Stand aside Aristotle. Have a seat Cicero. Isocrates,
Gorgias, Bacon, Richards, and the rest of you who spent your lives studying, thinking and
writing about the art and science of Rhetoric, chill. We don’t need your
services anymore. The psychometricians will take it from here. Not only have
they discerned the eternal essence of rhetoric sought by writers from Plato to
Kenneth Burke, they have found a way to measure it so now we can finally tell
if students are writing well or not. Let's see what they came up with:
Rhetorical
Skills
Strategy (16%). Questions in this category
test how well you develop a given topic by choosing expressions appropriate to
an essay's audience and purpose; judging the effect of adding, revising, or
deleting supporting material; and judging the relevance of statements in
context.
Organization (15%). Questions in this
category test how well you organize ideas and choose effective opening,
transitional, and closing sentences.
Style (16%). Questions in this category
test how well you select precise and appropriate words and images, maintain the
level of style and tone in an essay, manage sentence elements for rhetorical
effectiveness, and avoid ambiguous pronoun references, wordiness, and
redundancy.
The first thing you may notice is the phrase “questions in
this category” which means that we will be measuring how well students write not
by asking them to write, but to identify. Robert Pirsig wrote about the educational
outcome of this approach:
“As
a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that
had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation
seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed
to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. That sounded right,
and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you
to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. “
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance:
An Inquiry Into Values
Another reason this approach makes sense is since the
testers have come up with a testable definition of rhetoric that is both scientific
and objective, that is free from the subjective biases of previous attempts by
people like Walter Ong, or Erasmus it’s only logical that they use an objective
test to measure student skills.
Personally, I’m glad the testers have finally put these
issues to rest. Take the section on style for example. This issue has been contentious
since before the time of Cicero. What constitutes
eloquence? What is the correct style? Cicero had his ideas, but Seneca had some
very different ideas. For those of you who may not be familiar with this
debate, The Cambridge History of Greek
and Roman Political Thought, edited by C. J. Rowe, Malcolm Schofield sums
it up this way:
[U]like
Cicero, who used a leasured, periodic style suitable to the balanced tone of a
skeptical academic, Seneca expounded…in a nervous, epigrammatic style suited to
the passionate tone of a committed Stoic .
If fact, in one of his writings, Seneca said “style has no
fixed standard.” Cicero would disagree and for over 2000 years the battle would
go back and forth. As the editors of Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia Of Literature write:
His[Cicero’s]
influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of
prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said
to be either a reaction against or a return to his style.
Well, until today that is. So, what have the testers
discovered in the last couple of years that philosophers and rhetoricians haven’t
been able to discern in the previous 2000?
[S]elect
precise and appropriate words and images, maintain the level of style and tone
in an essay…
Now, some of you may
wonder who gets to define “precise and appropriate” but we say that’s a
meaningless quibble because the degree of sophistication and expertise that
went into the development of this instrument is such that—for mere teachers of
rhetoric anyway—if they had to explain it to us, we wouldn’t understand. Besides, it’s what
the testers tell us at the end of their definition that I find most intriguing:
[M]anage
sentence elements for rhetorical effectiveness, and avoid ambiguous pronoun
references, wordiness, and redundancy.
The sudden jump from general terms like "appropriate" to specifics like "ambiguous pronoun references" has to be significant. Are the testers giving us a clue? Sentence elements and ambiguous pronoun references are usually terms used when discussing grammar. Does good style equal correct grammar? It’s true grammar is the easiest
part of writing to measure, but it also means if there are any potential F
Scott Fitzgearlds in school now, they aren’t getting out. The manuscript of This Side Of Paradise that Fitzgerald
sent to his publisher was full of grammatical and spelling errors (the man
spelled disappointed “dissappointed” his whole life for crying out loud). He
assumed the publisher would correct them and when they published the first
edition cum errors he was completely chagrined.
I guess that’s no big deal though. After all, we’ve already
had one F. Scott Fitzgerald. Why would we want an educational system that might
encourage another?
The testers also admonish students to avoid “wordiness and redundancy”
which, if you think about it is a kind of redundant statement. Perhaps they are
trying to teach by example.
But it’s all good as the kids say. Now that we’ve got these
thorny issues wrapped up in nice little packages we can get on with the real
purpose of school--selecting the best answer to questions like the following:
Which author uses the most precise and appropriate words and
images, maintains the level of style and tone in his or her essay, and manages
sentence elements for rhetorical effectiveness, avoiding ambiguous pronoun
references, wordiness, and redundancy:
A.
Thomas Jefferson in “The Declaration Of
Independence”
B.
Montaigne in “Of The Education Of Children”
C.
Linus Pauling in ”How Long Can People Live?”
D.
Dave Barry in “A Journey Into My Colon—And Yours”
E. bell hooks in "Ethos, Pathos, And Logos In Keeping Close To Home"
