The Problematic Middle

Rebecca Moore Howard

Council of Writing Program Administrators

Newark, Delaware

16 July 2004

My paper today is entitled "The Problematic Middle." It refers to the problems entailed in writing program administrators' holding a middle ground between conservative and radical stances on instruction in sentence-level correctness. Time was when writing instructors believed in grammar drills as a means of encouraging sentence-level correctness in students' prose. Grammar constituted the first stage of learning composition: bottom-up pedagogy assumed that one could not write good essays without knowing how to write good paragraphs; could not write good paragraphs without knowing how to write good sentences; and could not write good sentences without a command of good (correct) grammar. John Genung followed this logic a century ago when asserted that learning the art of style is like learning to play a musical instrument: you must first master the component parts, before you can play a whole composition (13). Composition instruction therefore started with grammar—lots of it, transmitted through sentence diagramming and grammar drills. And inevitably, composition instruction finished with grammar, as well—for college students never could seem to master its principles. Those were the Bad Old Days of current-traditionalism, excoriated today by a variety of composition historians.

Then, so goes our received history, came the 1963 finding of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer, in their book Research in Written Composition:

In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing. (37-38)

Patrick Hartwell, writing twenty years later, would intone, "For me the grammar issue was settled" by Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer's conclusion (105). Then in his 1997 history of composition studies, Robert Connors alludes to the Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer book as a watershed moment in composition studies. After the publication of that 1963 book, he says, traditional grammar instruction continued, but only surreptitiously; the book, he says, split scholars of composition from practitioners.

From this line of reasoning came the radical set of stances on instruction in sentence-level correctness that now dominate composition studies. Here, for example, is Mike Rose on the subject:

The Middle Ages envisioned the goddess of grammar, Grammatica, as an old woman. In one later incarnation, she is depicted as severe, with a scalpel and a large pair of pincers. Her right hand, which is by her side, grasps a bird by its neck, its mouth open as if in a gasp or a squawk. All this was emblematic, meant as a memory aid for the budding grammarian. But, Lord, how fitting the choices of emblem were--the living thing being strangled, beak open but silent, muted by the goddess Grammatica. And the scalpel, the pincers, are reminders to the teacher to be vigilant for error, to cut it out with the coldest tool. (1-2)

The revulsion in the Rose passage translates into pedagogy that rejects sentence-level concerns as an obstruction to the teaching of writing. Hence Joan Mullin who, from her extensive writing center experience, asks why students judge the quality of writing according to the quality of the text's grammar, a concern that repeatedly arises across the curriculum. She wonders about the extent to which this obsession with grammar "detracts from [students'] ability to complete a writing task" (103).

WPAs find themselves in a peculiar position on this issue of grammar. The administrators for whom we directly work—and the cross-curricular faculty with whom we work and whose support we depend upon—tend to assume that the composition course is where students should learn language standards. In fact, they tend to use their students' command of written conventions as a yardstick to measure the success of the entire composition program. We busily argue against these erroneous viewpoints, and occasionally, as Keith Rhodes attests, we have moments of triumph, in which we do manage to persuade colleagues and bosses that what students most need to learn is a sensitivity to and interest in rhetorical occasion. From that, they will come to appreciate the power of sentence-level correctness, and they will be motivated to learn these standards—or they will come to understand why they might choose not to learn them.

But these moments of triumph are rare, indeed, and they are engulfed by a culture that is comfortable with its demands for sentence-level correctness; that denies the basis of those standards in white middle-class U.S. culture; and that endorses the fantasy that all college students have, through writing instruction, equal access to mastering those standards. In truth, as Olivia Smith's history establishes, since the eighteenth century, linguistic standards have served as a means of justifying social hierarchy. It is with this culture, socially complacent yet linguistically anxious, that the WPA daily must contend. She may deny its assumptions and claims about language and may assert a more rhetorically sophisticated and socially responsible vision of composition instruction. In the face of the WPA's determination and authority, colleagues and administrators' protests may subside. But only for a time. Soon, as is demonstrated again and again, at one college after another, the writing program that openly rejects the primacy of sentence-level correctness and the call for sentence-level pedagogy in composition courses will find itself with new, more compliant leadership. Or it will be replaced by another writing program within the college, one that adheres to conservative linguistic ideals.

And this is not the only institutional pressure exerted upon the WPA. From within her own writing program—if it is staffed with composition professionals and not exclusively by literate spouses of faculty in other departments—the WPA will feel pressure from compositionists who abhor current-traditionalism and bottom-to-top pedagogy. This pressure will be manifested in a variety of ways—sometimes diffused in a general sense that the WPA is complicit in the administrative hegemony of the educational machine. James Zebroski has published an essay about the Syracuse Writing Program that coheres with this point of view. Such beliefs resonate, too, in statements attributed to Lynn Worsham. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott McLemee offers this portrait:

"Simply to collapse the work of administration into the work of theory does everybody a disservice," says Lynn Worsham, a professor of English at South Florida and editor of JAC, who, along with [Gary] Olson, is one of the scholars most active in narrowing the gap between composition and cultural studies. She is troubled by the fact that composition studies is now making "a fairly huge investment in the subject of writing-program administration."

And sometimes the hegemonic complicity of writing program administration is found in claims as explicit as that of Sharon Crowley, who offers this generalization about WPAs: "These folks have followed the money. They give deans and taxpayers what they want: clarity, brevity, sincerity. They have no truck with invention, allusive styles, and most certainly do not contemplate any such nonsense as a critical relation to grammar" (166).

What's a WPA to do? Her administration regards her as the potential savior of students' mastery of sentence-level correctness, if only the WPA will exert her authority to compel writing teachers to discharge what "everyone knows" is their duty. Meanwhile, her colleagues regard her as the potential betrayer of all that composition stands for: social equality, individual emancipation, civic engagement, rhetorical acuity. The institutional pressures come not just from without but also from within.

So we find ourselves in a middle place, mediating between the two extremes, and it is the problems of this middle place that I am presently contemplating. I've long espoused the necessity of the WPA's taking up that middle ground—not a position of compromises between extremes, but a position of dialectic between the extremes. The writing program and specifically the WPA, I have argued, must welcome that dialectic, must see it as a necessary component of writing instruction. Composition pedagogy is not where the answers to sociolinguistic issues are ideally conveyed, but is instead the place where teachers and students together engage those issues—an approach known in critical pedagogy as reflection or co-inquiry. In Amy E. Robillard's revision, the approach becomes co-investigation, in which students and teachers together pursue sociolinguistic questions to which the teachers are not already in possession of The Answers. Co-inquiry has students' emancipation (often from their false consciousness) as a common objective; co-investigation pursues the possibility of students and teachers learning together things that they could not realize separately.

And it is, in my recent thinking, the job of the WPA to make such pedagogy (whether co-inquiry or co-investigation) possible, while not endorsing it as the sole objective of composition instruction. The composition classroom, from the dialectic perspective, must be a place where sentence-level linguistic norms can be explored and challenged, but it must also be a place where students who choose to do so can learn those norms and learn to apply them in their own writing (see Lu; Devet; Micciche).

The difficulty—and one which, I fear, most of us are understandably loathe to acknowledge—is that any pedagogy that by any means purports to communicate sentence-level standards to its students is a pedagogy that can be coopted by extremely conservative forces. This cooptation can take a variety of forms: it might be voiced in a demand that if some sections of composition can convey sentence-level standards, all sections should be required to do so. It might be voiced in a demand that the teaching of language standards be done better—i.e., through top-down instruction, not through rhetorical inquiry. Or it might be voiced in a demand that the effectiveness of such instruction be proven—through, of course, outcomes assessment.

And my blood does run cold at that possibility. My own program includes language standards in its official desiderata for first-year composition: of its fourteen learning outcomes, number eleven is "Students will learn to ask and answer editing questions, paying attention to their audience." Sounds pretty innocuous, eh? As the program director when these outcomes were drafted, I endorsed the entire document and felt this was a worthy inclusion in it. Since then, some linguistically conservative administrators at my institution have read the document and have asked where the "writing instruction" is. Turns out that what us compositionists call editing, they call writing—at least insofar as it applies to outcomes for first-year composition. Having identified this lapse in the Syracuse Writing Program's outcomes statement, these administrators began proposing some rather chilling alternatives, while also proposing to strike from our document items such as outcome number thirteen, "Students will develop a working understanding of contemporary theories of authorship."

"Why on earth would first-year students need to know about that?" they asked. And as you might well imagine, our explanation that an understanding of contemporary theories of authorship would help students understand the function of language standards in our culture and in their lives was hardly a comforting explanation. Our critics were decidedly underwhelmed.

It was by the skin of our teeth that our program escaped that particular attempt to coopt our learning outcomes, a cooptation that would have been accomplished by a dialectic revision of our learning outcomes—one in which theories of authorship disappeared, and language standards assumed a position of dominance.

Linguistic conservativism is alive and well in the academy, with no prospect of extinction. It lives in powerful places. And when the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges last year issued its report, "The Neglected 'R': The Need for a Revolution in Writing Instruction," it called for the "nation" to "invest in research that explores the potential of new and emerging technologies to," among other things, "identify mistakes in grammar" (5). Grammar-checking software, ladies and gentlemen, will contribute to a "revolution in writing instruction."

So I find myself asking, "To what purpose does the WPA mediate between the extremes of language ideology?" Will students actually learn much about language standards in a pedagogy of rhetorical grammar? No, they will not. Even if they did, would that substantially change their socioeconomic position? No; as Victor Villanueva, Keith Gilyard, Pierre Bourdieu, and many other scholars have established, it would not. In Distinction, Bourdieu demonstrates that education does not convey taste and its linguistic counterpart, language correctness; rather, through its apparent endeavors to do so, it certifies those who already have it and exclude those who do not.

And ten years later, in The State Nobility, Bourdieu establishes through empirical sociology that teachers from the petty bourgeoise who occupy mediating positions between conservative and radical forces in the academy are those who, more than conservative teachers, are responsible for the reproduction of the socioeconomic status quo through the operation of education. More than anyone else, these mediating teachers are the institution.

And that would certainly include the WPA who mediates, however dialectically, between conservative and radical linguistic ideology in the academy. Thomas Miller's history of the formation of college writing instruction finds that it is the linguistically insecure provincials who "founded college English studies because they lived in 'contact zones' as outsiders who had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage" (142). And what function does the WPA, who knows that such proprieties cannot be conveyed in first-year college composition, fulfill when she mediates between linguistic conservativism and radicalism? And to what extent does she deserve the suspicion of her colleagues whose beliefs are arrayed toward the other extreme of language ideology—especially when they know that the WPA (and yes, here I'm speaking of myself) shares those radical beliefs?

So I find myself today not with an answer but with that question: what, exactly, is gained by the WPA's mediation? And what would be the consequences of a refusal to occupy that mediating position? What would be the consequences of WPAs' asserting that college writing instruction is no place for the dissemination of language standards? What would happen if WPAs gave no room to the demands made by administrators such as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who insists that "Every dean should forthwith insist that all composition courses teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else" (Fish)? The answer might be writing programs fully dedicated to what Francis Sullivan and colleagues in the Temple University Writing Program call the "discourse of student needs," as distinct from the "discourse of formal conventions." And if such programs do not last, perhaps it will not be because they successfully enacted a socially responsible language pedagogy, but because, like all writing programs, they are transitory.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment and Taste. 1979. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. 1989. Trans. Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996.

Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963.

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. U Pittsburgh P, 1997.

Crowley, Sharon. "Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 21.1 (2001): 163-167.

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Fish, Stanley E. "Say It Ain't So." The Chronicle of Higher Education (21 June 2002). 27 June 2002 <http://chronicle.com/jobs/2002/06/2002062101c.htm>.

Genung, John Franklin. The Working Principles of Rhetoric. Boston: Ginn, 1901.

Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991.

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Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Grammar: Irrefutable, Irreconcilable Premises." Reflections in Writing 23 (2004) <http://wrt.syr.edu/pub/reflections/23/howard.html>.

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Lu, Min-Zhan. "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone." College Composition and Communication 45.4 (December 1994): 442-58.

McLemee, Scott. "Deconstructing Composition." Chronicle of Higher Education. 21 March 2003. 14 March 2003 <http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i28/28a01601.htm>.

Micciche, Laura R. "Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar." College Composition and Communication 55.4 (June 2004): 716-739.

Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1998.

Mullin, Joan. "The Use of Grammar Texts: A Call for Pedagogical Inquiry." The Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction. Ed. Susan Hunter and Ray Wallace. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1995. 103-113.

The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges. "The Neglected 'R': The Need for a Revolution in Writing Instruction." The College Board. April 2003. 30 April 2003 <http://www.writingcommission.org/>.

Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared. New York: Free Press, 1989.

Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language 1791-1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Sullivan, Francis J., Arabella Lyon, Dennis Lebofsky, Susan Wells, and Eli Goldblatt. "Student Needs and Strong Composition: The Dialectics of Writing Program Reform." College Composition and Communication 48.3 (October 1997): 372-391.

Villanueva, Victor, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Zebroski, James Thomas. "Composition and Rhetoric, Inc.: Life after the English Department at Syracuse University." Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Ed. David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 164-180.