College Teaching Part 43

XIX

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH COMPOSITION[60]

=Language an index of mental development=

"Deeds, not words," is a plat.i.tude--a flat statement which reduces the facts of the case to an average, and calls that truth. It is absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that we may never judge a man by his words. Words are often the most convenient indices of education, of cultivation, and of intellectual power. And what is more, a man's speech, a man's writing, when properly interpreted, may sometimes measure the potentialities of the mind more thoroughly, more accurately, than the deeds which environment, opportunity, or luck permit. It is hard enough to take the intellectual measure even of the makers of history by their acts, so rapidly does the apparent value of their accomplishments vary with changing conceptions of what is and what is not worth doing. It is infinitely more difficult to judge in advance of youths just going out into the world by what they do. Their words, which reveal what they are thinking and how they are thinking, give almost the only vision of their minds; and "by their words ye shall know them" becomes not a perversion, but an adaptation of the old text. Would you judge of a boy just graduated entirely by the acts he had performed in college? If you did, you would make some profound and illuminating mistakes.

This explains, I think, why parents, and teachers, and college presidents, and even undergraduates, are exercised over the study of writing English--which is, after all, just the study of the proper putting together of words. They may believe, all of them, that their concern is merely for the results of the power to write well--the ability to compose a good letter, to speak forcibly on occasion, to offer the amount of literacy required for most "jobs." But I wonder if the quite surprising keenness of their interest is not due to another cause. I wonder if they do not feel--perhaps unconsciously--that words indicate the man, that the power to write well shows intellect, and measures, if not its profundity, at least the stage of its development.

We fasten on the defects of the letters written by undergraduates, on their faltering speeches, on their confused examination papers, as something significant, ominous, worthy even of comment in the press. And we are, I believe, perfectly right. Speech and writing, if you get them in fair samples, indicate the extent and the value of a college education far better than a degree.

=Disappointing results from teaching of composition=

It is this conviction which, pressing upon the schools and colleges, has caused such a flood of courses and textbooks, such an expenditure of time, energy, and money in the teaching of composition, so many ardent hopes of accomplishment, so much bitter disappointment at relative failure. I do not know how many are directly or indirectly teaching the writing of English in America--perhaps some tens of thousands; the imagination falters at the thought of how many are trying to learn it. Thus the parent, conscious of this enormous endeavor and the convictions which inspire it, is somewhat appalled to hear the critics without the colleges maintaining that we are not teaching good writing, and the critics within protesting that good writing cannot be taught.

=Fixing responsibility for alleged failure of composition teaching=

It is with the teachers, the administrators, the theorists on education, but most of all the teachers, that the responsibility for the alleged failure of this great project--to endow the college graduate with adequate powers of expression--must be sought. But these guardians of expression are divided into many groups, of which four are chief.

There is first the great party of the Know-Nothings, who plan and teach with no opinion whatsoever as to the ends of their teaching.

Under the conditions of human nature and current financial rewards for the work, this party is inevitably large; but it counts for nothing except inertia. There is next the respectable and efficient cohort of the Do-Nothings, who believe that good writing and speaking are natural emanations from culture, as health from exercise or clouds from the sea. They would cultivate the mind of the undergraduate, and let expression take care of itself. They do not believe in teaching English composition. Next are the Formalists, who hold up a dictionary in one hand, the rules of rhetoric in the other, and say, "Learn these, and good writing and good speaking shall be added unto you."

The Formalists have weakened in late years. There have been desertions to the Do-Nothings, for the work of grinding rules into unwilling minds is hard, and it is far easier to adopt a policy of _laissez-faire_. But there have been far more desertions into a party which I shall call, for want of a better name, the Optimists. The Optimists believe that in teaching to write and speak the American college is accepting its most significant if not its greatest duty.

They believe that we must understand what causes good writing, in order to teach it; and that for the average undergraduate writing must be taught.

=Divergent views on teaching of composition=

The best way to approach this grand battleground of educational policies is by the very practical fashion of pretending (if pretense is necessary) that you have a son (or a daughter) ready for college.

What does he need, what must he have in a writing way, in a speaking way, when he has pa.s.sed through all the education you see fit to give him? What should he possess of such ability in order to satisfy the world and himself? Facts, ideas and imagination, to put it roughly, make up the substance of expression. Facts he must be able to present clearly and faithfully; ideas he must be able to present clearly and comprehensively; his imagination he will need to express when his nature demands it. And for all these needs he must be able to use knowingly the words which study and experience will feed to him. He must be able to combine these words effectively in order to express the thoughts of which he is capable. And these thoughts he must work out along lines of logical, reasonable developments, so that what he says or writes will have an end and attain it. In addition, if he is imaginative--and who is not?--he should know the color and fire of words, the power of rhythm and harmony over the emotions, the qualities of speech whose secret will enable him to mold language to his personality and perhaps achieve a style. This he should know; the other powers he must have, or stop short of his full efficiency.

Alas, we all know that the undergraduate, in the ma.s.s, fails often to attain even to the power of logical, accurate statement, whether of facts or ideas. It is true that most of the charges against him are to a greater or less degree irrelevant. Weighty indictments of his powers of expression are based upon bad spelling: a sign, it is true, of slovenliness, an indication of a lack of thoroughness which goes deeper than the misplacing of letters, but not in itself a proof of inability to express. Great writers have often misspelled; and the letters which some of our capable business men write when the stenographer fails to come back after lunch are by no means impeccable. Other accusations refer to a childish vagueness of expression--due to the fact that the American undergraduate is often a child intellectually rather than to any defects in composition _per se_. But it is a waste of time to deny that he writes, if not badly, at least not so clearly, so correctly, so intelligently, as we expect.

The question is, why?

It would be a comfort to place the blame upon the schools; and indeed they must take some blame, not only because they deserve it, but also to enlighten those critics of the college who never consider the kind of grain which comes into our hoppers. The readers of college entrance papers could tell a mournful story of how the candidates for our freshman cla.s.ses write. Here, for an instance, is a paragraph intended to prove that the writer had a command of simple English, correct in sentence structure, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The subject is "The Value of Organized Athletics in Schools"--not an abstruse one, or too academic:

If fellows are out in the open and take athletics say at a certain time every-day; These fellows are in good health and allert in their lessons, while those who take no exercise are logy and soft. Organized athletics in a school bring the former, while if a school has no athletics every-thing goes more or less slipshod, and the fellows are more liable to get into trouble, because they are nervious from having nothing to do.

This is a little below the average of the papers rejected for entrance to college. It is not a fair sample of what the schools can do, but it is a very fair sample of what they often do not do. It was not written by a foreigner, nor, I judge, by a son of illiterate parents, since it came from an expensive Eastern preparatory school. The reader, marking with some heat a failure for the essay from which this paragraph is extracted, would not complain of the writer's paucity of ideas. His ideas are not below the average of his age. He would keep his wrath for the broken, distorted sentences, the silly spelling, the lack (which would appear in the whole composition) of even a rudimentary construction to carry the thought. Spelling, the fundamentals of punctuation, and the compacting of a sentence must be taught in the schools, for it is too late to cure diseases of these members in college. They can be abated; but again and again they will break out.

It is the school's business to teach them; and the weary reader sees in this unhappy specimen but a dark and definite manifestation of a widespread slovenliness in secondary education, a lack of thoroughness which appears not only in the failures, but also, though in less measure, among the better writers, whose work is too good in other respects not to be reluctantly pa.s.sed.

Again, it would be easy to place much of the blame for the slipshod writings of the undergraduate upon the standards set by his elders outside the colleges. Editors can tell of the endless editing which contributions, even from writers supposed to be professional, will sometimes require. And when such a sentence as the following slips through, and begins an article in a well-known, highly respectable magazine, we can only say, "If gold rust, what will iron do?"

Yes the Rot--and with a very big R--in sport: for that, thanks to an overdone and too belauded a Professionalism by a large section of the pandering press, is what it has got to.

Again, any business man could produce from his files a collection of letters full of phrasing so vague and inconsequential that only his business instincts and knowledge of the situation enable him to interpret it. Any lawyer could give numberless instances where an inability to write clear and simple English has caused litigation without end. Indeed, the bar is largely supported by errors in English composition! And as for conversation conducted--I will not say with pedantical correctness, for that is not an ideal, but with accuracy and transparency of thought--listen to the talk about you!

However, it is the business of the colleges to improve all that; and though it is not easy to develop in youth virtues which are more admired than practiced by maturity, let us a.s.sume that they should succeed in turning out writers of satisfactory ability, even with these handicaps, and look deeper for the cause of their relative failure.

=Democratizing education and immigration the cause of poor quality of expression=

The chief cause of the prevalent inadequacy of expression among our undergraduates is patent, and its effects are by no means limited to America, as complaints from France and from England prove. The mob--the many-headed, the many-mouthed, figured in the past by poets as dumb, or, at best, an incoherent thing of brutish noises signifying speech--is acquiring education and learning how to express it.

Hundreds of thousands whose ancestors never read, and seldom talked except of the simpler needs of life, are doing the talking and the writing which their large share in the transaction of the world's business demands. Indeed, democracy requires not only that the illiterate shall learn to read and write in the narrower sense of the words, but also that the relatively literate must seek with their growing intellectuality a more perfect power of expression. And it is precisely from the cla.s.ses only relatively literate--those for whom in the past there has been no opportunity, and no need, to become highly educated--that the bulk of our college students today are coming, the bulk of the students in the endowed inst.i.tutions of the East as well as in the newer State universities of the West. The typical undergraduate is no longer the son of a lawyer or a clergyman, with an intellectual background behind him.

There is plenty of grumbling among college faculties, and in certain newspapers, over this state of affairs. In reality, of course, it is the opportunity of the American colleges. Let the motives be what they may, the simple fact that so many American parents wish to give their children more education than they themselves were blessed with is a condition so favorable for those who believe that in the long run only intelligence can keep our civilization on the path of real progress, that one expects to hear congratulations instead of wails from the college campuses.

Nevertheless, we pay for our opportunity, and we must expect to pay.

The thousands of intellectual immigrants, ill-supplied with means of progress, indefinite of aim, unaware of their opportunities, who land every September at the college gates, const.i.tute a weighty burden, a terrible responsibility. And the burden rests upon no one with more crushing weight than upon the unfortunate teacher of composition. That these entering immigrants cannot write well is a symptom of their mental rawness. It is to be expected. But thanks to the methods of slipshod, ambitious America, the schools have pa.s.sed them on still shaky in the first steps of accurate writing--spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and the use of words. Thanks to the failure of America to demand thoroughness in anything but athletics and business, they are blind to the need of thoroughness in expression. And thanks to the inescapable difficulty of accurate writing, they resist the attempt to make them thorough, with the youthful mind's instinctive rebellion against work. Nevertheless, whatever the cost, they must learn if they are to become educated in any practical and efficient sense; the immigrants especially must learn, since they come from environments where accurate expression has not been practiced--often has not been needed--and go to a future where it will be required of them. Not even the Do-Nothing school denies the necessity that the undergraduate should learn to write well. But how?

=Solutions proposed by four types of instructors=

The Know-Nothing school proposes no ultimate solution and knows none, unless faithfully teaching what they are told to teach, and accepting the sweat and burden of the day, with few of its rewards, be not in its blind way a better solution than to dodge the responsibility altogether.

The Formalists labor over precept and principle--disciplining, commanding, threatening--feeling more grief over one letter lost, or one comma mishandled, than joy over the most spirited of incorrect effusions. They turn out sulky youths who nevertheless have learned something.

The Do-Nothings propose a solution which is engaging, logical--and insufficient. They are the philosophers and the aesthetes among teachers, who see, what the Formalists miss, that he who thinks well will in the long run write as he should. Their special horror is of the compulsory theme, extracted from unwilling and idealess minds.

Their remedy for all ills of speech and pen is: teach, not writing and speaking, but thinking; give, not rules and principles, but materials for thought. And above all, do not force college students to study composition. The Do-Nothing school has almost enough truth on its side to be right. It has more truth, in fact, than its principles permit it to make use of.

The umpire in this contest--who is the parent with a son ready for college--should note, however, two pervading fallacies in this _laissez-faire_ theory of writing English. The first belongs to the party of the right among the Do-Nothings--the older teachers who come from the generation which sent only picked men to college; the second, to the party of the left--the younger men who are distressed by the toil, the waste, the stupidity which accompany so much work in composition.

The older men attack the attempt to teach the making of literature.

Their hatred of the cheap, the ba.n.a.l, and the false in literature that has been machine-made by men who have learned to express finely what is not worth expressing at all, leads them to distrust the teaching of English composition. They condemn, however, a method of teaching that long since withered under their scorn. The aim of the college course in composition today is not the making of literature, but writing; not the production of imaginative masterpieces, but the orderly arrangement of thought in words. Through no foresight of our own, but thanks to the pressure of our immigrants upon us, we have ceased teaching "eloquence" and "rhetoric," and have taken upon ourselves the humbler task of helping the thinking mind to find words and a form of expression as quickly and as easily as possible. The old teacher of rhetoric aspired to make Burkes, Popes, or De Quinceys. We are content if our students become the masters rather than the servants of their prose.

The party of the left presents a more frontal attack upon the teaching of the writing of English. Show the undergraduate how to think, they say; fill his mind with knowledge, and his pen will find the way. Ah, but there is the fallacy! Why not help him to find the way--as in Latin, or surveying, or English literature? The way in composition can be taught, as in these other subjects. Writing, like skating, or sailing a boat, has its special methods, its special technique, even as it has its special medium, words, and the larger unities of expression. The laws which govern it are simple. They are always in intimate connection with the thought behind, and worthless without it; but they can be taught. Ask any effective teacher of composition to show you what he has done time and again for the freshman whose sprawling thought he has helped to form into coherent and unified expression. And do not be deceived by a.n.a.logies drawn from our colleges of the mid-nineteenth century, where composition was not taught, and men wrote well; or from the English universities, where the same conditions are said (with dissenting voices) to exist. In the first place, they had no immigrant problem in the mid-century, nor have they in Oxford and Cambridge. In the second, the rigorous translation back and forward between the cla.s.sics and the mother tongue, now obsolete in America, but still a requisite for an English university training, provides a drill in accuracy of language whose efficiency is not to be despised.

The student must express his intellectual gains even as he absorbs them, or the crystallization of knowledge into personal thought will be checked at the beginning. The boy must be able to say what he knows, or write what he knows, or he does not know it. And it is as important to help him express as to help him absorb. The teachers in other departments must aid in this task or we fail; but where the whole duty of making expression keep pace with thought and with life is given to them, they will be forced either to overload, or to neglect all but the little arcs that bound their subjects. And since they are specialists in other fields, and so may neglect that technique of writing which in itself is a special study, their task, when they accept it, is hard, and their labor, when it is forced upon them, too often ineffective. Composition must be taught where college education proceeds--that is the truth of the matter; and if not taught directly, then indirectly, with pain and with waste.

The school of the Optimists approaches this question of writing English with self-criticism and with a full realization of the difficulties, and of the tentative nature of the methods now in use, but with confidence as to the possibility of ultimate success. In order to be an Optimist in composition you must have some stirrings of democracy in your veins. You must be interested in the need of the average man to shape his writing into a useful tool that will serve his purposes, whether in the ministry or the soap business. This is the utilitarian end of writing English. And you must be interested in developing his powers of self-expression, even when convinced that no great soul is longing for utterance, but only a commonplace human mind--like your own--that will be eased by powers of writing and of speech. It is here that composition is of service to the imagination, and incidentally to culture; and I should speak more largely of this service if there were s.p.a.ce in this chapter to bring forward all the aspects of college composition. It is the personal end of writing English. If the average man turns out to be a superman with mighty purposes ahead, or if he has a great soul seeking utterance, he will have far less need of your a.s.sistance; but you can aid him, nevertheless, and your aid will count as never before, and will be your greatest personal reward, though no greater service to the community than the countless hours spent upon the minds of the mult.i.tude.

In order to be an Optimist it is still more important to understand that writing English well depends first upon intellectual grasp, and second upon technical skill, and always upon both. As for the first, your boy, if you are the parent of an undergraduate, is undergoing a curious experience in college. Against his head a dozen teachers are discharging round after round of information. Sometimes they miss; sometimes the shots glance off; sometimes the charge sinks in. And his brain is undergoing less obvious a.s.saults. He is like the core of soft iron in an electro-magnet upon which invisible influences are constantly beating. His teachers are hara.s.sing his mind with methods of thinking: the historical method; the experimental method of science; the interpretative method of literature. Unfortunately, the charges of information too often lodge higgledy-piggledy, like bird-shot in a signboard; and the waves of influence make an impression which is too often incoherent and confused. If the historians really taught the youth to think historically from the beginning, and the scientists really taught him to think scientifically from the beginning, and he could apply his new methods of thought to the expression of his own emotions, experiences, life, then the teacher of composition might confine himself to the second of his duties, and teach only that technique which makes writing to uncoil itself as easily and as vividly as a necklace of matched and harmonious stones. In the University of Utopia we shall leave the organization of thought to the other departments, and have plenty left to do; but we are not yet in Utopia.

At present, the teacher of composition stands like a sentry at the gates of knowledge, challenging all who come out speaking random words and thoughts; asking, "Have you thought it out?" "Have you thought it out clearly?" "Can you put your conclusions into adequate words?" And if the answers are unsatisfactory, he must proceed to teach that orderly, logical development of thought from cause to effect which underlies all provinces of knowledge, and reaches well into the unmapped territories of the imagination. But even in Utopia composition must remain the testing ground of education, though we shall hope for more satisfactory answers to our challenges. And even in Utopia, where the undergraduate perfects his thinking while acquiring his facts, it will be the duty of the teacher of writing to help him to apply his intellectual powers to his experiences, his emotions, his imagination, in short, to self-expression. And there will still remain the technique of writing.

=How to teach college students the art of self-expression?=

Theoretically, when the undergraduate has a.s.sembled his thoughts he is ready and competent to write them, but practically he is neither entirely ready nor usually entirely competent. It is one thing to a.s.semble an automobile; it is another thing to run it. The technique of writing is not nearly as interesting as the subject and the thought of writing; just as the method of riding a horse is not nearly as interesting as the ride itself. And yet when you consider it as a means to an end, as a subtle, elastic, and infinitely useful craft, the method of writing is not uninteresting even to those who have to learn and not to teach it. The technique of composition has to do with words. We are most of us inapt with words; even when ideas begin to come plentifully they too often remain vague, shapeless, ineffective, for want of words to name them. And words can be taught--not merely the words themselves, but their power, their suggestiveness, their rightness or wrongness for the meaning sought. The technique of writing has to do with sentences. Good thinking makes good sentences, but the sentence must be flexible if it is to ease the thought. We can learn its elasticity, we can practice the flow of clauses, until the wooden declaration which leaves half unexpressed gives place to a fluent and accurate transcript of the mind, form fitting substance as the vase the water within it. This technique has to do with paragraphs. The critic knows how few even among our professional writers master their paragraphs. It is not a dead, fixed form that is to be sought. It is rather a flexible development, which grows beneath the reader's eye until the thought is opened with vigor and with truth. It is interesting to search in the paragraph of an ineffective editorial, an article, or theme, for the sentence that embodies the thought; to find it dropped like a turkey's egg where the first opportunity offers, or hidden by the rank growth of comment and reflection about it. Such research is illuminating for those who do not believe in the teaching of composition; and if it begins at home, so much the better. And finally, the technique of writing has to do with the whole, whether sonnet, or business letter, or report to a board of directors. How to lead one thought into another; how to exclude the irrelevant; how to weigh upon that which is important; how to hold together the whole structure so that the subject, all the subject, and nothing but the subject shall be laid before the reader; this requires good thinking, but good thinking without technical skill is like a strong arm in tennis without facility in the strokes.

The program I have outlined is simpler in theory than in practice. In practice, it is easier to discover the disorder than the thought which it confuses; in practice, technical skill must be forced upon undergraduates unaccustomed to thoroughness, in a country that in no department of life, except perhaps business, has. .h.i.therto been compelled to value technique. Even the optimist grows pessimistic sometimes in teaching composition.

And yet in the teaching of English the results are perhaps more evident than elsewhere in the whole range of college work. It is wonderful to see what can be accomplished by an enthusiast in the sport of trans.m.u.ting brains into words. When the teacher seeks for his material in the active interests of the student--whether athletics or engineering or literature or catching trout--when he stirs up the finer interests, drawing off, as it were, the cream into words, the results are convincing. Writing is one of the most fascinating, most engaging of pursuits for the man with a craving to grasp the reality about him and name it in words. And even for the undergraduate, whose imagination is just developing, and whose brain protests against logical thought, it can be made as interesting as it is useful.

The teaching of English composition in this country is a vast industry in which thousands of workmen are employed and in which a million or so of young minds are invested. I do not wish to take it too seriously. There are many accomplishments more important for the welfare of the race. And yet, if it be true that maturity of intellect is never attained without that clearness and accuracy of thinking which can be made to show itself in good writing, then the failure of the undergraduate to write well is serious, and the struggle to make him write better worthy of the attention of those who have children to be educated. I do not think that success in this struggle will come through the policy of _laissez-faire_. All undergraduates profit by organized help in their writing; many require it. I do not think that success will come by a pedantical insistence upon correctness in form without regard to the sense. Squeezing unwilling words from indifferent minds may be discipline; it certainly is not teaching. I think that success will come only to the teacher who is a middleman between thought and expression, valuing both. When we succeed in making the bulk of the undergraduates really think; when we can inspire them with a modic.u.m of that pa.s.sion for truth in words which is the moving force of the good writer; when the schools help us and the outside world demands and supports efficiency in diction; then we shall carry through the program of the Optimists.

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY _Yale University_

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