A Follow-up from Yesterday

Professor Major’s response to Professor Nelms, like Major’s original column, contains some refreshingly honest admissions and the seeds of a few useful questions. But Major’s undoubtedly well-intentioned argument is undone by his sheer ignorance of most scholarship in composition and rhetoric.

 

Major claims to “respect” comp/rhet, and he chides Nelms for reading a “different” essay than the one Major intended. The original essay, Major claims, was not about comp/rhet scholarship and therefore shouldn’t be read as such. Fair enough. But that skirts a more important issue here: If Major did know anything substantial about comp/rhet scholarship, he never would have framed the issue the way he does, and he would have realized that some of the questions he asks—some good questions, I might add—are answered extensively in the available scholarship in comp/rhet.

 

To my mind, the best question Major asks is why English (literature) professors, given the opportunity, avoid teaching composition like the plague. His own tentative answers indicate that he is not familiar with (or if he is familiar with, he ignores) the extensive historical scholarship in comp/rhet that sheds light on this question. Sharon Crowley, James Berlin, Susan Miller, Thomas Miller, Stephen North, and many others have written book-length treatments of the teaching of composition, paying special attention to the role composition has played within the structures of English departments over the past 140 years or so. Anyone familiar with this work would not exhibit the sort of gee-whiz approach that Major does.

 

The anecdote about the irate phone call from the physics professor serves a rhetorical function painfully familiar to any professor or graduate student in rhetoric and composition: The invocation of crisis. In this often-recycled narrative, student writing is bad and getting worse. Students can’t write comprehensible and correct sentences like they used to be able to do. We’ve fallen away from a golden age—maybe it was ten years ago, maybe twenty, maybe fifty. But things are broken and if we don’t fix them now our whole society will go to hell in a handbasket. But historical and empirical research demonstrate two things quite clearly: First, this “crisis” is nothing new, and it appears to be more a matter of perception than reality. Complaints about the atrocious grammar and mechanics in college students’ writing can be found as far back as 1841. The complaints lodged in 1841, along with those in 1875, and 1975, and 2008, and many of the years in between those . . . all sound remarkably similar. Second, the quality of student writing, if measured by the frequency of grammatical and mechanical errors, has remained essentially unchanged over the past hundred years. And, if examined from other angles, as Professor Nelms points out, student writing is now much better than it ever was. For example, students now write much longer, more fully elaborated papers than they did a hundred years ago.

 

I could go on much more, but I will conclude with this: Major’s argument that the teaching of composition might be improved if more experienced English (literature) professors taught composition. I happen to teach at an institution where all members of the English department, from adjuncts to full professors, teach at least a couple of sections of composition each semester. And I can attest that such an arrangement solves none of the problems Professor Major thinks it might solve. In some ways, it may make them worse.