Dartblog

Nearly three weeks ago now, Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt announced the creation of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. I have been meaning to address this development for some time now, but have been held up by a variety of inconveniences. The most recent was a trip to Paris this past weekend. Not all the way from Hanover, though—I am in Toulouse this term with one of the French Department’s Language Study Abroad programs.

On the bright side, my stay in la ville lumière was a welcome inconvenience if there ever was one. I learned, among a few factoids about gothic architecture, that the Mona Lisa is vastly overrated as a work of art, that there are a number of words in French that contain three consecutive e’s, and that the café servers of the French metropolis are noticeably more brusque than their provincial counterparts, particularly when a patron does something like order an orange game instead of an orange juice, as I once did owing to a subtle mispronunciation. Interestingly, these servers would often cheer up a bit after I ignored their inevitable switch to English. A particularly forgiving one even switched back to French, avoiding the awkward bilingual conversation that otherwise ensued.

Going back to rhetoric, the thrust of Dean Folt’s announcement is that Dartmouth’s freshman writing program will be overhauled in the coming years. She identifies six particular goals. I quote:

* eliminate all exemptions from the Writing Requirement so that all students will now take two writing courses;
* add two positions to teach courses in public speaking;
* introduce upper-level writing instruction in non-writing intensive disciplines;
* offer a wider array of writing courses for students who desire to develop greater sophistication in their ability in written communication;
* expand student support services, including writing assistance for students taking foreign language courses;
* develop and implement assessment tools to determine the effectiveness of the teaching of writing and speech.

Given the discouragingly low level at which many Dartmouth students write, the administration is right to work to improve the College’s writing instruction. I only hope it does so intelligently.

As I received one of the exemptions that Dean Folt now wants to eliminate, I have no personal experience with the College’s freshman expository writing class. What I have heard does not impress. Notwithstanding Associate Dean Lindsay Whaley’s praise for “the excellence of the current faculty in writing,” many students see the expository writing class as a grand waste of time. One student told me his writing professor was from the Arabic Department and wrote worse English than his students. Another in a similar situation was routinely given miscorrections on papers. Many writing classes spend little time on writing, but rather on “the research process.” In a similar vein, a major project in many writing classes is to film and edit a short video that surveys an issue. I was interviewed for one such video my freshman year. Forgive me if I’ve missed something, but I would have thought a writing class would teach writing?

The College’s “first-year seminar” program, on the other hand, seems strong. The first-year seminars do not attempt or pretend to teach writing itself. Instead, they are simply all-freshmen seminar-style courses on relatively narrow topics that students would not normally encounter until later. Mine, in the philosophy department, was on the metaphysics of personal identity. It was a fascinating and productive course, and a chance to improve my writing on my own, through practice. A good model.

There is nothing inherently wrong with mandating two writing courses for all freshmen. But if eliminating all exemptions from expository writing just means pouring even more resources into useless courses, that’s a problem. And make no mistake, it would be a gigantic investment. Let’s assume an incoming class of 1,075, a commonly cited admissions target, and that the writing courses’ current enrollment cap of 16 does not change. Then to offer each freshman two writing courses (one expository writing and one first-year seminar) would require a minimum of 136 writing courses per year; 68 sections of expository writing and 68 first-year seminars. Each faculty member teaches between 0 and 6 courses annually, for an average of about 3. So to offer each freshman two writing courses would be equivalent in resource expenditure to having 45 professors teach only writing.

There are two ways to make this worth the cost. One is to simply abolish the expository writing courses and require all freshman to take two first-year seminars. The first-year seminars work, and surely the faculty would have no problem with this measure. (What faculty member is remotely interested in teaching freshmen how to write?)

The second is to overhaul the expository writing courses. There do exist very effective ways to teach persuasive writing, even if Dartmouth’s courses don’t use them. The basic idea is the earth-shattering revelation that to teach writing effectively, one must actually teach writing. Not video, not speech, but writing. How this is done is to examine great works of rhetoric and analyze what makes them great. The works can be chosen from sources as far-ranging as Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death!”), Thomas Jefferson (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”), Edgar Allan Poe (“Once upon a midnight dreary…”), Abraham Lincoln (“Four score and seven years ago…”), Martin Luther King Jr. (“I have a dream…”), Franklin Roosevelt (“a date which will live in infamy…”), Ronald Reagan (“Tear down this wall!”), Jonathan Swift, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and even Barack Obama. Alongside this analysis should be a rigorous, comprehensive, no-nonsense study of classical rhetoric. This constituted the bulk of my eleventh grade English class, which did more to improve my writing than all other writing classes I’ve ever taken, combined. The inclusion of the word “rhetoric” in the name of the newly-created institute and the emphasis on “upper-level writing instruction” in the six goals indicates that Dean Folt might be thinking in this direction, but it is not certain.

BY THE BYE (as Joe would say): This leftmost member of the Dartblog quadrumvirate is in full agreement with his colleague Mr. Moore with regards to the level of democracy in the Democratic Party presidential nomination process. Yes, Mrs. Clinton did win the popular vote in Nevada and come out with one fewer delegate. However, I politely remind my colleague that there have recently been far greater indignities of the same type. A few years ago, a certain Mr. Al Gore won a popular vote and lost the greatest prize of all. Surely that must anger Mr. Moore more?