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a friend, knowing that my daughter was graduating from HS today, sent along a link to an op ed piece in the NY Times. as always with these things, it requires registration to read it; but this is just too good to miss -- so here it is in its entirety. fair use says I!
Devoid of Content
By STANLEY FISH
Published: May 31, 2005
WE are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.
Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.
On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.
You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.
How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one another."
Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions.
The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by which English indicates and distinguishes between the various components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing something to someone or something else, how does English allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (or what) is the doee; and how do you know whether there is one doer or many; and what tells you that the doer is doing what he or she does in this way and at this time rather than another?
Notice that these are not questions about how a particular sentence works, but questions about how any sentence works, and the answers will point to something very general and abstract. They will point, in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselves without content, are necessary to the conveying of any content whatsoever, at least in English.
Once the students tumble to this point, they are more than halfway to understanding the semester-long task: they can now construct a language whose forms do the same work English does, but do it differently.
In English, for example, most plurals are formed by adding an "s" to nouns. Is that the only way to indicate the difference between singular and plural? Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell them, must have some regular and abstract way of conveying that distinction; and so it is with all the other distinctions - between time, manner, spatial relationships, relationships of hierarchy and subordination, relationships of equivalence and difference - languages permit you to signal.
In the languages my students devise, the requisite distinctions are signaled by any number of formal devices - word order, word endings, prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name it. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point is that they know what it is they are trying to do; the moment they know that, they have succeeded, even if much of the detailed work remains to be done.
AT this stage last semester, the representative of one group asked me, "Is it all right if we use the same root form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguish between them by their order in the sentence?" I could barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a question like that one, they had already learned the lesson I was trying to teach them.
In the course of learning that lesson, the students will naturally and effortlessly conform to the restriction I announce on the first day: "We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function." The reason we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.
Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do, that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning nothing they couldn't have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.
In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only fleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the task of understanding the structure of language - a task with a content deeper than any they have been asked to forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and spontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. And when there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, and some student voices his or her "opinion" about something, I don't have to do anything; for immediately some other student will turn and say, "No, that's content." When that happens, I experience pure pedagogical bliss.
Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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enthusiast
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Please take pity on me, and give me a sentence using only
"coffee, should, book, garbage quickly". How he got 20 different sentences back, all coherent and all different, is utterly beyond me.
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utterly beyond me
Maybe you should take the class.
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enthusiast
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In reply to:
utterly beyond me
Maybe you should take the class.
Give up my job and my home, move 15000 kilometres, and somehow pay for a university course, having first qualified for entry to both the country and the university? Forgive me if I think my request a more reasonable approach. I will continue to hope that someone may yet be more helpful than you were.
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My gosh! That's among the best essays I ever read!
k
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Quickly, Garbage should book Coffee. I hear they're very good.
I'm with you, insel; perhaps a bit of hyperbolic verbiage?
formerly known as etaoin...
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Thanks, tsuwm! I don't read the NYT near as much as I should.
Here are some letters to the editor:
What You Write, How You Write It
Published: June 3, 2005
To the Editor:
In "Devoid of Content" (Op-Ed, May 31), Stanley Fish says that American students need to become explicitly aware of the functions of form in writing. I have to disagree, though, with his main point - that form trumps content.
Sentence form is not as free from content as Mr. Fish would have us believe. He says he gave students the words "coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly" and asked them to write sentences using those words. But had the words been "function, limit, derivative, slope, secant, rate, average and ratio," I doubt he would have seen the same result.
The words in my collection, when used mathematically, are highly constrained in the ways they can be put together sensibly. One must know what the words mean in order to find ways to relate them.
While my example could be seen as a trivial riposte to Mr. Fish's claim, I would hope he sees it as arguing that when actually writing to communicate, form and content are equally important.
Patrick W. Thompson
Nashville, May 31, 2005
The writer is a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University.
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To the Editor:
As a writing teacher whose method is to have students engage in personally and socially meaningful topics, and to write about these topics in full, drafted and revised essays, I am as concerned as anyone about students' difficulties with writing effective, clear prose. But I have had no luck with the formal teaching of form.
Students are able and willing to attend to issues of readability and surface error only when they have written something that is of enough value to make the arduous task of making it readable worth the effort.
Emily Isaacs
Montclair, N.J., May 31, 2005
The writer is director of first-year writing, Montclair State University.
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To the Editor:
Stanley Fish's assignment - asking students to create their own language - is brilliant! At last an educator who gets students to think about language.
I did not figure out English grammar until I taught myself Swedish during a year abroad in college. I see the same "aha!" moments in my students who learn a second or third language.
Sometimes a student needs to step outside her own conventions to see that she was trapped by them in the first place. And when she understands the logic behind the rules and conventions, she is no longer trapped, but freed.
Karla Spletzer
Boulder, Colo., May 31, 2005
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To the Editor:
As a father of three teachers and a longtime advocate of teaching sentence diagramming as a prerequisite to proper writing, a subject I was taught in sixth grade in 1922, I was pleased to read that someone understands the problem that faces our country.
When will our educators wake up?
Francis L. Fahy
Trumbull, Conn., May 31, 2005
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To the Editor:
Stanley Fish points out that we have been brainwashed into believing that content is paramount to form. Furthermore, we have been given technological crutches through computer spelling checkers and grammar programs to support this mistaken belief.
I am routinely appalled by writing that is not edited for correct syntax beyond these computerized quick fixes. The result is something that at best sounds unprofessional and at worst is incoherent.
Drew Lebkuecher
Washington, May 31, 2005
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To the Editor:
If we want students to learn the form of language, we should require that they take two years or more of ancient Greek or Latin.
Scores of students to whom I've taught ancient Greek have told me they not only learned the form of English for the first time through studying Greek, but also learned to read English with a more critical and discerning eye. Latin can achieve the same end.
When one learns Greek and Latin, form comes first, but then, following form, comes content, sublime and concise.
Michael Simpson
Dallas, May 31, 2005
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To the Editor:
Employers looking for copy editors should look for college grads who took Stanley Fish's composition class and hire them quickly.
His students will be able to untangle other people's sentences - preferably sentences that are written in their own made-up languages but maybe in English as well. And his students won't ask any uncomfortable questions because they will not care what the language means or what it may do to other people.
We learn what we are taught. What Stanley Fish teaches isn't writing.
Deborah Brandt
Madison, Wis., May 31, 2005
The writer is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin.
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To the Editor:
Yes, writing clean English sentences is a learned craft. And like any other craft, it requires practice and guidance. But what student, confronted with contemporary popular artists of all stripes, wants to be a craftsperson?
As long as artistry is perceived as celebrity, and not the embodiment of art, the acquisition of skills is less necessary than an ability to generate clever ideas.
Yet artistry is more likely to arise from craft than craft is to arise from artistry. As I've told my students, "You can't deconstruct before you learn how to construct."
Mark Rosenblatt
Brooklyn, May 31, 2005
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God Bless her (so to speak).
On the first day of class in 10th grade English, she told us all, "I'm not concerned with what you say. I'm concerned with how you say it."
This is what kids ought to be learning in English class - how English works. It's not the only thing they ought to learn. And I don't think every class should be taught this way. But it's great that one time in their lives these students have an English teacher who makes them think about how the language works.
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I've been a voracious reader for most of my life. My English skills were pretty good, probably because of the reading and the family I was born into. In the 8th grade I sort of started to get the idea of adjectives and adverbs in English, but 9th grade was the breakthrough for me: I took Latin.
My vocabulary improved some, of course, due to the many Latin-influenced words in English. But my understanding of how language works was truly formed by learning the "rules" of Latin grammar. Tenses, number agreement, modifiers, prepositions, pronouns - whew, did I learn to know what those were!
I have to agree with the author of the article in the NYT: if you can't understand the sentence, what matters the content? Both are important, having something worth saying and saying in a way that others can comprehend. Good luck to him teaching pupils to understand how language works!
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le Guin, author (1929- )
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> Please take pity on me, and give me a sentence using only
"coffee, should, book, garbage quickly". How he got 20 different sentences back, all coherent and all different, is utterly beyond me.
OK, to answer your question Vern, he nowhere uses the word 'only' in relation to that task. Sample answers might include other words to structure the relationships of the sentence.
A good article, but I've also got major reservations. I see no evidence of a practical outlook: he seems to think the meaning of these relationships in language is inherent, where they are demonstrably not - they are a product of repeated patterns of usage.
In that and many other respects, usage shapes, modifies and recreates language. All those who espouse the benefits of learning ancient languages need to be clear on what grounds they think this valuable. Is it simply through carrying out structural analysis, or (as so often creeps in) a belief that this is somehow getting back to the pure roots of Englsih before it got polluted by (ugh!) people actually using it to convey content?!
I have other considerable reservations too, but will leave it there for now.
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I'm glad for my Latin instruction for the structural analysis it taught me; to me it's a bit like playing a musical instrument: you learn how to play and then learn to improvise. Some musicians learn in other ways, I suppose, self-taught or whatever, and possibly writers could learn content before form. I still think most of the best writers and musicians have the craft down before the artistry.
I'm trying to leave myself some wiggle-room here because I'm convinced that having something to say makes good writing, too. I still like capitalization and punctuation and spelling and correct tense and number, though. It depends on the format, too; business letter more formal but a novel just about anything can be done far as I'm concerned.
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le Guin, author (1929- )
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I never understood English grammar until I took HS latin. I made good grades - I just didn't get it. After latin, though, I realized, for example, the difference between phrases and clauses. I understood that while grammar rules are somewhat arbitrary, that it was good to agree on some things (so as not to have the romans sneaking up on their own rears).
I think some of the criticisms are off base. Of course the author of this article believes that content is important. Of course he believes that one needs both form and content to communicate. If there is no content, what is the use of communicating? But it's like Mrs Schlinker told us - she didn't care what we had to say, but only that we said it well.
What essayist has done is taken something like sentence tree parsing and gone to the next level with it. He has abstracted the problem of communication in the same way that a class in HS algebra abstracts the problems of mathematics.
You learn the forms and develop some comprehension of the underlying mechanisms in class and later, when you have to solve real problems, you're on surer footing. You don't have to think about how to set up a set of equations in 3 variables or 5 or even 10. You have the basics down and not only that, you are sufficiently comfortable that you can skip steps, combine methodologies, perhaps even develop new ones. You can use your toolbox of methods and formulae with the same creativity that some guitar players use with the fixed set of chords they have learnt.
The only criticism that I might level against this approach is that it might be too abstract for some students. But I don't think every course needs to be geared for the success of the lowest common denominator.
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Pooh-Bah
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To make sentence of Fish's list, remove commas:
Coffee should book garbage quickly.
The questions who is Coffee and why he should book garbage at all, let alone quickly, are disallowed by the first rule of Fish's language game.
But, while the article is interesting and seemingly controversial, I take it tsuwm is making another point -- if just formally.
"Incidentally," congratulations on your daughter's graduation!
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> Of course the author of this article believes that content is important.
If that is indeed true it cannot be adduced from what he has actually written here. The central thrust of his argument occurs in the second paragraph where he suggests most current US compositional classes major on content without study of formal structure. This ’theory’, he asserts, is wrong: “Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.”
Well, actually he is factually wrong.
We all learn language by doing it.
Understanding the formality or the methodology comes WAY later.
It is perfectly possible to run a good class in composition without going into the analysis of form he is so self-frottingly ecstatic about. This is not to say that what he is doing is not valuable, because I would agree that it is, but it is not the only technique, and it is plain wrong to suggest it has some inherent primacy over other ways of study. Methods of study that are more accessible to the large majority may also not necessarily be ‘appealing to the lowest common denominator'.
Above all, I simply laugh at the fact he implies that what he is doing is about ‘composition’. It is actually about dissecting composition. This stands (to use his favourite word) in the same relationship to composition as dissecting a frog in biology does to understanding the meaning of life. It may be a very useful discipline of study, and it may indeed save many average people from expressing themselves with inexactitude or lack of clarity. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest this kind of pedagogy has ever stimulated creative composition.
Congraduelations, Mikelsdottir!
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Pooh-Bah
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>>The central thrust of his argument occurs in the second paragraph where he suggests most current US compositional classes major on content without study of formal structure. This ’theory’, he asserts, is wrong: “Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.”<<
I'm not sure about that. I think his point is that without an understanding of form, "content" -- thought -- is not likely to evolve. His reference to 'big ideas' is facetious; this is evidenced later in the piece when he describes 'big ideas' as "usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth." Not to formulate ideas. But he also says that the reason his classes 'don't involve content,' is because "once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content." 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. True, he might have said this better, and his failure argues against him, but what he seems to be trying to point out is that the majority of American students cannot formulate clear content, because the majority of American students are trained to write -- that is, to think -- unrigorously. I'm afraid he's right.
You are probably mostly right, when you say that language is learned in the doing. And in that case, the fault my lie in the content: a lot of it is mush. A more demanding curriculum would probably force attention to the formal structures in which its content is 'embedded.'
His polemic should be taken with a grain of salt. It sounds as though his Freshman course is essentially remediary. He is attempting, by means of an assault of abstraction, to teach his students what they should, indeed, have learned in the course of the thoughtful use of language. But the thoughtful use of language may be a thing in short supply in the US classroom.
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Professor Kingsfield: You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.
The Paper Chase (1973)
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Pooh-Bah
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It's quite clear that few of you have actually tried to teach English composition. I think Fish's approach is extreme, but it is quite valid. The arguments above about him not valuing content are, however, not. What he said wa that in his class what was important was syntactical structure. He probably felt that he didn't need to add that being able to construct a sentence correctly is a futile skill if you have nothing worthwhile to say.
I have taught remedial English to both children and adults. It is not an easy task. For most on this board, writing is almost as natural as breathing, but for a significant percentage of people it is not. They can "hear" a sentence in their heads. They can express it orally, in good form. They can even read someone else's prose in a logical fashion. But they simply cannot get it down on paper themselves in good English. I could give you examples (and I will if anyone is really interested). I believe that some people are "wired" to be able to write fluently and others are not. I have taught people who are very, very intelligent but who cannot, for the life of them, express their ideas in writing. At first I thought they were just being mentally lazy, but, given the desperation of some of my students and their willingness to spend time and effort to do something about it, I realised that I was wrong.
A knowledge of the general rules of grammar is absolutely essential to such people, because it gives them a framework within which to work while constructing written sentences. While they are learning those rules, the context or concepts are strictly secondary.
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Capfka has spoken/written well.
I once attempted to teach a class in rhetorical strategies as they relate to the argumentation of ethics (and moral theology). It was a great failure. The students all had college educations and many of them had post-graduate degrees. My attempts to persuade them to look at the "how" of argumentation, apart from the content, were quite unsuccessful. Most of them simply could not separate the content from the method. To my increasing frustration, I gave them all sorts of models and language for talking about the "how" but, even at the end of the course, most of them were unable to think about and talk about methods without slopping over into discussion of content.
I think this has something to do with what Capfka is saying here.
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> What he said wa that in his class what was important was syntactical structure. He probably felt that he didn't need to add that being able to construct a sentence correctly is a futile skill if you have nothing worthwhile to say.
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.
Your assertion of what he may or may not think has no grounding in what he actually wrote. You may be right – but if so, he has let his claims run away with his mouth, which is not a great advert for his passion for the “clean English sentences” which he implies will automatically render thought equally pure and clean. I think insel’s got it right – it’s the faculties of analysis which are falling short: basically, he’s tackling an effect, and not, as he fondly believes, a primary cause.
Of course, the study of any discipline in a structured and analytical framework will improve cognitive faculties. I agree with you that his approach has validity, as I said above – just not the exclusive validity he claims for it.
He notes that “once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.” One can understand his frustration at having to drag his mighty intellect down to the level of his mere students, but he misses a point clear to many other teachers: a variety of teaching styles is required in order to reach all pupils. One of the keys to this is to build on their existing foundations of knowledge in order to gain their motivation: many students will respond more effectively to a lesson of grammar, for example, if it is embedded in getting them to communicate more effectively on a subject they care about. His students are apparently not like this – I will take that on trust despite the evidence in most classrooms to the contrary, but I do not accept that his techniques will work universally. Many dull pedants have been turned out by these pedagogic methods in previous years; knowledge of clear structures does not a writer make.
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Pooh-Bah
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>>[My] assertion of what he may or may not think has no grounding in what he actually [posted].
. . . and yet, I can't help but think -- and damn it all, I may be wrong -- that tsuwm was actually targeting certain tendenciencies on this board and how they may sometimes veer away from its original and continuing purpose. Given Fish's perhaps hyperbolic description of the content of 'content' as well as the fact that his examples by allusion are the *rehash of, yes, important issues, I take it the lead post in this thread was a mild, and humorous, critique. Let him who knows speak or remain silent.
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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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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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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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>>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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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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"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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>>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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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.
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By the same token I've found yours and others' comments here illuminating and a good counterpoint, so thanks for the discussion - and thanks Joe Fox!
fwiw, if my arguments have interested or engaged anyone at all you may be amused to know that I have never studied formal English structure (only coming to that through linguistics later in life), have never studied formal debate, nor have ever studied formal logic (again, at least until comparatively recent years). Any skills with language that I do now possess, I have picked up largely by that strange process of osmosis that is so derided in this article.
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Pooh-Bah
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Again, Fish also says that "once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content," thereby acknowledging the importance of content. Significantly, he made his remarks in the course of a graduation address, not of a treatise, His emphasis, as well as his virtual ommissions, must be understood in that light. And he does twice, if briefly, signal his concern for the meat of discourse. In a sort of meta-sense, the fact that he bothers to make a speech whose content is a brief presentation systematic remedial approach to what he sees as a widespread problem is a further proof that his concern is not exclusively for form. By calling attention to his perception that the content of most high school debate is unrigorous drivel, he is pointing out that what the spouting of that unrigorous drivel has replaced in the classroom is the development of the facility to reason. His method is extreme, but so is the problem.
This is my take on his meaning. Whether I agree or disagree with his approach is another matter, and falls outside my remarks.
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Well, I'm only a quasi-literate Zilder (tautology, you say?), but I think the good professor's speech is very fishy. I would hardly recognise proper structure if it jumped up and bit me on the assumptive, so maybe I'm biased. That said, I feel that he undermined the validity of his point by taking to the extreme. Obviously, some grasp of good structure is necessary for expressing content in a meaningful way, but he went very much further than that. I was able to construct a few sentences using only those words (and I did wonder about the absence of the word "only" from the instructions), but felt that the results simply demonstrate that language is not exclusively form, any more than it's exclusively content. The sentences I created were devoid of meaning, and in my simple world language is a tool for conveying meaning. I'd rather have a home where the walls were a little bit higgledy-piggledy and the door hinges squeak than a perfectly built empty house, with absolutely everything engineered to millimetric precision, and no life allowed in to disturb its pristine structure. The professor can go back to his academic fishbowl, and I'll go back to writing sloppily constructed prose that makes sense to the only person who cares about it.
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Well said, bro ~ I'd rather be an aquatic mammal with a well-developed speech repertoire and not a grammarian despot in sight, so thanks for all the fish :)
As for you insel, you sound suspiciously like Berowne!
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addict
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the absence of the word "only"
He says, "Here ... are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." He does not say, "use them in a sentence," but "turn them" into a sentence. Does that not imply "only"?
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> turn them into a sentence well, I tried.... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Max Q sez: in my simple world language is a tool for conveying meaning.
Sure, like the following:
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
On snowing.
or this:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
or this:
Mares eat oat and does eat oats
and little lambs eat ivy.
A kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?
or this:
Boop Boop Diddim Daddum Waddum Choo!
Boop Boop Diddim Daddum Waddum Choo!
Boop Boop Diddim Daddum Waddum Choo!
And they swam and they swam right over the dam!
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Carpal Tunnel
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> Does that not imply "only"?
Yes, Nancy, on rethinking that phrasing I think you're right - it does probably imply that doesn't it? But eta's point is all the more valid anyway, and we could spin those words around to make other patterns, na Vern? Of course it's at the cost of being a mere sequence of sounds - and I hope he's not going to pretend any of those sounds have inherent characteristics that identify them as particular 'parts of speech', because that only comes from their content...
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Pooh-Bah
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Mav, if I didn't think you were mostly serious, I would almost say your hyperbole exceeded Fish's. You polemic almost seems to adhere to a more prescriptivist bent than that this imagined raving prescriptivist.
***
You haven't addressed the second sentence, which belies the imperative you insist upon in the first.
As to Berowne, tell me who that is, and I'll tell you why I disagree.
--insel-that's whiskey talk-peter
***
BTW, this Stanley Fish?
From the Chicago Sun Times (Sorry, tried to post it as a link, but it is on the cusp of Archive, and it just didn't go.)
It's his 'last chance to get it right'
April 25, 2005
BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter
Inside a small, utilitarian classroom on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, Stanley Fish is concerned about this pressing question: What is truth? Or, more specifically, how one comes to believe what is true and what is false.
Fish, among the best-known English professors in the world, is teaching his last class as a full-time academic.
"This is about my last chance to get it right,'' he says.
Fish, who turned 67 last week, now plans to retire and move to a home he owns in Delray Beach, Fla., with his wife, Jane Tompkins, an English professor and special assistant to the provost.
To honor Fish's contributions to the school, UIC has started a lecture series in his name that kicks off today at 4 p.m. at the Student Center East, 750 S. Halsted.
In his class, Fish is discussing epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It is part of a course called "Religion, Citizenship and Identity,'' which analyzes how everyone from scientists and theologians draw their conclusions about truth.
On this particular day, Fish shows students a three-page essay he spent most of the day crafting that lays out his position on how he determines the truth.
Widely admired by students
Even though Fish has written hundreds of books and papers in his nearly 45-year career, his thoughts on the topic are constantly evolving. So much so that he now says he disagrees with a published paper he wrote just a few years ago. Now, he says while one's experience and upbringing influence what one believes to be true, they cannot be used as a reason to argue something is true, which he had claimed previously.
"I was making a big, big mistake,'' he admits.
His lecture is laced with academic-speak, such as when he called the students "miserably presentist'' when none catches his reference to the 1938 movie "Angels with Dirty Faces." And the discussion often hinges on nuances that are at times hard to grasp.
But the group of 14 students remains engaged, even as the course passes three hours in length. Students say Fish remains fascinating.
"He's very passionate about what he teaches,'' said Sebastian Anderson, 20, of Chicago. "Everyone I talk to likes Professor Fish,'' said Yelena Shagall, of Skokie. "They may get a bad grade, they may disagree, but they like him.''
In addition to his earlier opinions, Fish takes on his critics, who have made him a lightning rod in academia. One accused him of supporting terrorism because of his take on a poem by Milton, Fish's expertise. Fish says his critic "can't be right.''
The class also discusses a book that devotes many pages to disagreeing with Fish. The article and book are not the only ones to take on Fish: In the last 30 years, 200 articles and other publications have revolved around his writings.
Later, in his corner office in University Hall, Fish takes on his other critics, who thought he devoted too many resources in his five years as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to hiring "rock star'' professors. Those two dozen big name scholars -- coaxed away from places like Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago -- drew six-figure salaries in a time the university was eliminating classes because of state budget cuts.
He notes that the vast majority of his faculty hires were young and also notes student rolls actually shrank by more than 10 percent during his tenure. But he admits he was unsuccessful convincing state politicians why the high- profile faculty were necessary.
"You are learning from people who are making the field,'' he said. "We were producing the kind of work that is paid attention to at other universities.
"That's huge. But you can see why someone in the state Legislature might have difficulty appreciating that.''
'Degrees worth a lot more now'
Students, however, do appreciate what he did.
"Our degrees are worth a lot more money now,'' said Shagall, 20.
His other controversial views include suggesting that tuition be doubled so as not to erode the quality of UIC and a suggestion that faculty "aim low'' by teaching students to be good learners but not necessarily committed citizens of a democracy.
Despite the controversies, Fish says he has no regrets.
"This has been a magnificent experience,'' he said.
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Pooh-Bah
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Yup, it's that Stanley Fish. Did you think there could be two of him? 
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oh, Love's Labour's Lost:
Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,
Which with pain purchased doth inherit pain:
As, painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by.
Study is like the heaven's glorious sun
That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks:
Small have continual plodders ever won
Save base authority from others' books
These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
And every godfather can give a name.
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