History Bump

First-year and sophomore writing courses, "with their emphasis on forms, on error-free writing, and on the ability to follow directions," arose from a post-Civil War emphasis on written rhetoric (223).

Composition-rhetoric has always been obsessed with classification, especially of the modes of discourse (whose dominance of pedagogy began to be superceded only in the 1950s) and of the modes (patterns) of exposition (210). That "mania" for classification can be traced as far back as Roman rhetoric and was reinforced by the Royal Society desire (cf. Sprat and Locke) for scientific certainty (211) and its concomitant disdain for rhetoric (211-212).

Adam Smith introduced the notion of "multimodal approaches" (212). Arguing that rhetoric embraced all modes of discourse and not just the persuasive, Smith significantly influenced the work of George Campbell, who advanced the rhetorical attention to multimodality (213), in part by employing outdated theory of faculty psychology (214). The other major figure in the movement was Hugh Blair, who in many ways "parrots" Campbell's theories. But his attention to "neoclassical genre theory—literary and belletristic forms" popularized multimodal approaches (216). It might be Samuel P. Newman who should be credited with defining the modes of discourse (220). Henry Noble Day replaced Richard Whately's conflation of rhetoric and persuasion with "the most sophisticated multimodal rhetoric of the mid-nineteenth century" (221). Then Alexander Bain popularized it (222-223). In 1885, John Genung published The Practical Elements of Rhetoric, which (along with the work of Bain) "popularized the modes throughout America" (224) and exerted pedagogical dominance from 1895 to the mid-1930s, in part because the textbooks were being written by literary scholars (226). "[M]odes classify and emphasize the product of writing, having almost nothing to do with the purpose for which the writer sat down, pen in hand. Modal distinctions are divorced from the composition process" (254).

As a by-product of modes-based pedagogy, instruction in expository writing emerged in the 1920s (227). In the hands of Day, this instruction anticipated Kinneavy's "aims-oriented" pedagogy (228), and it was taken up by Scott and Denney (230-232) and by Buck (233)—but in an undertheorized manner (234) until Fulton's 1912 textbook (234-235). Expository writing was consonant with Dewey's call for practical instruction (236), and it could also be "neatly packaged and easily taught" (238). Contemporary instruction in journalism, technical writing, and business writing has an origin in expository composition instruction: when such instruction becomes concrete and practical, it "secedes" from composition. This secession in turn limits what genres can be taught in composition (239).

Meanwhile, textbooks began developing the notion of "levels" of instruction (240-250), with the developmental instruction taking on reductive, simplistic, prescriptive practices (242-243).

The 1920s also produced instruction in the "thesis text" (227)—textbooks that subordinate all writing instruction to a single idea, e.g., Wendell's valorizing of Unity, Mass, and Coherence (251).

Kinneavy, Britton, and D'Angelo offer alternative ways of classifying discourse that have not (according to available evidence) been widely adapted (255).