Informal argumentation : toward a unified foundation for teaching composition

Since the birth of composition teaching in the nineteenth century, classroom emphasis has been on the "practical" task of ensuring that students be able to apply writing skills. Yet to have students practise skills for their own sake is ultimately to neglect the ethical rationale behind writing: to communicate not only information but also opinion. The overall purpose of any composition class should be to show students that writing skills are a vital link between themselves as individuals and the world of humanistic issues. Perhaps the worst effect of the "skills only" approach to composition (that is, when instructional attention is focused on forms and models above all else) is that writing ceases to be a unified, organic process of creating and shaping ideas and opinions. Recently, both rhetoricians and composition theorists have proposed frameworks consisting of sets of unified principles; however, few such frameworks have been applied systematically to teaching writing. The rationale behind this paper is to address the problem of reintroducing ethical content to the writing class by restoring a measure of respectability to "opinionable" writing. One way of working towards this goal is to adopt an informal argumentative framework for teaching composition: that is, a set of principles and strategies that acknowledges the opinionable nature of virtually all prose and that systematically guides a writer towards discovering opinions and supporting ideas through induction and synthesis of information. The main purpose of this paper, therefore, is to discover the theoretical principles of informal argumentation, primarily by tracing the development of exposition and argument as forms, kinds, and aims of writing from the eighteenth century until the present. Chapter One explores the origins of exposition and its roots in the New Logic of Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and John Locke. Adam Smith and George Campbell, two eighteenth-century rhetoricians, realized that rhetoric—the art of communication—also needed to adopt, at least partly, the new scientific methods which the empiricists wielded so successfully; otherwise rhetoric would be unable to communicate scientific matters. Smith's principles of clarity, precision, objectivity, and simplicity of diction are the cornerstones of exposition; yet he also emphasized the importance of communicating humanistic issues accurately and honestly. Campbell, for his part, equipped rhetoric with a philosophical foundation in which presenting information is one part of an organic discourse in which understanding and passion together give rise to truth. Thus, the logic of synthesis and induction together with these ethical concerns were united in eighteenth-century rhetoric. These principles generally failed to characterize nineteenth-century composition and rhetoric texts, as Chapter Two shows. A survey of texts from the 1850's to the turn of the century traces the gradual compartmentalization of exposition, argument, and persuasion through their loss of the informal argumentative foundations which Smith and Campbell delineated. The majority of these texts emphasize practicality and ease of teaching through rule and model; the imitations of texts which present a theoretical or ethical framework tend to stress the practical skills. Chapter Three, which examines texts published from 1917 to 1968, reveals that the loss of an informal argumentative foundation for unifying discourse structures continues well into the twentieth century. By the 1930's, exposition in particular has become the aim, occasion, and form of discourse most emphasized in composition classrooms; argument has been relegated to the college debating team; and persuasion, because of its reliance on emotions rather than facts, has lost virtually all respectability. After 1969, a year heralding a widespread awareness of the role of rhetorical theory in composition teaching, argument and persuasion begin to regain their lost ground in the writing classroom. Chapter Four describes how current theorists (Stephen Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, Richard Young, James Kinneavy and Frank D'Angelo, to name the major ones) view the role of argument and of informal argumentative processes in unifying exposition, argument, and persuasion. In the final chapter, this paper attempts to answer the question—"To what extent have current composition texts adopted informal argumentative principles?" A survey of fourteen texts published between 1969 and 1983 reveals that several of the most popular and long-lived adhere to the same exposition-argument-persuasion model as did their predecessors of the 1890's. Others, however, have adopted some informal argumentative principles (such as the ethical stance which posits writing as a vehicle of opinion about issues, or the view of invention as a primarily inductive/synthesizing process). This chapter concludes with suggestions, in the form of a classroom outline, for incorporating informal argumentative principles, particularly in a freshman English class which combines composition and literature. Such an approach to teaching writing will help fulfill one of the prime goals of a writing instructor: providing students not only with skills, but with a vital connection to the world of ethical purposes.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat