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4 Composition in 1977: The National Conversation

What might be done in response to all of these difficulties, all of this sense of crisis and controversy, all of this attention to the nation’s literacy woes? That was the problem that faced writing teachers and professionals struggling to develop the field of rhetoric and composition in 1977. There was no shortage of solutions proposed by departments of English that were using composition as a place to work out their own difficulties and that were in the midst of being both challenged and galvanized intellectually.

Old Time Religions: Traditionalism and Current Traditionalism

Not every proposed solution was innovative, of course. As you might expect from the counter-reformation voices we quoted in the previous chapter, some people prescribed a stiff dose of traditional medicines: a focus on the expository modes and/or on “ basic skills,” a Great Books curriculum, and other measures associated with what Richard Young in an essay published in 1978 dubbed “current-traditionalism” in composition.13 Young’s essay called attention to the resiliency of current-traditional pedagogy in the nation’s composition courses: the “emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; an analysis of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and research paper” (31). Proceeding from a positivist, “windowpane” view toward language, current traditionalism depended on the publication of handbooks to reinforce its obsession with correctness and with static forms such as the five-paragraph essay and the research paper. To teachers of writing who lacked formal training and who were comfortable teaching as they had been taught themselves, current-traditionalism offered a formulaic approach to invention (if invention was considered at all), a linear view of composing that reduced revision pretty much to correction, and a “bottom-up,” not a “top down,” approach to instruction (i.e., instruction began with words, sentences, and then paragraphs, rather than proceeding from overall plans and strategies that then generate local sentences and paragraphs). Many teachers of current-traditionalism, dedicated and experienced or not, mainly understood themselves to be assignors and correctors of papers that tended to be required year after year; learning to compose was regarded largely as a matter of learning rules for logic and etiquette.14

For many teachers of writing, learning to write was also a matter of learning forms known as the expository modes. Advocates of the so-called modes—description, narration, exposition, and argumentation—could trace their instruction to the nineteenth-century work of Alexander Bain, who held that each mode had “its own subject matter, its own organizational forms, and its own language” (D’Angelo, Conceptual 115); descriptive writing organizes, narrative writing recounts, expository writing instructs, argumentative writing persuades. Although Robert Connors has claimed that Bain’s modal curriculum effectively died by the 1950s as exposition came to dominate the other modes (“Rise and Fall”), in fact it appears more accurate to us to say that the modes were simply being renegotiated—their number, their functions, their relationships. Any number of textbooks and readers and courses were still organized according to some version of the modes, and in those courses students were directed through a series of modal assignments, one after the next, that were illustrated in the readers. A description assignment might be followed by narration, comparison, analysis, classification, and definition—or some other combination might be offered. In other words, if exposition was gaining headway as the chief kind of mode, it was also generating its own kind of modal arrangements: static forms of one kind or another into which, according to current-traditional thinking, students were implored to pour information.

These current-traditional approaches to writing instruction were welcomed into many English departments in part because of the long history of New Criticism in those departments. After a text-based pedagogy for criticism was created by the publication of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938, John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941, and Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature in 1942, many writing courses began to incorporate New Critical values. New Critical faith in the autonomy of art and artists, and New Critical respect for stylistic achievement, easily dovetailed with current traditionalism, which also eschewed politics and emphasized style; and New Critical regard for written artifacts over artistic processes or cultural and rhetorical contexts reinforced current-traditional pedagogical doctrine as well. New Critics walled off so-called “literary” (and hence “timeless”) discourses from everyday ones, insisting on distinguishing the special connotative beauty of literary language from matter-of-fact scientific denotation. New Critics quite literally gave rhetoric a bad name, regarding everyday discourses as beneath their consideration, and their disdain for what they regarded as ephemeral writing translated itself in many composition classes into attention to Great Works and Great Writers, as opposed to student writing and more popular and rhetorical culture. It is true that by 1977 the New Criticism was losing momentum, as we have indicated: close analyses of literary texts had become stale with every new microanalysis, and even Rene Wellek was seeing its shortcomings in the famous essay he was writing in 1977, “The New Criticism: Pros and Cons.” But New Criticism and current traditionalism continued to affect classroom practices well into the next decade—even as they affect classrooms today.

Indeed, at many colleges and universities during the 1970s the composition class comfortably doubled as an introduction to Great Ideas or to canonical literary texts that were part of an established literary canon that provided “content” for students to write about. A number of composition-and-literature textbooks accommodated these courses, as they had for decades (Crowley, Composition, chapter 5). If the courses did not always emphasize explicitly literary genres of poetry, drama, and fiction, then they often offered up an analogous “canon” of “artistic” nonfiction or an introduction to Great Ideas in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities that could generate material for student essays. The best-selling 1977 edition of The Norton Reader, for example, accommodated both approaches: it included familiar essays by people like E.B. White, Wallace Stegner, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, James Thurber, Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacob Bronowski, Loren Eiseley, John Henry Newman, X. J. Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Swift, and George Orwell (“A Modest Proposal” and “Politics and the English Language” to be sure), along with 1960s-inspired items by Eldridge Cleaver, Dee Brown, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Toni Morrison; and it organized itself according to heady titles like History, Ethics, Human Nature, Education, Mind, Politics and Government, and Literature and the Arts. (For that matter, it offered a table of contents that permitted teachers to teach the expository modes from the book as well.) Current traditionalism in 1977 was fed by many other textbooks in the Norton tradition and many other handbooks in the Harbrace tradition: enthusiastic imitation followed imitation.

Process Pedagogies

But criticism of New Critical and current-traditional approaches to composition was coming from several sources, among them the proponents of two student-centered pedagogies with roots in the 1960s and in the social sciences: expressivism and cognitivism. Besides being mutually convinced of the relative autonomy of writers from social circumstances (still something of a given in the 1970s), both expressivists and cognitivists claimed to be fundamentally concerned with the “composing process” of writers: they therefore promoted what we now know as “process pedagogies.” But the two groups treated the composing process somewhat differently and expected different behaviors from student writers. Though there was actually considerable common ground between the two camps, in 1977 expressivist and cognitivist advocates of process were in fact competing for priority in the field and promoting different basic principles and pedagogical strategies.15

Expressivists, who during the 1960s had ridiculed traditional composition classrooms for promoting humdrum current-traditional formulas and a neutral voice that Ken Macrorie had dubbed “Engfish,” accommodated process pedagogies in the 1970s rather easily. Indeed, when back-to-basics advocates attacked personal voice pedagogies and the creativity-oriented classroom tactics of the expressivists, expressivists often defended themselves by adopting a process perspective. In his 1972 book The Authentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing, for example, Donald Stewart (following Robert Zoellner, and Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke) had blamed contemporary teachers for using methods that “teach students how to judge their finished work but not how to produce it”—a development which, Stewart went on to say, “implies a fundamental shift in attention away from the product of writing toward the process by which that product eventually gets on paper” (19). Along with Macrorie, William Coles, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow, Stewart argued that student writing would improve if students could be given the opportunity and the space to exercise their writing abilities extensively, especially in the earliest stages of the writing process. Accordingly, what were known as “pre-writing techniques” and other process-oriented strategies (e.g., free writing, reflective writing, journal keeping), essential expressivist pedagogies designed to promote student growth through writing, were promoted for the composition classroom to achieve the expressivist aims of personal growth, authenticity, self-discovery, and voice:

The primary goal of any writing course is self-discovery for the student and [. . .] the most visible indication of that self-discovery is the appearance, in the student’s writing, of an authentic voice. It proceeds from the second conviction that the techniques of pre-writing, developed in the 1960s, will best help the student develop this authentic voice. (Stewart, Preface xii)

While expressivists agreed about the importance of the writing process, they committed themselves to somewhat different specific approaches. Coles, an iconoclastic product of Theodore Baird’s writer-centered pedagogies at Amherst (see Varnum) who had become the composition director at Pittsburgh (where he influenced David Bartholomae, who arrived about the same time), was teaching students to develop an effective, individual style that would emerge if they would write frequently about their personal viewpoints and experiences, discuss their writing with others, and use the responses of others (rather than formal rules) to guide their revisions. In The Plural I (1978), Coles in the vein of Macrorie denounced “themewriting” as the inevitable result of most current composition pedagogy and encouraged students to become adept at more expressive than formulaic communications. Elbow in a similar vein was contending that people learn to write not from textbooks but from actually writing and reflecting on that writing; his Writing without Teachers (1973) provided prompts that encouraged a variety of activities, from freewriting to reflection to exchange. While he was careful to emphasize that his approach was designed ultimately to produce better written products, Elbow was widely appreciated for encouraging writers to explore freely their developing thoughts through multiple drafts. And he was adamant about the need to deflect critical attention away from formal matters, including correctness, until very late in the composing process. But Elbow’s approach was not asocial: while he emphasized the need for students to develop personal identities through writing, he also encouraged them to consider audiences for their documents and to learn how to function in communities through discourse. In an appendix to Writing without Teachers, Elbow offered “The Doubting Game and the Believing Game” as a dialectical process of measuring the claims of the self against those of the community.

As the title Writing without Teachers implies, expressivists fundamentally held that formal instruction was more or less incidental to a writer’s growth. Students were regarded as independent agents—even teachers and textbooks were irrelevant—who could intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error. The material of writing came from the student’s own subjective background, the teacher could “never quarrel with the student’s experience” (Elbow 106), and a writing course was thus a matter of a teacher’s nurturing student self-discovery and self-expression. All of these values were already guiding the pedagogy of Donald Murray, who would nurture expressivism into the 1980s: in 1977 Murray was developing an expressivist-process synthesis that was beholden to creative writing workshops and that would find its most mature expression first in his 1978 publication “Write Before Writing” and then in his 1980 “Writing As Process: How Writing Finds Its Own Meaning.” All of these values were also getting theoretical sanction from the instructive sections on expressive discourse in James Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse (1971) and from James Britton’s appreciation of expressive discourse in Language and Learning (1970) and The Development of Writing Abilities (1975; the American paperback edition appeared first in 1977).

In their concern for self-discovery rather than communicative effectiveness, however, expressivists clashed with those in the new cognitivist school, which by 1970 was beginning to compete with the expressivist school as the dominant process approach to composition. After all, Janet Emig in her 1971 book The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders had drawn attention not only to the composing processes of writers but also to the mental processes that writers employ while composing. A fierce critic of current-traditional approaches (Crowley, Composition 200–01), Emig also established that professional writers as well as students relied on identifiable mental devices and activities that stimulated composition. By the mid-1970s Linda Flower and John R. Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University were studying through a distinctly cognitive lens the composing processes employed by actual writers, students as well as professionals, in an effort to understand empirically the processes involved in composing. Hayes, a psychologist, teamed with Flower to learn more about how the mind tackles the problem of writing. In December of 1977 Flower and Hayes published in College English their groundbreaking essay “Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process,” a manifesto to their approach to process. They rejected the view of writing as the observance of fixed rules and models and instead called for a more strategic, cognitive “problem-solving” approach: since writing consisted, they felt, of a “hierarchical set of subproblems” tackled iteratively, such as planning and organizing, they offered a set of heuristics to “give the writer self-conscious access to some of the thinking techniques” that good writers use to “generate ideas in language and [. . .] construct those ideas into a written structure” suitable for a specific situation (449, 451). And they were embarking on a research program that would soon generate a series of essays, a 1978 conference, and a set of essays based on that conference, Cognitive Processes in Writing, edited by their Carnegie Mellon colleagues Lee Gregg and Erwin Steinberg in 1980. Research by Flower and Hayes was already contributing to pedagogy by broadening instructors’ conceptions of the writing process and by enabling instructors to develop “strategies for helping student writers to discover their intentions,” including prewriting and inventional strategies, planning and organizational strategies, editing strategies, and so on (Faigley, Fragments 30)—all of which were quickly added to pedagogical efforts throughout the nation. Moreover, Flower and Hayes encouraged teachers to understand the writing process as a set of layered cognitive activities involving not just broad activities like “pre-writing” or “revising” but also specific activities practiced by good writers, such as “setting up goals,” “finding operators,” and “testing your writing against your own editor” (“Problem-Solving” 457–58); in each case Flower and Hayes articulated not only how these strategies worked cognitively but also where they fit into the larger process of writing. Flower and Hayes were not embraced universally or uncritically (Ann Berthoff, from a position in aesthetics and philosophy, was already especially withering in dismissing what she regarded as the cognitivists’ compartmentalization of mental processes); but by 1977 most composition handbooks had come to acknowledge, at least superficially and at most substantially, that writing was a process whose stages ought to be considered in some way by writing teachers—though, as Flower and Hayes pointed out, advocates of process pedagogy tended to take “different roads to the same territory.”16 Most newer textbooks incorporated chapters on invention techniques such as brainstorming and freewriting (products of the expressivists’ approach), describing these strategies and providing exercises to guide students through them; and most offered detailed advice about revision as well.

On a final note, as Janice Lauer indicates in her sidebar, one of the key influences on the movement toward process—the reemergence of interest in rhetoric, especially classical rhetoric and rhetorical invention (a development that we discuss later in this chapter)—matured in the second half of the 1960s. Partly because of James Berlin’s categorizing of the expressive and cognitive schools, this influence has been insufficiently acknowledged in accounts of process pedagogies, but the new rhetorical studies were surely not without implications for process-minded scholars and teachers in 1977.

The Impact of Linguistics

Even as the process movement was taking wing, in part under the aegis of breakthroughs in cognitive psychology, other possible solutions to the literacy crisis (some sympathetic to process pedagogy, some more product-oriented) were being supplied by developments in the relatively new and certainly vigorous social science of linguistics.

One such approach to linguistics, “tagmemics,” derived from the work of Kenneth Pike and his collaborators at the University of Michigan, Richard Young and Alton Becker.17 Tagmemics contributed in important ways to the process movement; indeed, Young, Becker, and Pike moved the field into invention, psychology, and cognitive science several years before Flower and Hayes began their own work. In their influential 1970 text Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, written even before the publication of Emig’s Composing Processes, Young, Becker, and Pike defined rhetoric “much more broadly than it had been defined for many years”; they declared that “[rhetoric] is concerned primarily with a creative process that includes all the choices a writer makes from his earliest tentative explorations of a problem in what has been called the ‘prewriting’ stage of the writing process, through choices in arrangement and strategy for a particular audience, to the final editing of the final draft” (xii). Working from Pike’s premise that linguistic action could be understood from the perspectives of particle, wave, and field, and from Young’s appropriation of John Dewey’s ideas on problem formation in Logic and Democracy and Education,18 the authors posed a set of heuristics for examining “units of experience,” a category which includes any person, object, or abstraction subject to thought. Much of their textbook consequently offered heuristics for prewriting and invention to help students to solve problems by preparing the mind to understand—and hence to come up with—good material for compositions. But Young, Becker, and Pike also described techniques for examining rhetorical situations (especially for realizing writing as a response to a problem), for editing drafts, and for analyzing texts in preparation for revision. These tactics without question shaped the work of Flower and Hayes and stimulated a great many other process advocates.

But though efforts to ground composition pedagogy and theory in tagmemics proliferated, and though aspects of tagmemic rhetoric reached the classroom through Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, through Flower’s 1981 textbook Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing, and through J. C. Mathes and Dwight Stevenson’s technical writing textbook Designing Technical Reports, these efforts never fully surpassed their marginal heuristic applications, possibly because, as Lester Faigley has observed, tagmemics to a degree “failed to account for a variety of distinctions that writers perceived among different texts” (Fragments 86). In other words, as a linguistic theory, tagmemics was proving to describe only incompletely the practices of actual speakers and writers. If composition theorists were seeking a model of language use that conformed to students’ actual experiences as language users (and which could thus suggest effective strategies for intervening in the writing process), then the analytical strength of linguistic approaches became a detriment when applied to the relatively unsystematic chaos of actual writing. The emergent discipline needed a more comprehensive model to lean on.

This weakness of tagmemics, along with some of its successes, also characterized to a degree one other major linguistic approach to composition of the 1960s and 1970s, transformational-generative (TG) linguistics. In many respects, TG was even more limited than tagmemics in its value for composition and rhetoric in that it was attentive mostly to sentence-level considerations. However, during the 1970s, several rhetorical theorists and compositionists nevertheless aligned themselves with versions of this linguistic current. Several of them, most notably Ross Winterowd and Joseph Williams, sought ways to overcome the limitations of TG by crossing the “sentence boundary” into larger discursive forms, and by uniting it with a broader theory of rhetoric.19 Furthermore, its contribution to pedagogies like sentence combining and its fundamental role in informing the debates over “students’ right to their own language” in the early 1970s made it a significant contributor to new directions in composition.