Lucille M. Shultz: How I Found the Problem in History and Why the Modern Band-Aid is Worse

Irony on top of irony, I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry. Schultz’s piece is interesting and effective in its function as an observation of historically marginalized theory, but what the article fails to mention is the ultimate consequence of this discovery: the paradigm shift is not one of equality between rule-based structure and free flowing expressivism. Where the emphasis was once squarely in the realm of prescriptive rules, the focus of expressivism now seems to be, as Fulkerson puts it in “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” “quietly expanding its region of command” (655).

I suppose the first order of business should be an observation of Shultz’s excellent scholarship regarding the ridiculous approach to writing taken by scholars in the early 19th century. John Walker is Shultz’s primary target, and he serves as a fairly easy punching bag. I don’t believe anyone in our small discourse community will argue that students can only learn by “learning rules;” that “young writers are not capable of inventing their own subject matter,” or that students should only “write about general, abstract topics, not about their personal experiences” (14). The first task of just getting the students to memorize the rules of composition would extremely difficult, not to mention boring beyond belief, and I find it difficult to believe that a majority of students cannot form an original idea, or at least their own interpretations of an early idea, without the all-knowing sage to tell them. That being said, the introduction of “new” composition theory sheds some light onto many problems that I have seen firsthand in the modern classroom.

First of all, I think it is important to point out that regular people become teachers, and as I know them, regular people rarely enjoy teaching rules. It is far easier and more enjoyable to read a story and freely write about how it makes us feel or what the text reminds us of in our own lives; in short, expressivisim is fun and rules are not. This brings me to a description of my freshman classroom; of course I am writing about generalities—not every student fits the following mold—but if one were to choose from any one of my students at the beginning of the year, each one, if willing, could explain his or her summer vacation with great detail. Each student in the class could put in writing a description of how a story made him or her feel, or he or she could discuss and write down the similarities and differences in one another’s experiences. What almost no student can do is write a paragraph using commas correctly or read a story and pick out the main idea and its support. The focus of early education has foregone any rigor in the memorization of rules and structures. The buck is passed from grade to grade, and ultimately the student graduates with a fine grasp of ethos and self-esteem, but can he or she understand why a complex sentence beginning with a subordinate clause needs a comma? Drop in on any graduation and ask.