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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

If Only I’d Known This In Grad School I Wouldn’t Have Had To Read All Those Books



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"