disciplinary grappling

I have spent the week in orientation for new TAs. For about an hour on Monday, I sat in on a colleague's orientation for an oral and written communication class, and the rest of this week I have been doing--mostly observing--the orientation for Speech Comm 101, "The Principles of Effective Speaking." I'm directing 101 this year. Fortunately, there are many other people involved, including a coordinator, an assistant director, and three peer leaders (all five really fantastic) and so my main job is to think about the course itself and the training we do.

On Monday, one of the new TAs in the other orientation used English classes as a point of contrast for this particular course. The main idea there was that the writing that gets done in English classes is, well, overdone. And the unspoken assumption was that such writing (think of the words flowery, beautiful, ornate, and use really elaborate 19th-century gestures when describing such writing) is not only condoned by English professors but demanded. Hm. That's not really how it works, though it is often true that students in English classes come in thinking that this is what we want as well.  The result is often (not always, but often) clotted, thesaurized prose that needs to be pruned. Badly.

Then today in a really terrific teaching demonstration, the assistant director of 101 used English papers several times as a point of contrast when describing the kind of writing students need to do for an oral presentation. She used the phrase "write for the ear." Writing for the ear, incidentally, is something that really, really interests me, and Quintilian was a little obsessed with it too. And while it seems like writing for a composition class is more writing for the eye, written discourse also, Sharon and I stress in our book, ought to be composed for the ear. Why? Because when someone reads, even silently, they often hear the language. Now, it is definitely true--and I'm pretty sure this is what the a.d. was getting at--that writing for an oral presentation needs to be quite crisp, and that shorter sentences are almost always more articulable and therefore more easily understood when spoken (or in the case of a conference featuring mostly English professors and graduate students, when read out loud). It's also true that when speaking from an outline of keywords, it would be next to impossible to recall a complex sentence, draped with dependent clauses, kind of like this one.**

But. I praise crisp, short sentences in essays written in my English classes just as much (perhaps more than) I do really complicated sentences. Both can have a certain elegance that gets worn away when the same sentence structure gets repeated over and over. This wearing away might not happen as easily in oral presentation, but I'm still thinking about that.

There were many more instances in which my training as a teacher of English seemed to go against the training as a teacher of communication. There is, in one (the speech comm class), a huge emphasis on thesis statements, whereas it's a big no-no in current writing pedagogy to build everything around a thesis sentence.* I also had to wrestle my own hand back to the desk to keep from pointing out a really big (huge) misplaced modifier in one of the model sentences today. (I didn't want people to roll their eyes at the English professor.) For now, I'm content to observe and to reflect on the disciplinary distinctions--or assumptions about disciplinary distinctions--and what might be behind them.

*note: For the record, in the hour I sat in on the oral and written comm orientation, I didn't hear a single mention of thesis statements, so I don't want to generalize from 101 to the entire discipline of communication. Instead, there was a heck of a lot of rhetorical training going on. That probably owes to the person in charge.

**updated to add: I've had even more a.d.-inspired thoughts on the two-wayness of memory in writing-for-speaking pedagogy, but I've recorded those in a comment below, like the 8th one or so. I expect to have much more to say on these distinctions (and nondistinctions) later on in the term, and am loving the comments, so keep 'em coming!

Comments

[oa]

Well, that would explain why the basic comp students I get later on can't make a damn argument but can "express themselves" in their "voices." At least, at Dawg U.

For the record, this is the last year the person in charge is in charge. :) just sayin. for the record. last year.

[Dave Mazella]

Hi Debra,

Since I'm coming out of an "English-only" program and background (never took comp, only lit courses, and spent a total of 3 yrs teaching comp), I was curious about the debate about thesis statements going on in pedagogy. Would you mind talking a little more about this debate, or at least passing along some cites?

Thanks,

DM

[dhawhee]

oa: yeah, the voice thing is a whole other bear. and DM: i'll have to go with the quick-and-dirty here, because I'm tied up with orientation stuff! thesis statements have a long history of being tied to that god-awful five paragraph theme, and of being terribly prescriptive. but even more than that, they're often taught in this way: come up with a thesis and then argue it. from a rhetorical perspective (esp. ancient rhetoric, which emphasizes invention), it actually takes a LOT of work to generate arguments, and in the course of doing this generative work one develops a solid stance, or something approaching an argument in succinct form. In other words, having students "come up with a thesis" and then figure out how to argue it has it backwards. Sharon Crowley and I have a rather long meditation in the preface of our textbook against the "state a thesis, then support it" sort of approach. Incidentally, the ancients used the word "thesis" to name a general proposition, like "one should/should not marry" (versus "Cicero should/should not marry"). Anyway. But to say it's a big no-no might be too blanket. This is coming from my training in particular, and my orientation as a classical rhetoric person with an interest in the history of composition.

[Mindy]

I totally understand what you are saying about the difference, though from the mirror image of being the speech gal in the English comp world. One issue is that of time (chronos not kairos)and so the short sentence in the written composition world is still quite a bit different than the short and crisp sentence composed for an oral presentation that must, ideally, be both understandable and memorable given one pass/hearing. Time also has to do with why thesis and claim construction is important. The longer the speech, the more important the memorable central argument and claim become as something the audience can cling to. Not really all that pretty, but when you've got only one shot at it, the idea is to do what works.

'Course public speaking pedagogy has not changed in well, EVER. There will be mad money for the person or people who can successfully redesign and think public communication/"speaking" for the 21st cent.

[dhawhee]

Mindy: This is exactly the kind of stuff that's been rolling around in my head all day. (including the possible need for change!)

[c...]

this is fascinating (and, as someone who's helped run the english side's orientation, a rather strange and disconcerting view of myself from outside). I'm partly intrigued because, though I don't think I've ever asked students to write as if they were going to speak the prose, some of the best comp-class prose I've seen came from students who were consciously taking on an oratorical style for their writing.

Mostly, though i understand the value and difference in learning/doing both written and spoken communication (not to mention other forms...), I'm super uncomfortable with making stark divisions between the pedagogies... to close on a silly little anecdote: i'm pretty sure it's a common english-side comp class strategy to have students read their papers out loud to help smooth legibility *and* reveal jumps or contradictions in the argument ...

[E!]

"Because when someone reads, even silently, they often hear the language."

Totally--and that, I am finding, is a large paart of why it's so difficult to teach writing to Deaf students (at leas as a hearing instructor with zero Deaf culture experience). I'm sure someone's done some kind of research on this, how literal sound affects meaning and precision even when nothing is ever read aloud. It's kind of blowing my mind.

[dhawhee]

E!: whoa, no kidding.

And c . . . yeah, right? I'm also intrigued by the way memory figures in, and not just the traditional way I mentioned above--that the works need to be recallable for the speaker, but how a speech's main point needs to be memorable (different from memorizable, but still) for the hearers, as Mindy points out. Again, this is something the a.d. called to our attention the other day--the important distinction between completely "forgettable" and, well, unforgettable. This is not the way we describe written composition, but hey, maybe it ought to be.

[little miss s]

E!: A colleague and I are having a similar issue while assisting a blind student with her writing. The computer she uses makes it difficult for her to edit due to the lack of quality voice software programs available. When the program reads her writing back to her (while she is trying to edit) there is no fluent articulation and she gets frustrated easily in the revision process. I would love to have some resources for helping my blind/deaf writers!

..Hi Debbie!

[Z]

Hey d, great post. A few thoughts.

It would be nice if prose and speaking styles were historicized and contextualized in these sorts of classes. Whether one "ought" to write/speak in a particular style is, of course, massively culturally determined and, when I was teaching comp way back in the day, I always thought it was, you know, kind of my job to point that out to students, reveal to them the various styles one might adopt, and enable them to choose from among those styles to suit the purpose of the particular instance of writing/speaking. You know: rhetoric.

The relation between writing "for the eye" and "for the ear" is vexed. In Renaissance classrooms, which still form the basis for our own, the model was Latin, and particularly Latin oratory. But of course, they'd never actually heard a native Latin speaker, so they were making a lot of it up. And Latin sentence structure of course fits pretty uneasily into English. Nonetheless, students like Shakespeare were busy reciting Cicero, translating him into English, reciting the English, translating their own translation back into Latin and reciting that, and so on and on. The results could not have been anything like what an early modern English speaker would have naturally said or easily understood, and yet it was the most culturally valued form of writing and speech.

Further, the huge influence of Cicero on Renaissance prose composition resulted in a style - dominant for a time in the 16th-17th century but also mocked by many including Erasmus - that had long, complex, clausal and periodic sentences. If you read (the totally awesome) Thomas Browne's (totally awesome) Urn Burial, you'll see many amazing examples of it. These sentences were not written "for the ear" in the sense that the Speech Comm people are talking about--or they were written for very different ears than ours--but in fact they were precisely written with an idea of what Ciceronian oration would sound like if written in English prose, so they sort of *were* written for the ear.

Of course there was a backlash against the pervasive Ciceronian style, and (esp. since Latinism has largely died away in the meantime as the mark of education) I think that backlash has pretty much lasted until today, and might even be considered a constitutive feature of "vernacular modernity." So now our students are supposed to write and speak a lot more like Hemingway than Thomas Browne. Nonetheless, if you read someone like WG Sebald, you'll find an incredible Ciceronian style in much of his writing, and if I ever had an undergrad who wrote like Sebald, I'd eat my own foot before I told him to change his style so people could understand his writing by ear. I might not tell him to write a job application like that, but I'd help him write the cover letter for his New Yorker submission.

Ok, enough ranting. Something about your post got me annoyed. Something seems very parochial about this speech comm intro class, and I fear that the students will all be taught to give the exact same PowerPoint bulleted business presentation. Visions of Mad Men are dancing in my head... I have become an old curmudgeon... I will stop now...

[dhawhee]

Awesome, Z. We ought to coauthor something sometime. I tend to teach punctuation in this historical way--punctuation's invention as breathing marks, and the resulting usefulness (in writing especially) of those marks as rhetorical tools for pacing, meaning, etc. I love the idea you give for historicizing styles too. As for the hackles, yep--this is exactly what prompted the post. I gotta watch that Mad Men.

[Jim Aune]

Having taught both public speaking and writing, I am actually sympathetic to the Comm person's point. Students with well-developed writing skills usually, in my experience, think they should be able to stand up and just read a manuscript. Students with less-developed oral or written composition skills have trouble understanding how to narrow a topic, and developing a simple thesis and preview statement can be very helpful. It's easier to take an overly explicit introduction and make it more subtle and interesting than vice versa. On the other hand, such hit-em-over-the-head organization is most useful for informative/expository speeches, less so for persuasive ones (especially those with an inductive pattern of organization), and definitely not for epideictic speeches (I realized this a long time ago when a student pointed out that "I Have a Dream" has no thesis statement). I learned how to teach writing by co-teaching with Fred Antczak, and his emphasis on the concept of a "contract" with the reader/listener [I forget where the idea came from--William Brandt?--is still a good way to deal with these issues.

[Dave Mazella]

If you want to see the tensions between the rhetorical and anti-rhetorical attitudes among English lit types, just listen, if you can, to a full day's worth of MLA talks, 20-30 minutes long, read one after another, with almost no concessions to the varied interests or orientations of the unfortunate and entrapped audience members. This is why I like to emphasize the importance of things like presentation, responses, etc. in grad seminars, but I get a surprising amount of resistance about this.

It's worth reiterating, as Z does, that "writing to the ear" has very different meanings in different times and places, but certainly the principle of addressing the knowledge, interests, concerns, attention spans, etc. of the people sitting directly in front of you would be a good start, and actually takes a lot of practice to master.

[Dave Mazella]

If you want to see the tensions between the rhetorical and anti-rhetorical attitudes among English lit types, just listen, if you can, to a full day's worth of MLA talks, 20-30 minutes long, read one after another, with almost no concessions to the varied interests or orientations of the unfortunate and entrapped audience members. This is why I like to emphasize the importance of things like presentation, responses, etc. in grad seminars, but I get a surprising amount of resistance about this.

It's worth reiterating, as Z does, that "writing to the ear" has very different meanings in different times and places, but certainly the principle of addressing the knowledge, interests, concerns, attention spans, etc. of the people sitting directly in front of you would be a good start, and actually takes a lot of practice to master.

[caraf]

I'm late to the party here because, like dhawhee, I spent all last week with new TAs talking about stuff like this. I like very much dhawhee's comment (way up there) that "having students 'come up with a thesis' and then figure out how to argue it has it backwards." The key term that's largely missing from the discussion above is argument. Our emphasis in the hybrid writing/speaking course I direct is on training in argument skills that cut across modes (writing, speech) as well as domains (work, school, civic life). So for us (and, I suspect, for other comm folks as well) it's not initially so much about whether there is/isn't a "thesis," but whether the student in question has done the work required to generate a supportable claim. For example, students in our courses don't "get to" make a persuasive argument on their selected topic until they have spent a good chunk of the semester learning about argument, mapping the history of the issue/controversy they are examining, and getting a sense of the full range of available positions on a given question. We focus not on individual messages but on getting students to recognize that arguments don't exist in a vacuum, that controversies have histories, and that argument is not just a product but a process by which we collectivley make decisions. As dhawhee notes, this is hard but important work.

[dhawhee]

caraf: 1,000 times yes. thanks for this!

(we should coauthor a public speaking textbook to get money for vacation lake homes.)

[Z]

I want a vacation lake home. I will co-author anything with anyone if it gets me one.