisticdifficulty than others; some will require atighter, more sequential mode of think-ing; but all will have in common the

WHAT IS TECHNICAL WRITING? 23

essential effort to limit the reader to oneinterpretation.

It seems t( me that this view not onlyilluminates the nature of technical writ-ing but also emphasizes the kind oftraining required of our schools. Un-fortunately, few educational institutionsare meeting the needs in this field.Professor Kirkman mentions the failureof the traditional teachers to provideenough practice in writing on practicalsubjects. Professor Kapp has insistedthat the conventional instruction in for-mal English courses does not equip aman to teach or practice scientific andtechnical writing. The Shakespearianscholar, G. B. Harrison, commentingupon his formal writing courses in Eng-land, says:

The most effective elementary trainingI ever received was not from masters atschool but in composing daily orders andinstructions as staff captain in charge ofthe administration of seventy-two miscel-laneous military units. It is far easier todiscuss Hamlet's complexes than to writeorders which ensure that five workingparties from five different units arriveat the right place at the right timeequipped with proper tools for the job.One soon learns that the most seeminglysimple statement can bear two meaningsand that when instructions are misunder-stood the fault usually lies with the word-ing of the original order.? [My italics]

But our strictures should not be con-fined to the English teachers. All of usin education must share the responsi-bility for this condition. In fact, I be-lieve that in all too many instances, atleast in college, the student writes thewrong thing, for the wrong reason, tothe wrong person, who evaluates it onthe wrong basis. That is, he writes abouta subject he is not thoroughly informedupon, in order to exhibit his knowledgerather than explain something the readerdoes not understand, and he writes to a

7 G. B. Harrison, Profession of English(New York, 1962), p. 149.

professor who already knows more thanhe does about the matter and who evalu-ates the paper, not in terms of what hehas derived, but in terms of what hethinks the writer knows. In every re-spect, this is the converse of what hap-pens in professional life, where thewriter is the authority; he writes totransmit new or unfamiliar informationto someone who does not know butneeds to, and who evaluates the paperin terms of what he derives and under-stands.

B. C. Brookes takes a similar positionwhen he suggests that English teachersconcerned with science students shouldask them occasionally to explain aspectsof their work which they know well sothat the teacher who is unacquaintedwith the material will understand it.Such an assignment not only is a realexercise in composition but also taxesthe imagination of the student in devis-ing illuminating analogies for effectivecommunication. The teacher's themeshould be: "If your paper is not plainand logical to me, then it is not goodscience."8

Both Harrison and Brookes recom-mend the kinds of exercises that areoften viewed skeptically at the collegelevel. This is a regrettable attitude, es-pecially since it usually derives fromunfamiliarity with the nature and needof such work and from unawareness ofits difficulty and challenge, Teachersoriented primarily toward literature seelittle of interest in this field, but thosewho enjoy compositionespecially itscommunicative aspectcan find consid-erable satisfaction here. Of one thingthey can always be sure: deep gratitudefrom those they help.

Department of EnglishCollege of EngineeringUniversity of Michigan

BB. C. Brookes, "The Teaching of Eng-lish to Scientists and Engineers," TheTeaching of English, Studies in Communi-cation 3 (London, 1959), pp. 146-7.