Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.
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“We don’t do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas – yours, mine or anyone else’s. We don’t have an anthology of readings. We don’t discuss current events. We don’t exchange views on hot-button issues. We don’t tell each other what we think about anything – except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function.” The reason we don’t do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show. —Stanley Fish —Devoid of Content (NY Times (will expire))
At Seton Hill, at present we have a two-semester course called “Seminar in Thinking in Writing,” which attempts to cover freshman comp, an introduction to cultural studies (education, gender, family, race, etc.), and a first-year experience program. There are certain topics that I exclude from consideration — abortion and gay marriage, for example (I’ve never read a student paper on those topics that takes “the other side” seriously, no matter what side the student takes). I should probably add “images of women in advertising media,” since the student argument is pretty much always, “Advertisers should show healthy images of women,” and the paper never actually spells out what kind of benevolent dictatorship would force publishers to follow that directive, or what punishments should be visited upon those who dare to exercise their first amendment rights.
A few weeks ago, a committee led by our newly-hired comp director, Laura Patterson, agreed to change the program so that it begins with a one-semester composition course that students can test out of, and that they must re-take as many times as necessary in order to pass it. Then they move on to a one-semester course on cultural studies (intended to focus on developing critical thinking skills), and then one or two subject-specific writing courses. In the humanities program, we are thinking of two courses — one early in the program that covers all the humanities, and then another for the specific major. In fine arts, students learn in ways other than writing, so the faculty there don’t think that a writing-intensive course will be helpful until after the students have done the studio courses and learned the material that they will need to write about in their upper-level courses. Nobody from the natural sciences or math was at that meeting, so we realize we have some information gathering to do.
One of the problems with our current two-semester plan is that students who are good writers have to take it anyway, since the cultural content delivered by the course is considered important to the core curriculum.
I won’t be teaching Seminar in Thinking and Writing in the fall, but I will be piloting one of the mid-level writing intensive courses, specifically American Lit (which serves as a Gen Ed course for students seeking “American Culture” credit, as a required coverage course for English majors, and a broadening course for education students who may or may not be planning to teach English.
I spent more time on the grammar component in “Introduction to Literary Studies,” and while some students were worried about it (writing essays that pleaded for leniency), when we spent a while on professionalism, I thought I noticed a slight shift towards realism. Several students who desired to make their living with their writing skills were bizarrely cavalier about grammar, until one class when I spelled out the following situation.
You’re an editor. Part of your job is to correct the grammatical mistakes in articles submitted to you for publication. You get two submissions from strangers. One is a bit dry, but grammatically correct. The other is witty and lively, but full of grammar, spelling, and syntax errors. Which would you rather do — give the author of the dry submission a few pointers to make the article wittier, or go through the witty submission with a fine-toothed comb, checking every comma, every preposition, and every subject-verb agreement?
After I asked students to submit a resume and cover letter, in which students applied for a real job that uses their English skills, even before I returned those assignments to students, I noticed students asking me how they could work for The Setonian (the student paper, which I advise).
I never did get around to handing out copies of an article from The Onion, announcing “English replaced to be new syntax with,” and I never did get around to giving them constrained writing assignments (write a poem only using the upper typewriter row, or palindromes (“Bob.” “Racecar.” “Dennis sinned.” “Dennis and Edna sinned.”), or on the day they are supposed to submit a 200-word essay, give them time in class to cut out 100 words of fat, and then for homework have them add 100 words of muscle.
The reason I didn’t get around to these compositional activities is because we were too busy looking at content — I had them read The Tempest, then spent the next week reading six academic articles on the play. I assigned them pairs of articles with widely diverging viewpoints, and I was very pleased with the result. I’d actually like to repeat this exercise, but instead of assigning widely diverging articles, I assign articles that differ more and more subtly.
It would be nice to have the time for that — and I might, if more students entered this class with better composition skills. And I think the revised core writing program will give many students exposure to bedrock skills earlier in their careers.
I don’t think content will disappear from our new composition course, but perhaps we can cover just one or two content units instead of the three we’re expected to cover now. I never had a problem with grammar in my English courses, in part because I took three years of Latin in high school. The German grammar that I took in college was a snap by comparison. While some of my grad school companions were mystified by Middle and Old English at the University of Toronto, I loved the required History of the English Language course.
I agree with Mike that the form vs. content debate raises a false dualism. But I have to say that I admire Fish’s call for a return to the basics of language. That said, I can’t imagine giving a class the assignment of creating a new language because it seems an exercise in needless abstraction.
Instead, I hope we can establish a pre-STW comp course at Seton Hill with an emphasis on form. An emphasis on form, of course, doesn’t mean an absence of “content,” although it might mean an absence of hot-button identity issues. Those issues could wait until students had mastered the basics of language (or demonstrated such a mastery). It makes sense to put the art of composing sentences and paragraphs before the art of composing an argument.
I think of Fish’s model for “content-free” comp as an extreme on a continuum of form/content balances in the comp classroom. There are a number of other known models for structuring such a non-cultural-identities-based composition class: personal essays, literacy as topic, rhetorical strategy as topic, and the composition lab model, where students spend most of their class time writing and reacting to the writing of others.
Mike, if breaking away from form can lead to new ideas, does the reverse hold true? Will breaking away from ideas lead to new forms? I don?t think it?s possible to break away from form, just as I don?t think it?s possible to break away from ideas. It is possible to break with conventions. And the subject matter of composition courses ?cultural studies and personal identities ? is very conventional, even if when composition was forming as a discipline these topics were not routinely covered outside the composition classroom. Now, these topics are embedded in the curriculum, and high school teachers feel they are giving students a leg up if they assign papers on the topics they?ll be expected to write about in college. But then my job, as a college teacher, is to get students to unlearn the coping strategies that helped them suffice and placate their way through high school.
If Fish finds that students took his courses because they wanted to be taught by The Great Stanley Fish, starting the class with a statement that focuses squarely on student performance (rather than anyone?s ideas) might be a useful pedagogical strategy.
I do share your frustration at Fish’s dualism, which is amplified by his status as a recently-retired academic heavyweight. Few freshmen will have the perspective to see that banishing content from the classroom is an idea, and that Fish?s claim to be content-free means that his students are, in fact, being subjected to his ideas about teaching. I?m sure Fish knows this. He?s overstating his case, because he wants to get the attention of readers of the op-ed page, just as he wants to get the attention of his students. To expose students to the ideas that you advocate, while at the same time telling them that you are disciple of the pure and dispassionate Truth is another matter. Plenty of academics decry that attitude when they see it in organized religion, but it happens all too often in academia, too.
At the same time, I enjoy a good sermon, and I don?t mind it when Fish preaches. Students do make fewer mistakes when they write about what they know, but since they come to college to learn about what they don’t know, we aren’t doing them a favor if we never force them into unfamiliar spaces.
I tell my journalism students that the profession requires them to be objective, although I know plenty of journalism (including editorials and reviews) includes the personal opinion of the author. Local sports sections are veritable celebrations of regional bias. While it?s nice to imagine that journalists are nobly pursuing the truth, in fact there are economic advantages ? two competing small papers advocating opposing political viewpoints are more expensive to run than a single large paper that serves both constituencies. Still, I have to start out drilling the concept of ?objectivity? into their heads, so that they can recognize bias when they encounter it. (The fact that many students wrote phrases like ?that was a bias [sic] sentence? on their final exams, even after [supposedly] reading a whole book on the topic of bias, suggests I need to spend a bit more time on the concept.)
I think the problem with content is that students expect study guides and end-of-chapter questions with answers in the back of the book, and all the co-reading supportive materials their high school teachers created for them in a desperate attempt to get them to understand the content. Their reading strategies are optimized according to the level of comprehension they needed to demonstrate in order to succeed in high school. You simply cannot cover as much material, at any significant depth, if you are teaching the basics of college reading at the same time. Throw in writing, a university portfolio, and cultural enrichment activities, and you get a crowded schedule full of many minor assignments. If students perform well on these cultural assignments, that may lull them into a false sense of security. And the good students, some of whom throw a huge amount of effort in these minor cultural assignments, can get burned out when it comes to the major writing assignments that are part of the composition track.
Arguing that the study of form should itself be a subject is pretty much what rhetoric is all about, isn’t it? And rhetoric is far from content-free. Fish’s cry to banish content from the classroom is a political and pedagogical choice that is situated in rich cultural context. I see within it an optimistic attempt to create independent learners, who have the bedrock skills that will enable them to realize and actualize the organic relationship between form and content.
At any rate, I look forward to teaching in the revised writing curriculum, hopefully in the fall of 2006.
I’m wondering how the new program ideas for STW will affect the role of the RTA. Obviously things are bound to have changed from when I was a first-year, but I wouldn’t mind learning more about what things are changing and how, considering that I’m stepping into a position intended to assist this sort of class. Keep me posted. I would like to see more students get more from the class, because it’s a great idea in theory; nonetheless, I did hear a number of not-so-good things from a few of this past year’s STW classes.
Oh, and I should add that I really LOVE the “say you’re an editor with two choices” example! That does illustrate the point really well. Although the dualism is still false (because editors get tons more than two types of submissions) it’s a great way of proving to students that ideas will only get you so far.
“We are not interested your ideas”? Please. I teach Stanley Fish in literary criticsm and I usually admire his work, but in this piece he’s being hyperbolic beyond belief. Obviously “form vs. content” is a false dualism. Form for form’s sake can be deadly, leading too quickly into not only a classroom brimming with boredom, but also a factory that produces nothing more than lockstep logic. The problem isn’t always the teacher, it’s just the student level: new college students want shortcuts and predictable models so they can “get it right” and manage their classload rather than think freely and fruitfully. It’s the reason the “5 paragraph paper” has become the model for all non-thinking freshman essays. And though it sure beats the “no paragraph logic paper” it’s still a product of cookie-cutter factory work and the invention and revision stages in the writing process get abandoned.
When Fish says “content is a lure” he’s on to something. In some ways, it seems to me that a lot of comp teachers treat content as a sort of bait to lure students into an appreciation of form. And it works! But as with most lures, the means only leads to the end of entrapment. Form can be a cage that some students never break out of. I think there are ways to strive for balance. To look at how one thing shapes the other. Content makes form interesting, and vice versa. Breaking away from form can lead to new ideas. And that’s the thing: I do care about student ideas — and if I didn’t then I have no right for them to care about mine.
Karissa, STW won’t change between now and this fall. But you’re right — if STW changes, then the role of the Resident Teaching Assistant also changes.
One of the best things about STW was that the class stayed together for a whole year. David Droppa literally asked for a moment of silence in honor of that part of the STW experience, when it became clear that other needs of the program were trumping the benefits gained through that stability.
We floated the idea of expanding Connections (a one-credit “Adjusting to College and Doing All Your Paperwork” course) from one semester to two, but there was a clear desire to keep that course from being a dumping ground for random things that didn’t seem to fit elsewhere. A different committee oversees that course, so we didn’t get too far into it.
Any changes will have to be brought forth to the whole Faculty Senate, of course, so there’s a forum in place to hear the concerns of any groups who stand to be affected by the proposed changes.