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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Some of you may be interested in this additional discussion (if not already aware of it): http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002227.html#moreedit: insel, I was referring to Capfka's assertion, but you make a contsumately interesting point anyway - let the old fox speak if he will!
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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the old fox digresses:
I believe the only personal note that I interjected into my intro was that this piece was "just too good to miss." hum along with me as I examine, pro bono publico, my likely hidden agenda.
many of our best threads here have stemmed from some statement of seemingly irrefutable logic. which is, perforce, quickly refuted six ways from Sunday. this is only enhanced when there is a self-referential element of some sort.
so, did I have any of this in mind when I posted? who knows what nefariousness lurks in the mind of a poster?! the shadow do!
-joe (vere atque certe) friday
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Carpal Tunnel
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Trivium Pursuit
You go, brother mav! Our friend's problem seems to be that he is stressing the grammar and the logic at the expense of the rhetoric.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>>Nonsense. What he actually says is clear and emphatic:
Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.
He doesn’t say “my classroom” but “the classroom” in general.
Well, I think I understood what Fish was driving at and, unless my understanding of his statements was deficient, the conclusion I came to was what I said in my original response. His professional dilemma and the solution he came up with struck an immediate chord, given my past involvement in teaching written grammar.
I didn't feel it necessary to take offence or even to comment on the undoubted hyperbole. Literalism is not my forte, I'm afraid. I try to deduce meaning from what I read, not just pick at it. Although I have been known to do that, too.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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From Mav's link. This is exactly what I deduced from what I read:
It's all too easy. Most writers naturally think in terms of the structure of their content, not the structure of their sentences. And content also has form -- see this earlier Language Log post for some discussion. Furthermore, speech has its own structure, independent of discourse structure and sentence structure -- think about the phrase-sized groupings you can hear in skilled doubletalk. In Korn's unfortunate sentence, where the ambiguities are structural, a skilled speaker could easily signal the desired analysis by differences in timing, pitch contour and voice quality.
The writer starts with a meaning plainly in mind, and hears it rendered in inner speech. If the syntax is not congruent with the structures of meaning and sound, well, two out of three ain't bad. The reader, however, faces worse odds. In reading, the meaning is the end of the process, not the beginning, and there is no prosody on the page. If the sequence of written words falls naturally into a syntactic pattern that clashes with the intended meaning, reading goes wrong.
This is how I interpret the view that "content is a lure and a delusion". In fact, the goal is congruence of form and content. For today's freshman composition students, however, just as for Eric Korn and all the rest of us, content too easily displaces form, if formal analysis is never taught or learned.
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veteran
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veteran
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"He is suggesting that once pre-digested glop is introduced, the kids stop thinking about anything at all. He is also suggesting that thinking involves making connections."
I think this is a bull's eye. The problem is exactly this. I've seen it happen in my daughter's debate classes. In fact, I saw it in my own debates, as well as composition courses. Students get obsessed with the content, with winning the argument, and in so doing tend to repeat the same arguments they've read elsewhere.
I don't think this professor is repudiating other ways of teaching composition. I think he's saying that somewhere along the way, the students ought to stop and learn the form - and that his course was as good a place as any. I don't know that students will just pick up the form by using it. Students can pick up wrong ideas and use them poorly as well as they can pick up good ones.
k
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>>Let him who knows speak or remain silent...<<
+
>>so, did I have any of this in mind when I posted? who knows what nefariousness lurks in the mind of a poster?!<<
...or both
lol!!
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Pooh-Bah
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>>Our friend's problem seems to be that he is stressing the grammar and the logic at the expense of the rhetoric.<<
Of course, if this were truly the case, his meaning would be *absolutely* inscrutable for not existing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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> I think this is a bull's eye. [...] I don't think this professor is repudiating other ways of teaching composition
Yes, I agree with you that there is some sense in this approach, FF. Bbut what he actually says, in clean and clear sentences in the second paragraph, is that he does indeed repudiate the vast majority of teaching taking place today:
Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form […] The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way. [e.a]
Not, you will notice, that ‘content should be given a lower priority’, or that in some circumstances might be a useful part of the pedagogical toolkit: no, complete banishment is prescribed. Now, to argue about the merits or demerits of what he says is one thing, but since he has expressed himself clearly and with some care, I see no profit in arguing about its actual content. He has stated clearly and transparently that he believes most current teaching practice is fundamentally misguided, and thinks that in classrooms up and down the land form should be everything, content nothing.
This is as intellectually weak as anyone having the temerity to suggest that no study of form is worthwhile, and it can all emerge from processing content – therein lies the madness of Shakespeare’s typewriter monkeys. But it must be faced that Shakespeare did indeed come (despite what Alabama believes) from a long line of ‘smart monkeys’, and the post-facto analysis of what he did is invariably undertaken by formalists with duller minds than the man himself. I would accede at once to the argument that Shakespeare’s luminous grasp of poetry was built on foundations that included study of form through Latin and Greek, but I have little doubt that the formalists of his day would have been happy to beat out the irregularities of his use of language had they the wits to do so.
I do not dispute that the study of language forms is valuable. I do not dispute (nor indeed have much knowledge about) whether American students are functionally more or less literate or capable of rational discourse than in some previous golden age.
What I am disputing is the central tenet of what he has clearly stated in that second paragraph: that form is everything, and content, nothing. That is the way to raise a litter of grammarians, for sure, but human beings should aspire to higher things!
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veteran
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I took that as hyperbole. If it's literal, then yes he's gone too far. But I'm back to Mrs Schlinker here. Mrs Schlinker said something like "I don't care what you say, but how you say it."
I always took this to mean that she didn't care - for the purposes of the class - what our opinions were, only that we correctly communicated what we wanted to say , and correctly interpretted what we had read.
I'm considering Fish's phrase "content is a lure and a delusion." On the one hand I understand clearly the value of content - students can get most excited about things that interest them. If they get excited they will learn more. Also, one part of mastery in any subject is bridging the gap from theory to practice.
I've seen the consequences of (mis-)education based solely on content. Students learned more about convincing their particular class, but they didn't learn that much about writing. OTOH, with your explanation I think I see connections to cases where students have learned about forms alone. In this case (and I can only think of one example at the moment), the 'student' was very well-versed in the form, but was a practically incapable of communication. (Although, frankly, it's not clear to me whether this was a due to defect of the method of instruction or a disorder of his personality.)
Being an inherently stubborn person, I'm not willing to change my mind immediately. But what you say does make a lot of sense to me.
k
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