JAC Volume 13 Issue 1

Professional journals tend to avoid reviewing composition textbooks in preference of more "scholarly" works. That's understandable, but unfortunate. We may not take writing textbooks seriously, but we cannot ignore their power. As Kathleen Welch, Robert Scholes and a host of others have pointed out, textbooks can impose dangerous ideologies on writing classrooms. Perhaps in response to such concerns, a whole new breed of "rhetorically aware" composition textbooks has emerged. These books, usually written for advanced courses, second-semester freshman composition, or special classes in argumentative writing, can be dangerous and deceptive.

For example, consider Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric WithReadings, a book that focuses on argumentative writing, based on logic, in a variety of modes. After it first appeared in 1989, a sufficient number of writing programs adopted it for their advanced or second-semester courses to warrant the production of a second edition with added "process" elements. (My own institution, for example, urges us to use this book for our second-semester courses.) At first I was impressed with the book's apparently well-grounded applications of important rhetorical theory. A quick scan of its sections entitled "A Detailed Look at the Uses of Evidence in Argumentation," "Moving Your Audience: Finding Audienced-Based Reasons," and "Accomodating Your Audience: Treating Opposing Views in an Argument That Both Clarifies and Persuades" suggested a theoretical stance sensitive to rhetoric. But once I excavated the books real underlying theory and saw its manifestations in my classroom, I was alarmed.

Writing Arguments is dangerous for two reasons. First, its authors work from an unexamined ideology based on absolutist, empirical beliefs in "truth," "reality," "objectivity," and "clarity"—notions which undermine a flexible definition of rhetoric. Second, the authors attempt to temper these ideas with twisted notions of rhetoric, hoping to create a smooth, appeasing blend of syllogistic logic and audience-based rhetorical theory. In the book's preface, Ramage and Bean ironically devote three-fourths of a page to "Theory of Argumentation in the Text." The first theory they discuss, and the one that guides the first two sections of the book, aligns argumentation with formal logic. In Part I, "An Overview of Argument," the authors carefully distinguish between argumentation and persuasion: "Persuasion is primarily concerned with influencing the way people think or act, whereas argument is concerned with discovery and conveying our best judgments about the truth of things through an appeal to reasons." Throughout the book, Ramage and Bean describe argumentation without a goal of finding "truth" as less than ideal. Persuasion and manipulation take on negative connotations such as "cheating" and "trickery." Indeed, the authors tout argumentation as a defense against persuasion. The clash between argumentation as discovery of truth and argumentation based on the sophistic gaining of adherence is clearly the subject of the section "Clarification or Victory? The Debate Between Socrates and Callicles." The writers describe Socrates as a "vanquisher of error" seeking enlightenment and clarification. Callicles is characterized as a "shadowy figure" who takes a utilitarian approach to argumentation. Interestingly enough, the authors acknowledge Callicles' position of questioning all truths as legitimate. They say, "Clearly, our world is more like Callicles'. We are exposed to multiple cultural perspectives directly and indirectly." Despite this acknowledgement, Ramage and Bean continue to uphold the idea that arguments can be inherently complete and thus perfect versions of "truth," revealing text-centered views of writing, and traces of a Romantic philosophy that emphasizes the encoders self-discovery and clarification. The rest of the book's first section is devoted to a "process" approach to reading and writing which depends on constructed strategies and steps that "systematically" guide the student through that complex process.

In section two, "The Logical Structure of Arguments: Claims, Reasons, and Evidence," the writers use syllogistic logic and Toulmin's schema for classifying arguments as "heuristic" devices. The section begins with an analysis of the "rhetorical triangle." Ramage and Bean's version, however, leaves out the critical fourth element: context or culture. Without context or culture, argumentation can only take place in a vacuum. The writers attach logos, ethos, and pathos to message, writer/speaker, and audience, respectively. This makes for a neat three-part diagram, but it distorts complex rhetorical concepts by placing them in different spheres ad simplifying their meanings. As the book proceeds, logos, ethos, and pathos are used in increasingly limited ways. After briefly describing ethos and pathos, Ramage and Bean then abandon these concepts in search of an internally consistent argument that can stand on its own. They begin, "One way to discover assumed premises is to convert each of your enthymemic because clauses into a three-part stucture called a syllogism." Students practice isolating these three parts in textbook exercises, but then find it a staggering leap to apply syllogisms to their own writing and end up doubting their usefulness.

Ramage and Bean outline Toulmin's schema in a diagram similar to a syllogistic proof and include exercises that ask students to focus on finding and labeling individual elements with little concern about how they relate to the argument in a macrocosmic way or within a specific social context. Thus, instead of a unified argument, the student ends up with a series of disjointed parts. Not only do these arbitrary constructions and mechanistic exercises confuse students, they also bore them. Ramage and Bean would have a difficult time answering the ever-popular student question, "What does this have to do with real life?"

The authors' quest for "truth" is particularly evident in the two chapters dealing with evidence. Throughout this chapter, they assert that there is a "correct" way of using evidence, a way of sorting out "facts" and achieving objectivity. One definition of fact that Ramage and Bean provide is "a noncontroversial piece of data that is verifiable through observation."

Ramage and Bean describe their second major guiding theory as a rhetorical one which finds "additional philosophical grounding in the work of Chaim Perelman and others." Instead of using the concepts of audience and adherence as measuring sticks throughout, the authors reserve them for selected places. Ramage and Bean first discuss audience in chapter four, where they describe shared assumptions as such things as "axioms in geometry or the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence." After this chapter, audience and adherence slip into the background until they are seriously considered for the first time in chapter eight.

The third section of Writing Arguments is entitled "The Rhetorical Structure of Arguments." This title alone displays the authors incessant need to express everything in a structure—even the dynamic, interactive elements of rhetoric. It is here, on page 145, that the book finally addresses such issues as adherence, ethos, and pathos. But this is too little, too late. Ramage and Bean offer short overviews of the appeals to credibility and emotions, and in assigning worth to methods for deploying these appeals ("the problem of slanted language," "Appeal to Emotions Through Appropriate Word Choice"), the authors ignore the psychological and social dimensions of argumentation. Specific audiences and specific contexts are sidelined for a text-dominant view; context or culture is still missing from their rhetorical triangle. In this section about rhetorical "structures," Ramage and Bean repeatedly use a bridge metaphor to "connect" the self-contained arguments in section two to rhetorical concerns. With such titles as "Audience-Based Reasons: Building a Bridge Between Writer and Reader," the authors describe writing as a linear, pipeline transfer between encoder and audience. This destroys any and all notions of writing as a continuous and simultaneous interaction among all elements of the rhetorical triangle.

The final two sections of Writing Arguments only compound the books problems. First, Ramage and Bean divide argumentation into five categories that suggest mutually exclusive purposes for writing arguments and reduce these purposes to algebraic equations (X is/isn't a Y). Finally, the textbook provides numerous excerpts from arguments by "professional" writers. These excerpts, along with the categories of arguments, provide the writing instructor with a too convenient, too simplstic, and too deductive means of teaching argumentation.

Writing Arguments has its bright spots. Sections on gathering library sources, conducting field research, and documenting sources are helpful, as are some of the exercises and invention strategies in the "process" chapters. On the whole, though, this textbook operates from an ideology foreign to rhetoric, one which denies situational contexts and thereby disempowers students. Ramage and Bean apply the important rhetorical theory of Perelman and others, but they do so in a limited, compromised, and distorted way.