Johnson and Elbow commentary on Rhetoric vs. Literature

As a student immersed in both professional communication and English, I find both Johnson and Elbow’s articles to be fascinated reads. They moved me with hope for future collaboration of two fields— rhetoric and literature—which authors argue are not so foreign from one another. These articles have great importance for our particular classroom; as soon-to-be teachers of writing, my classmates and I can gain valuable insight from the concepts, ideas, and “wishes” Johnson and Elbow convey.

Johnson writes: “…as a rhetorician” I cannot be considered a scholar, nor can my work be regarded as a valid contribution to the humanistic enterprise of English departments, unless my colleagues in literary specialties can construe what I’m doing as having something to do with the concerns of literature and nothing to do with the teaching of writing or with a pedagogical theory in composition” (23). As true as this rings within the aforementioned disciplines and the University, this statement is unbelievably unfortunate. I find myself in complete agreeance with Johnson and Elbow when I ask: “How are these two fields not related?” If I have taken just one thing from Dr. Barnett’s ENGL 852 Rhetoric and Professional Communication, it is this: rhetoric is indeed prevalent across many disciplines today. The reason for the portrayed disconnect and the generated negativity; however, dates back to its Aristotelian conception. Rhetoric, in its evolution, has increased its representation as a bad rap; it is the “whore child” of literature or composition, the lesser between itself and philosophy. Johnson states that “the divorce between rhetoric and literary studies is a righteous separation founded on considerable incompatibilities in aims and substance; (22) however, if rhetoric is the counterpart to dialectic and the mediating force bringing groups in to dialogue, how is it so distant from literature, if literature is in many ways the documentation of dialogue? Are these aims not compatible?

I established another connection with a different MAPC course, ENGL 856: Workplace Communication, in Johnson’s commentary on the them-vs.-us creed. In Dr. William’s course, we have discussed how identification influences the dynamics and relationships within a workplace. Congregation, for example, is important as it implies an “us” perspective, whereas segregation implies one of “them.” George Cheney mentions this congregation vs. segregation in his article “The Rhetoric of Identification and The Study of Organizational Communication,” and he quotes a passage from Burke: “Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (Burke). This quote speaks to the importance of congregation (we) and segregation (me), and it suggests that the voice within is the loudest; therefore, no other voice can convince the loudest without the loudest voice already having some predisposition of believe. This “Burkean identification,” as well as the concepts addressed in Cheney’s article, is evident in the divorce between rhetoric and literature.

Elbow also reiterates this distance and “mediate[s] for a moment on the two essential dimensions of language use that [he] has been implying” rhetoric and poetics. In one sense, language is rhetorical…” (471). If Elbow can identify the ways in which language classifies as rhetoric, how are these two fields still disconnected? Johnson touches on this question in using a theme of interrelatedness in conjunction with a pluralist definition of literacy. He writes: “A pluralist definition of literacy can develop from the identification of these kinds of correspondences—from the recognition that learning to write is a function of learning to interpret, that learning to interpret is a function of learning to write, and that both learning to compose and learning to assess meaning are functions of learning to read texts” (24). I think we, as students of professional communication and writing, can infer yet another connection and find resemblance of these teachings within another field—communication studies.

In the final note, Johnson credits Wayne Booth for his comment on the aims of rhetoric. Booth says: “What we say matters, and it matters how we say it” (Johnson, 25). This saying is quite similar to McCombs and Shaw’s classic communication theory of agenda setting that states while “the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, it is stunningly successful in telling readers what to think about” (McCombs and Shaw). Agenda setting theory is based on the notion that press decisions lead to a transfer of salience of issues to users. It seems that this same transfer is taking place between the divorced fields—rhetoric and literature. Johnson and Elbow both discuss the constant sway of importance and dominance of one field over another, and I cannot help but to wonder if this divorce is larger than it seems.

Faigley, "Judging Writing, Judging Selves"

In “Judging Writing, Judging Selves,” Lester Faigley invites discussion regarding the views teachers of writing take when approaching the works of their students. Faigley opens and writes: “While most teachers of writing still assign grades to papers at some point in the course of instruction, the emphasis has shifted from summative to formative evaluation, or, in the language of process advocates, from a teacher’s role as judge to one as coach” (395). Using diverse notions of the self, Faigley compares 1929 standardized essays to recent collections of student writing. The comparison illustrates Faigley’s claim that today’s teachers of writing are also considered with student’s consideration of the self as much, if not more, as they are student's consideration of the actual text.

I first connected with Faigley in the opening paragraph, specifically with the line quoted above, as it allowed me to reflect on an experience from my undergraduate years (ironically, an article focused on the importance of the self prompted me to do just this). During my senior year at Virginia Tech, I held a paid position in the CommLab, the university’s oral communication lab. The sister lab of the Writing Center, the CommLab assisted VT students, university-wide, with all phases of a speech—planning, organizing, brainstorming, outlining, and delivering. One goal of the CommLab was to provide adequate guidance to its clients and create a relationship outside of the teacher-student one within the classroom. A unique feature of this lab was the role its coaches played; we, as undergraduate peer mentors, were called “coaches” rather than “tutor,” “teacher,” or “mentor.” A research study in Spring 2012 revealed that 100% of clients preferred this title to any others. Clients stated that “coach” was a less intimating title and it reinforced the feeling of equality in the coach-client relationship. Students were more inclined to trust their coach, value the time spent working and return for follow-up sessions with the coach, simply because the lack of hierarchy in the CommLab workplace. I mention this experience because we, as coaches, fulfilled the teacher-as-coach role that Faigley describes in the opening paragraph. Rather than acting as judges or graders of the work of our clients, we coached them throughout their process.

As I read of the 92 examination books The Commission read and looked over the prompts provided in the text, another question came to mind: How much change have we actually witnessed in these standardized assessment prompts? Yes, we notice and describe the transformation that teachers have undergone in their “judgment” or reflection on student writing, but how much has the structure of the prompts changed? In reading the questions within Part One, I could not resist thinking about today’s standardized tests. How different are the questions written in 1929 from those written and provided on tests such as the SAT, GRE or MCAT today? Do we not still see the similarities? How can teachers undergo such a change in their readings and evaluations of student work, yet the prompts stay static? Going along with this idea, I reflected on the numerous study guides and detailed tutorials that provide intense preparation for these tests. These books, just as Faigley’s article, highlight samples essays students have written to previous prompts. Each prompt is following by a teacher’s evaluation of and commentary on it; typically, this discourse includes a grade based on the pre-determined scale. It is so interesting to ponder these materials (as well as the tests they represent) then to read an article like Faigley’s and compare.

I made more connections in later pages. On 404, Faigley writes: “Several teachers mention that while the particular example they discuss is flawed (spelling and mechanical errors are reproduced), the student achieves excellence because he or she is either ‘honest,’ writes in an ‘authentic voice,’ or possesses ‘integrity.’” This statement reminded me of the concept of storytelling as we have discussed this semester in ENGL 856: Workplace Communication. Having just read Stephen Denning’s Squirrel Inc., our class has learned some of the key components of what makes a good story. According to Denning, there are different needs for a story depending on the objective of the story. For example, if the objective is for the speaker to communicate who he/she is, then that story will need to: 1) reveal some strength or vulnerability from the past, 2) be true, or 3) be moving. Do these characteristics not parallel those put forth in the statement above? To some extent, we can apply the same principles to storytelling as we do when writing about the self.  

I had another question after reading what Roger Garrison declares about writing: “‘Good writing,’” he says, “‘is inevitably honest writing. Every writer, beginner or not, needs what Hemingway called ‘a built-in crap detector.’ All of us, like it or not, are daily immersed in tides of phony, posturing, pretentious, tired, imprecise, slovenly language, which both suffocate and corrupt the mind’” (Faigley 405). My question deals with truth in regard to creative or fiction writing. If honest writing is so highly valued, where and how do readers (or even teachers) find and evaluate the self in fiction writing? How do we justify these genres and credit student authors with their attention to self if their writing is falsified? Where do we find the balance?