A Quick(?) Review

In light of the statement that we aren’t thinking deeply enough or sufficiently considering the readings, I thought I’d try to do a quick review of what we’ve covered and see if I can’t synthesize the major points. I’ll try to add a second post this week on the new readings.

1. FYC is largely accidental and as a consequence is poorly defined, both in methods and in goals.

• Parker calls it, and English departments in general, the accidental and undefined child of speech and linguistics. Horner discusses the religious and political forces driving this accidental birth, and raises the point that the discipline, such as it is, was designed for the upper class. Schank makes a similar point, suggesting universities are really in the business of training professors, and ultimately arguing that this focus on being “academic” is an impediment to the more fundamental goal of being well-educated.


• Brereton and Kitzhaber look more specifically at what departments are doing. Brereton examines three major departments and finds a largely ineffective (according to the depts’ own reports) mixture of literature, linguistics, rhetoric, and speech that varies substantially by school. Interestingly, most folks from these departments (100 years ago!) complained about the quality of student writing and lack of time for grading. Kitzhaber, in one of my favorite critiques, suggests that the three key problems with the discipline are (1) it lacks clear aims and so there is no sense of progression (this prefigures Hairston’s suggestions to some extent), (2) there is little confidence in the expertise of the instructors, and (3) the texts are less rigorous. In all key problems include the “cult of literature” largely driven by class elitism, the focus on teaching math/science in the post-Sputnik time (though I would point out that math teaching has been, if anything, even less effective than FYC), and confusion about whether FYC is the first step in a lit major or a service course.

2. One key instructional mistake is focusing on style (and an unreal style at that) and structure over content. Plus some hints of solutions.

• Macrorie, though included in the second week of readings, begins to point the way forward with his discussion of “Engfish”—the pretentious style into which students are forced. Real writing, he suggests, is about telling truths and writing freely. Essentially he seems to be adopting the romantic/expressive position, in large part as a rejection of the older formalist approach. Crowly makes a similar point, suggesting that the push toward prescriptive instruction has minimized or eliminated invention and artificially elevated style and arrangement. D’Angelo obliquely references a similar trend toward prescription with his (welcome) attack on teaching the “modes.”


• Finally, Shaughnessy takes on the most fundamentally prescriptive methods, teaching grammar, by pointing out that this approach actively undermines writing instruction by enhancing the obstacles that prevent students both from writing and from having anything to write about. However, she does not suggest simply ignoring errors, stating that they “are unintentional and unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader,” adding that “errors carry messages which writers can’t afford to send” (395). Instead, she argues that errors are more symptomatic than problematic, arising from the underlying logic of the writer and thus offering the opportunity for instruction. As such, she seems to reject both the formalist and the expressive approaches, leaning toward a rhetorical (and perhaps cognitive) approach instead.

So, to sum up, despite addressing a fundamentally different group of students than a century ago, FYC is clinging to methods that are not only ineffective, but destructive. In particular, the readings suggest the current traditional/formalist approach is the wrong way to teach, and instead we should move toward the cognitive and rhetorical models. They also suggest we need to settle, once and for all (or at least for a while) what FYC is actually trying to achieve.