Invention I

Invention is the discovery of arguments, according to classical rhetoric.  The word comes from the Latin invenire, “to come upon.”  The premise behind the notion is that, while the facts of the issue at hand vary from case to case, the forms of the arguments available to the rhetor, whom I’ll call the writer, are similar from case to case.

Those forms, what I call frames, are categorized into two logical approaches, inductive and deductive.  Inductive frames are those of the example:  instances, stories, descriptions; and statistics, which generalize those Roger-level phenomena.

Deductive frames are derived from syllogisms.  They take the form of if this is true, then that must also be true.  The if clause (among many options) signals a premise, the then clause is the conclusion. 

Several frames are found among the deductive box of arguments:  contraries, comparisons, analogies and part-for-whole arguments require analytical reduction into components.  If A has these parts, and they correspond to B’s parts, then we can speak of A by speaking of B.  The analogy is akin to the commutative property in arithmetic:  If A=B, then B=A.  I speak of A by speaking of B.

Other frames for deductive argument include definition:  If justice means “getting what you deserve,” then …  Certain conclusions can be asserted to follow from that definition:

1.  You should be compensated for good work (be it flipping hamburgers, acing tests, closing sales).

2.  You should be free to vote if you’re an American citizen.

3.  You should be treated with dignity.

And so on.

Similarly, if you belong to the category American Citizen, you enjoy certain guaranteed rights, not all of which may be enjoyed by non-citizen residents, though, in our case, that number is limited.  Whether a person enjoys those reserved for citizens depends on whether that person belongs to the category of “American Citizen.”  This frame is traditionally called “genus-species,” or category—member.

Other deductive frames include Contraries (“If obsession with social media causes anxiety disorders, abstention from social media will calm the mind”) and “More and Less,” or what we might call a fortiori, Latin abbreviated from a fortiori argumento, “from stronger argument” (“If a high school graduate has trouble finding a good paying job, how much more trouble will a high school dropout have?”) We use Antecedents—Consequences and Cause—Effect as we do premise—conclusion.  Past-Fact/Future Fact involves moves to the origins or history of the issue at hand and extrapolation into the future if current trends continue.  There are others, but let this compilation suffice.

The advantage of such catalog of argument frames?  It gives you resources for how you present your case.  It makes possible your figuring out not only what but how to state your arguments.  It goes beyond reasons and examples, allowing you to be interesting as well as informative and persuasive.  I would argue that being interesting is the most efficient route to being persuasive.  And the vehicle for being interesting is variety.

The point I want to make here, though, is that there exist a multitude of ways to frame arguments that have been available to you for over 2,000 years.  But you’d never know it by reading a typical college composition textbook, which is focused on the writing process.

I continue the discussion of invention in my next post, with an overview of inductive frames.

In my YouTube videos I discuss many of the more popular frames, both deductive and inductive.  If you need more examples, check those out. The link for my channel is on the left side of this blog home screen.

Additionally, you can purchase the Martin Luther King Teaches Rhetoric to see the variety of frames King uses in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." 

Make “Transition” Meaningful

Just as we ask students to edit their writing in order to make it more concise and precise, occasionally it behooves us as professional English teachers to review the language we have inherited and often enlarged.

Our notion of transition is one such concept.  Haziness about what it is has resulted in a category that has no relation to what the word means.  On the premise that precision is a virtue to practice and not only preach, I propose to chip away at the accretions to arrive at something simple and useful.

The verb originates in the Latin transire, to cross from one place to another, or to change places (Online OED).  Not to stay in one “place.”  Not to “connect” or “add” or “compare” or any of the encyclopedic list of functions listed by Purdue OWL.  Those constructions, in a less grammar-phobic age, used to be properly called adverbial clauses. No, transition means, simply to change, from one locus or place to another.

To its credit, Purdue OWL’s presentation early on admits that weaving key words from one paragraph into a subsequent one is an established method of connecting paragraphs.  (I call this “chain stitching;” see https://youtu.be/KP3q3H5bnf8 for an analogical demonstration.)  It is useful to know that writers of non-fiction don’t use transitions perhaps as often as we think.  However, I think the student who wrote the page lost track of what the word means, what the concept includes. (“However” is a transition, from approval to disapproval.)

The category, it seems to me, should include those words that move us from one subject or argument or viewpoint to another, if we are to be consistent with the word’s meaning.  That would embrace contradiction (nevertheless, however, although and its cousins, still, but and yet, on the other hand, and so on) and chronology (earlier, later, subsequently).

Moreover, we want to distinguish those adverbs that signal continuation or elaboration of arguments in process (moreover, indeed, furthermore, additionally) from those arguments we need to transition to.

Furthermore, I question the need for elaborate categorization—it becomes something else to learn, instead of something encountered through reading arguments and learned tacitly as well as through modeling.   Better to call them adverbs as a general class if we need to call them anything, if for no other reason than to keep our vocabulary a more useful model of clarity and precision.

We ask it of our students.  We should be prepared to respond in kind.

Similes Without "Like" or "As"

College freshmen—some of them, at least—can still remember that a simile is a comparison of one thing with another using “like” or “as.” 

Or is it?  What are we to make of this from William Least-Heat Moon in The Road to Quoz:

eastward to the Mississippi lay cotton fields and wetlands, so that for some miles the Ouachita was a kind of zipper between the old steamboating South and the cattleman's West.

Or this from Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House:

…Faruk pulled out a handkerchief the size of a sheet and was mopping his sweat

Or this from David Gessner’s All the Wild that Remains:

All the pretending and the myths were, to his eye, no more real than the false fronts of the towns in Hollywood westerns.

Just to provide a few.

Constructions like these are more frequent than you probably think.

They each offer comparisons without "like" or "as." They aren’t metaphors, because the language—“kind of,” “size of,” and “more real than” indicates comparison. Why are they not labeled similes?  Habit and laziness, in my estimation.

We are not used to questioning the definitions and assumptions of our childhood, it seems.  Yet we want our students to think critically about their childhood assumptions.

I’ve argued elsewhere that we have a lot of such definitional baggage:  topic sentences, transitions, the “writing process,” paragraphs themselves, that we need to re-think before we recapitulate and further propagate these misconceptions. 

They might have value for some age groups as developmental concepts, but by the time students hit a college classroom, we need to bring our teaching closer to the reality of adult writers.

Through the sheer numbers of students they have to teach, high school teachers (I was one) need to keep things relatively simple.  Hence, the five paragraph essay.

While numbers pressure is building in Community and 4-year colleges, the maturity of our students demands that we exhibit the critical thinking that we expect of them.

The watchword of pedagogy when I first started teaching in the 1970s was “relevance.”   While I’m more than a little skeptical of the notion as a guiding light, it might nevertheless be useful to think of debunking inherited oversimplifications in our classrooms as one of the more “relevant” of our responsibilities.

By the way, in the interests of blatant self-promotion, if you are looking for an exercise on similes without “like” or “as,” you can find one in Copia, my workbook on figurative language, linked on the home page of this blog.

A concept we need to obsolete: the topic sentence.

I presume, in this discussion, that as English teachers we value precision in our language.  Otherwise, as Orwell has written so eloquently, our slovenly writing becomes slovenly thinking, which in turn reinforces our slovenly writing.  If this presumption is true, though, we have some housecleaning to do.

We were taught about topic sentences in grade school:  my wife, who made a career as a 7^th grade English teacher, tells me her district introduced the concept in 4^th grade.  They are also defined in our college handbooks (Hacker, Sommers, A Writer’s Reference, 7^th Ed) and online resources (Purdue OWL).  Hence, they are a familiar entity we’ve grown up with, hardly worth thinking about.  

So let’s, for once, think about them.

First, it seems a useful question to ask if real writers write topic sentences.  Erika Lindemann, in A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (3^rd), cites studies that conclude, “anywhere from 50 percent to 80 percent of the paragraphs written by accomplished professionals do not contain topic sentences” (emphasis in original).

There are pedagogical reasons to expect topic sentences in every paragraph:  classrooms are laboratories, and we are teaching basic structures; students need structural constraints in order to control what can amount to a flood of words; we only have so much time to read student writing, so we need to control length as well as structure.

But if we are going to defend this practice, we need to be at least honest about how artificial it is, and have students read arguments which consist of several paragraphs.  Martin Luther King’s four-paragraph defense of disobeying unjust laws in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might be helpful here.

The Online Oxford English Dictionary defines “topic” initially in terms of the word’s application in ancient rhetoric’s “commonplaces.”  This leads to the third definition, which is what we normally associate with the word:  “The subject of a discourse, argument, or literary composition”.  No argument here, I would think. 

As a “grammar” term, the OED extends the definition:  “The part of a sentence which is marked as that on which the rest of the sentence makes a statement (comment), asks a question, etc.”  As usual, the OED editors provide examples taken from published prose, but in this case the models are about topicalization, not illustrations of the definition in use.  Presumably, the illustration has no meaning out of the context of a paragraph.

The problem with the definition and our application of it is its inadequacy to describe real writing.

Look at the paragraph below:

Any project that aims to challenge modern ideas by recalling older ones risks falling into nostalgia.  Defenders of rhetoric often invoke a utopian past in which wise and eloquent politicians provided effective leadership through the majesty of their words alone.  A glance at the journalism about recent presidential campaigns about the candidates’ lack of eloquence and in wistful comparisons with figures from the past, such as John F. Kennedy.  But the same magazine that lodged such a complaint during one recent campaign had also run an article after Kennedy’s inaugural address that looked back nostalgically to Adlai Stevenson…

Which sentence of the first two is the “topic” sentence?    Both refer to the romanticization of the past by people offering alternatives to the present.  The second mentions the domain of examples from rhetoric, and the specific examples given show the never-ending quest for the perfect example of “good rhetoric."

   

Isolated from its fellow paragraphs, we cannot really answer the question.  

Does it help to know that the book the paragraph comes from is Saving Persuasion by Bryan Garsten?  Now we see the second sentence is doing more than offering illustrative examples of an abstract approach to arguing from the past.  They are instead pertinent to the content of the entire work.

I raise this issue, because the definition of “topic sentence” assumes a self-contained context that a reader, particularly an unsophisticated one, may not understand or perhaps will miss if reading carelessly. 

The first difference between the two sentences is that only the second specifically mentions “rhetoric,” thus narrowing the scope of the more general first sentence (making it lower on the Abstraction Ladder than the opener). 

The other difference is that the second, being narrower, makes a specific claim that pertains to the topic—the issue at hand, nostalgic claims about a golden age era of deliberative rhetoric.

“Topic sentence” doesn’t account for what Garsten is doing:  using a broad introductory statement to pave the road for the claim of the paragraph, which is defended by several examples. 

Furthermore, this example demonstrates that we can’t treat paragraphs outside the context in which they appear.

Lastly, this paragraph rhythm is not unusual in non-fiction writing.

I want to assert two additional premises:

1)  All writing is argument.  Even expository writing makes the implicit claim that an explanation or description offered portrays what the writer claims it portrays.

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold   

      

       Wm. Carlos Williams

This poem seems like pure exposition, except it concludes with “they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold,” which is the language of judgment and motive, that is, of claims.  It “states a case” for why the narrator ate the plums which didn’t belong to him and pleads for forgiveness.

2)  Stephen Toulmin’s scheme of argument structure is an appropriate model for teaching the foundations of argument to college students of any ability.

Consequently, the better word for us to use to identify the issue at hand and the attitude toward it is “claim,” using Toulmin’s terminology.

Thesis sentences are claims.  But theses are defended by multiple arguments, each with its own claims and evidence.  Those arguments may be “found” among the classical commonplaces and frame the content.

Thus we move from grade school vocabulary to the world of adults, a worthy place for college composition teachers to be with their students.

The Need for Details—One More Reason for Low Level Thinking

One of the casualties of Bloom’s taxonomy emphasizing high level cognitive skills, it seems to me as a writing teacher, is that not only has memorization become passé, but noticing as well.  English teachers want details in your writing.  It’s amazing, though how hard it is to get those.  Some of it is due to the language we teachers use—“details” can have various levels of specificity (see my YouTube video on The Ladder of Abstraction).  Still, people don’t notice their environment.  We have a hard time describing what our street looks like from our front window.  We’ll miss colors and whole objects.  Even when we see the trees for the forest, we can’t identify them.  When we hear a bird, we can’t name it or suggest the shape of its call.  We have trouble describing the face of our best friend.

Such a focus on the forest means that the defense of claims is often vague or irrelevant.  Anecdotes and procedures lack continuity because the steps between the beginning and end were invisible, as though the camera’s shutter got stuck.

Some folks lay the blame on the observation that you are to blame: when better alternatives are lacking, you have your noses stuck to your smart phones.  It’s hard to notice one’s surroundings when always looking down.

True enough, but I saw the poor recall/ignorance of detail with my high school students long before smart phones became ubiquitous.  Face it, teachers have been trained to train you to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate from the time your’re in grade school.  We teachers have lost balance, though, and since we abhor “drill and kill” and mock learning “names and dates,” we have forgotten the need for lower level knowledge, even though it is the foundation for Bloom’s entire structure.

I can’t help but think that this handicaps inquiry (we read only for the “main idea”) as well as argument.  Furthermore, we enable and reinforce “biased assimilation,” our preference for evidence confirming our stands over contradictory facts.  If we don’t bother remembering facts, such self-protective regard is even more secure. 

Add to that, of course, postmodernist doubts about the very concept of objective fact, and we leave you without a crucial intellectual tool.

Pile on Trump's insistence that everything criticizing him is "fake news."  It's not just a class issue.  White, educated, middle class parents listen to the conspiracy theorists--some of them, we now know are Russian propagandists--and refuse to vaccinate their children. The dangers multiply.

Bereiter and Scardamalia have documented that knowledge enables experts to dramatically shorten how they solve problems compared to non-experts.  Some of that is procedural and skill-based, but underneath it all is domain specific knowledge of what things are and how they work. 

The stories of students’ ignorance continue to surface, their “college readiness” questioned, and their high failure rates leading to dysfunctional political initiatives (Rich).

Intellectual skills form the mortar that puts facts into context and relates them to each other and to conceptual schemes.  But mortar without bricks makes for poor structures.

Sources

Bereiter, Carl, and Marlene Scardamalia. Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Print.

Rich, Motoko. "As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short." New York Times 26 Dec. 2015, sec. A. NY Times. Web. 31 Dec. 2015.

Why you need to memorize facts

If you visit Thomas Frank’s YouTube channel, you will find a number of videos that will help you memorize information.  In his telling, the only reason to do that is to score well on tests.

There are better reasons.

The first is that if you aspire to mastery in anything, from chess to chemistry, lab tests to languages, baseball stats to business probabilities, you need to know stuff—a lot of stuff.  Research on expertise has demonstrated that one of the defining characteristics of an expert is that she has mastered her specific domain knowledge about medical terminology or computer coding or the physiology of the brain—whatever.

The lack of such mastery means you are always looking things up, slowing down your ability to solve problems and make decisions, sometimes to your employer’s detriment, sometimes to your client's, either of which detracts from your effectiveness. 

Nicholas Carr, in The Glass Cage, describes how airline pilots, by letting computers fly planes while they watch over them, see their knowledge and skills degrade to the point that, when an emergency arises that disables auto-pilot, they lack the ability to process the situation and make the right decisions.  Accidents result, lives are lost.

Background knowledge starts playing a major role in learning from an early age.  When parents don’t talk much to their four-year-old child, he will struggle to learn to read, because learning to match printed words to the world relies on previous knowledge of the world and those things words signify.

Jeanne Chall has explained in detail how that struggle only gets harder as the child moves from learning to read in grades 1-3 to reading to learn, which begins in fourth grade.  If he is behind by the time that starts, odds are he will never catch up, because the target only gets harder as his peer group gets older.

The moral:  without knowledge, you will have a hard time learning new things, since we incorporate new information by relating it to what we already know.  No knowledge, no learning.

It’s also nice to know what you’re talking about.  As you get older, you’ll be talking more and more to people who are not your immediate peers.  Not knowing your facts when you make a claim will only encourage those older people to dismiss you more readily.  You don’t want to be credible to the folks who hire you, promote you, mentor you?

As distasteful is it may be to you, memorizing information is an important skill for you to acquire, and there is no time like the present to begin, practicing the skill by studying appropriately for those exams you hate to take. 

Resources:

The Jeanne Chall book is The Reading Crisis:  Why Poor Children Fall Behind, avl for loan from EBSCO books.

The foundational research on expertise is in Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves:  An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise

Some links to Thomas Frank videos:

https://youtu.be/eVajQPuRmk8

https://youtu.be/mzCEJVtED0U