The forms of thought
In his online New York Times column, “Think Again,” Stanley Fish writes here, here, and here about the way writing is taught at American colleges. His conclusion: It usually isn’t taught well when it is taught at all. Along the way Fish spars with several composition teachers who, in their responses to his first column on the topic, assume that Professor Fish, an eminent Milton scholar, has never taught composition himself. True, he doesn’t say anything in that first column about his own extensive experience as a writing teacher and tutor (at UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and, most recently, Columbia University’s Teachers College). So his critics took the bait. Fish has some fun reeling them in.
When Max Byrd says (contemptuously), “Professor Fish might get off his high horse and teach a course himself,” I reply, Professor Byrd should climb off his low horse and do some fact-checking before he pronounces.
In his third column, Fish mentions one important exception to his general observation that American high schools don’t teach students how to write.
By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all. The exception seems to be Catholic schools. More than a few commentators remembered with a mixture of fondness and pain the instruction they received at the hands of severe nuns. And I have found that those students in my classes who do have a grasp of the craft of writing are graduates of parochial schools. (I note parenthetically that in many archdioceses such schools are being closed, not a good omen for those who prize writing.)
Fish thinks the best way to teach students how to write is to teach them the various forms an English sentence can take. These forms are what generate meaning. They “are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought.” The content doesn’t matter — indeed, to the composition teacher it is usually a distraction. Fish shows his own students a “neither/nor” sentence, has them write their own ”neither/nor” sentences (about anything), then asks them to analyse the deep structure of such a sentence: How does it “organize items and actions in the world”? This is not exactly the method those severe nuns used, but an emphasis on the formal elements of language– in English and, for many students at Catholic secondary schools, also in Latin — did once distinguish Catholic education. Does it still?
I have to confess that when I was a kid, I thought that diagramming sentences was great fun, the cat’s meow! For better or worse, I still see the point of learning how to do so.
For the whippersnappers out there who are saying “whating sentences?”
http://www.geocities.com/gene_moutoux/diagrams.htm
No, I never had to deal with one this long ….
http://ask.metafilter.com/35008/What-is-Prousts-longest-sentence
Bernard, I’m with you on diagramming. Here’s my unscientific data: I went to Catholic school until 8th grade, and then to public high school. From what I observed, and what I heard from teachers, Catholic-school kids were much better prepared in English/language arts, especially grammar, when we got to high school. A lot of what we spent time doing in 9th-grade English felt remedial to me. (Math and science was another story.)
I think Latin is great for helping to learn to diagram sentences.
In my high school, we had regular writing assignments (it was called “composition”), which were very carefully, and severely, eva;iated/ (A 500-word assignment seemed enormous to me then; now I can hardly clear my throat in so few words!) I wonder how much composition is required today.
We also read a lot and thus learned a lot about writing, almost by osmosis.
Is unclear writing a window into unclear thinking? Or do clear thinkers need to learn the craft of writing in order to clearly express their clear thoughts? Or does the craft of writing clearly aid one in thinking clearly?
FWIW – I find that writing a homily is almost always a spiritual learning experience for me. Seeing my thoughts on paper leads to new thoughts and insights.
Is unclear writing a window into unclear thinking? Perhaps. One would think that in writing about “The Gates of Paradise”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_of_Paradise, the author could have simply stated that The Gates of Paradise are open to all who seek to live their Lives according to The Word of God Made Flesh, whose only orientation is to The Will of His Father, which is why, it is through Christ, that we can see The Heart of God, Who is Love, to begin with.
The deep connections (?) between Catholicism and diagramming are entertainingly explored in this post and the comments.
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=5107
The topic also reminds me of the thesis of art historian Erwin Panofsky’s short book, “Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.” Cathedral architecture, like any great medieval Summa, tried to make visible, step by step, the inner order of religious narratives.
Sister Mary Ruler-on-the-Knuckles didn’t teach sentence diagramming in my public elementary school. Mrs. Belknap, a member of the local John Birch society did. Her assigned sentences for diagramming usually warned us all about the Red Menace: “Communists have infiltrated Walt Disney Studios to send subtle indoctrination com-symp messages to American children.”
I have never done a study of it, but it has always seemed to me that the students who identify themselves as having come from Catholic high schools focus on “correctness” of writing. The content in their essays are no less hackneyed, superficial or poorly supported than the rest. But they tend to get huffier about a C+ because everything is spelled and punctuated correctly and it all looks nice on the page.
This year I’m teaching freshman comp for the first time since 1989. I’m interested to see whether a generation reared on the process model, which seems to be the standard method for teaching writing in public middle and high schools, has made students better writers.
I guess I’m somewhat off topic, but that never stops me …
Jean, I’d be curious to know whether a generation who communicates via text messages, Facebook and Twitter can construct a cogent paragraph.