JAC Volume 4

During the past decade, one of the most promising models for advanced composition courses has become “writing across the curriculum”—that is, courses in which students write for and about a variety of academic disciplines. When traditionally-trained English faculty are confronted with “writing across the curriculum,” however, they frequently respond with a sense of inadequacy. Quite naturally, they feel they cannot teach the sophisticated subject matters and methodologies that writing in disciplines as diverse as history and psychology and biology demands. They wonder, too, why they, rather than faculty in those disciplines, should teach such forms of writing.

Both responses explain the current trend toward writing programs that are not located exclusively within the English department, that distribute responsibility for writing among all disciplines and at all levels.¹ Yet even within a curriculum that makes such a distribution and asks all of its faculty to assign writing, we want to suggest that a certain kind of cross-curricular writing course belongs within the English department and that such a course is neither inappropriate nor secondary to the department’s traditional concerns. Although English teachers cannot bring a knowledge of the content and methodologies of many disciplines to the composition classroom, they can bring something else that is essential: an understanding of the ways that conventions operate in a piece of written discourse. English faculty can teach students rhetorical analysis and use of convention, drawing upon what might ordinarily be considered non-literary texts, and such teaching may not only strengthen our composition pedagogy, but also enrich the English curriculum and our sense of what we mean by "literary.”

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Few concepts in English studies are quite as literary as the concept of convention. English faculty have customarily concerned themselves with matters of style, structure, or themes that have become, through time and habit, characteristic of a literary form. In literature courses we customarily discuss the conventions of the sonnet or the Bildungsroman or Greek tragedy. If we imagine, for example, a class on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s prefatory sonnet to The House of Life, we might think first of reminding students that this sonnet assumes basic conventions of prosody (fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter), and also that it manipulates conventions of structure (the octavesestet arrangements of the Italian sonnet) and conventions of style (the double oxymoron of the opening lines: “A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, / Memorial from the Soul’s eternity / To one dead deathless hour”). Any one of these stylistic or structural conventions might lead to a discussion of broader conventions of theme or questions of meaning. We might ask if Rossetti’s choice of the Italian octave-sestet arrangement, rather than the Shakespearean triple quatrain and couplet, expresses his admiration for Dante, the poet whose name he assumed, and if this choice suggests a consistent Pre-Raphaelitism or betrays a Victorian poet’s desire for priority, for a pre-Shakespearean poetic form. We might discuss what Rossetti means when he calls the sonnet a “memorial” to “one dead deathless hour,” pointing out that he invokes a tradition in which sonnets become defenses against time: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,” the Shakespearean sonnet begins. Rossetti’s “memorial” to “one dead deathless hour,” we might suggest, echoes this conventional theme but revises its intention, preserving an image of the beloved for eternity, but paradoxically testifying to a love that is forever dead.

An English class that addresses these or similar matters, whether it uses the word convention or refers instead to common topoi, recurrent patterns, or a literary tradition, depends upon the concept of convention. And this concept—literally a “coming together,” a shared understanding about matters of style, structure, and theme—is as crucial to a writing class as it is to a literature seminar. For convention implies certain principles about the composition and interpretation of texts that neither a writer nor a reader can ignore:

(1) It assumes a certain relationship between a writer and readers, one shaped by a shared knowledge that we call convention. As the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics explains, convention involves “an implicit agreement between a writer and some of his readers” that “allows him certain freedoms in, and imposes certain restrictions upon, his treatment of style, structure, and theme and enables these readers to interpret his work correctly.”² These restrictions should not be equated with, nor can they be reduced to, a set of rules. Convention may include practices that seem close to rules: when Rossetti decides to write a sonnet, for example, he commits himself to fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter, thus resticting his poetic space and binding himself to a rule of prosody. But in a larger sense, committing himself to one convention permits Rossetti other freedoms—freedom to choose an Italian arrangement and thus express his admiration for Dante; freedom to use a linguistic form like the oxymoron and thus invoke the “dead deathless” theme; freedom, in other words, to create and communicate meaning to his readers. As Rossetti’s example shows, a writer’s choice among conventions provides a way of creating meaning, and such choices, in turn, provide a way by which a reader may understand a text. Students of writing as well as of literature need to know that readers respond to conventions and that, without conventions, there can be no significant exchange of meaning.

(2) Convention assumes a certain relationship between a writer and other writers. It entails the reading of past writers by a modern writer and includes a dependence upon, as well as a deviation from, what those other writers have achieved. Clearly, Rossetti had read both the English and Italian practitioners of the sonnet form and chose to work within the Italian structural tradition. Whether he did so out of a dissatisfaction with the English quatrain-couplet pattern, out of an overwhelming admiration for Dante and Petrarch, or out of a Victorian poet’s need for priority, one implication for the teaching of writing is central: writers learn by reading other writers, those who have worked within a tradition of written discourse and have helped to delineate its terms.

(3) Convention assumes a certain relationship between a writer and a field of written discourse, a point implied by the last statement. In saying that Rossetti had read his Italian and English predecessors, we mean, of course, that he had read their sonnets and that he was conscious of them not simply as individual poems but as a unified tradition. It may seem peculiar to call this tradition “a field of written discourse,” and yet our sense of a field as a piece of cleared land, set off or enclosed for a specific purpose, is as appropriate for literary work as it is for agricultural husbandry. Convention implies that some of the ground has already been cleared and cultivated—which does not mean that a new writer merely plows old ground, but that each writer who expects to contribute something to the field needs to know what has been done, how it has been done, and what remains to be done. Applied to the teaching of writing, this relationship of writer to field of discourse suggests that apprentice writers learn by reading and examining works in the field and trying their hands at similar tasks.

Traditionally, these three relationships—of writer and reader, of writer and writers, of writer and field of written discourse—have been fundamental to the teaching of literature, and we believe they are fundamental as well to the teaching of writing. For if students need to know about conventions in order to understand various literary genres, they also need to know about conventions in order to write the prose forms of various academic disciplines. And this need has implications for the methods we use to teach writing.

Consider, for example, the knowledge required of biology students assigned a lab report in its standard form. The need to know the conventional structure: title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and references. They need to know as well conventional distinctions among the sections: that, e.g., the “results” section presents the facts discovered in both statistical and verbal forms, whereas the “discussion” section interprets the facts, explaining their relation and significance to other work in the field. And they need to recognize a characteristic scientific style: what might be described as “effaced” if one refers to the de-emphasis of the experimenter or as “highlighted” if one refers to the emphasis of key objects and facts. Students may acquire this knowledge in various ways—from the classroom comments of a biology instructor, from the written instructions of a laboratory manual, or from the trial and error of submitting a lab report and receiving it back with its inadequacies noted in red. But those who acquire knowledge in the last way, and perhaps even in the first two, may come to approach academic writing as the adherence to a rigid set of rules.

Students could, however, be introduced to writing the scientific report through the concept of convention and the three relationships that it entails. They might discuss the habits of readers of such reports, learning that most scientists read only selected parts, some to check the results, others to adapt the methodology of the experiment, still others to clip the abstract and file it away. Such readers, students might learn, rely upon the conventions of the seven-part division to make reading efficient and effective. Or students might themselves read a report written by a scientist from their institution, discussing with him or her the process of writing up an experiment and the advantages (and limitations) of the standard report form. Or they might read a sampling of reports from a scientific journal, learning inductively the conventions of the various sections and the distinctions among them. Each of these activities should lead students to ask what conventions reveal about the discipline that has agreed upon them: about what the discipline believes constitutes evidence, about what it considers a legitimate presentation of evidence, about the stance of the researcher in relation to evidence.

If the case is difficult for the student in the natural sciences, the demands are even more complex in the humanities, where forms of academic writing are more diverse; differences between forms of student and professional writing, more pronounced; and conventions, less obvious but nonetheless binding. In a history course, for instance, students may be assigned to read a popular form of historical narrative, the sort represented by Garrett Mattingly’s The Armada or Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why.³ These works employ narrative structures that recount history in almost novelistic style while embedding an interpretation of the events within the narrative, primarily by means of emphasis and selection of detail. Students may frequently be asked to read this form of historical narrative, but they are seldom asked to write it. Their most common assignments involve historical analysis,⁴ an apprentice version of the sort published in professional journals such as the American Historical Review. Historical analysis often includes narrative, but for the specific purpose of formulating a historical problem or demonstrating a point of argument. Unlike historical narrative, it uses interpretive and argumentative structures, with paragraphs that cite and analyze texts in ways that resemble literary analysis. A knowledge of the differences between these forms and of the conventions associated with each is expected of students in the discipline—even though history professors may not state that expectation or, in doing so, use the word convention.

Such knowledge of conventional structure and style is shared by professional readers and writers of historical articles and scientific reports, and it is shared because both have read the works of other writers in a specific field of written discourse. The fields need to be shared with apprentice writers. They can be shared by introducing apprentices to the work of professionals and by showing them how to read that work for its conventions as well as content.

The task is a natural one for English teachers. Although we may justifiably feel nervous about entering the sophisticated domains of research in biology or history or psychology, we need not feel so about analyzing the written discourse of any of these fields. Our profession is nothing, as J. Hillis Miller has suggested, if not philology and rhetoric, the love and use of words, and the attempt to facilitate through written criticism the acts of reading and writing.⁵ Traditionally, English teachers have taught students to recognize conventions and to understand the use to which individual writers put them in the creation of literary texts. We can transfer our knowledge of convention and our understanding of its enabling power to forms of writing that are not “literary” in the traditional sense: to historical essays, to psychological case studies, to scientific lab reports.

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As an experiment in this approach, we taught a freshman writing course in which we studied the written discourse of five disciplines: art history, history, biology, literature, and philosophy. Our goal, at the most basic level, was to teach our students how to recognize and utilize the central conventions of writing in these disciplines by using techniques of rhetorical analysis. This strategy enabled us to link the students’ desire to take a “practical” course with our desire to show how rhetorical analysis, a central aspect of our discipline, complements other parts of a university education. Beyond this most basic level, however, we also wanted to engage students in the process by which conventions are created and established. We wanted them to see how conventions—even those that seem to be carved in stone, like the “rule” that sonnets have fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter—are shaped by an agreement between writers and readers about a shared field of discourse. The relationship between a writer and a field of discourse is, in effect, a field of choices, and the aphorism about rules being made to be broken applies as well to conventions, which are nothing more and nothing less than the boundaries against which the members of a discipline define and test their ideas. The writer’s relationship to a field of discourse includes, therefore, not only an acceptance of conventions, but sometimes a healthy challenge to them. Such challenges, we wanted to teach our students, are the very stuff that ensures the continuing relevance, redefinition, and survival of academic disciplines.

To implement the two parts of our goal, we designed a course in which we consulted with colleagues in other disciplines to create a curriculum, and then worked with students on techniques of invention, methods of rhetorical analysis, and strategies of collaborative revision. Although we ourselves were professionally competent in only one or two fields (and virtually incompetent in the others), we decided not to ask our colleagues to team-teach the course. Instead, we asked them to suggest well-written essays that reflected the standard procedures of their discipline, to help us devise paper topics that students were likely to meet in an introductory course, and to participate in one class discussion in which they responded to questions about their discipline and its conventions. With this advance planning, we devoted approximately two weeks (four class periods) to each discipline, depending on the complexity of its conventions and the needs of our students. Typically, we spent the first class period analyzing the professional essays of a discipline and their basic conventions; next, we invited our colleague to lead a discussion; finally, we used two or three class periods to study problems in composing related to the conventions of the discipline.

In planning the course, we were guided by five principles, which we share with those who might be interested in trying a similar approach:

(1) Working with colleagues to choose texts proved far more effective than searching through professional journals or collections of essays. Our colleagues suggested well-written, representative, and even humorous essays that we would never have found on our own; they also recommended a wide range of texts, which enabled us to demonstrate the various strategies used by professionals in a given discipline. Our colleague in philosophy, for example, suggested that we examine a central philosophical debate—"Reason versus the Passions”—by studying contrasting discussions of human emotion. We read excerpts from four philosophers: Rene Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul”; William James, The Principles of Psychology; Errol Bedford, “Emotions”; and C. S. Lewis, “Men Without Chests.”⁶ Descartes, a representative of seventeenth-century continental rationalism, and James, of nineteenth-century pragmatism, typify one side of the debate in their identification of emotions with psychological or physiological events. In contrast, the two modern philosophers, Bedford and Lewis, argue that emotions do not merely designate psychological or physiological processes—i.e., that emotions are not names for feelings. These four texts gave our students a varied sample of philosophical writing, ranging from the “scientific” structure and tightly controlled argumentation of Descartes to the discursive and conversational style of Lewis. Because the texts also spanned several centuries, we were able to compare and contrast the writings of the earlier philosophers with those of Lewis and Bedford, which were chosen to demonstrate effective contemporary writing in philosophy and to furnish students with models for their own arguments.

(2) Asking our colleagues for advice in devising assignments stengthened the link between our freshman writing course and the larger college curriculum. Colleagues generously shared paper topics from their introductory courses (which we then revised to meet our needs) or else helped us invent topics modeled on actual assignments given in introductory courses. The assignments we gave our students were, therefore, directly related to those they would encounter in other disciplines. To continue with our example from philosophy: our colleague suggested a short assignment that would respond to either Descartes or James on the status of human emotion. The students would summarize, analyze, and criticize the philosopher’s position, and would use either Bedford’s or Lewis’s essay as a formal model. The assignment was designed to include several conventional procedures of the academic philosohical essay: an initial summary of a philosopher’s position on an issue: a decision either to defend or attack this position: an analysis of the philosopher’s assumptions including reasons in support of the position offset by possible objections; and a summary of the essay itself that would indicate areas for further reflection. For those students wanting a practical course, such procedures appeared to be the coveted rules that would ensure good grades on philosophy papers. In the classes that followed, it was our task to expand this notion by suggesting the contexts that created these conventional procedures and by showing how the conventions still functioned to shape and reshape philosophical discourse.

(3) Inviting our colleagues to join one class discussion, to respond in person to our questions about a discipline and its conventions, aided our efforts to build a transition between different conventions and different disciplines. These discussions gave students enrolled in large introductory lecture courses a chance to ask individual questions about writing in the various disciplines. Several students used these meetings to ask questions which, though central to a discipline, are rarely if ever raised in other contexts: "What is a historical fact?” “What does it mean that writing in the sciences is ‘objective’?”

When our colleague in philosophy responded to questions about writing in his discipline, he focused on two of its central conventions, the argumentative dialogue and the use of examples drawn from human experience or from “ordinary language.” He proposed that students construct their philosophical dialogue by testing an assumption of Descartes or James with a specific emotion—such as being trustful, angry or hopeful. Can one, for example, locate “being trustful” in a specific physiological reaction? Did one’s being trustful begin at 4:05 this afternoon and end at 4:21? Is feeling trustful the same as being trustful? By asking such questions, our colleague showed students how to draw on their own experience as a source of evidence and how to monitor the assumptions of philosophical argument with such evidence.

We could have taught this writing course without asking our colleagues to lead a discussion, but we found that their presence, if only for one class, lent an interesting authority to our approach. It enabled all of us to raise questions about the subject matter of academic disciplines that neither the students—nor their English teachers—were fully equipped to answer. It also created an environment for professionals within a discipline to show how conventions were a working part of their vocabulary, central to the shaping of their ideas as well as their prose.

(4) Asking students to experiment with different strategies of invention fostered an ongoing discussion about the genesis of convention, about the ways that different approaches to solving a problem reflect and engender modes of thinking associated with a discipline. We suggested that certain heuristics seemed to lend themselves more naturally to one discipline than another (such as particle-wave-field analysis to art history or Burke’s pentad to history). But we suggested, too, that an application of several different heuristics to the same field could produce surprising, even novel results.

In philosophy, for example, we designed a verbal heuristic that was intended to expose the metaphorical basis of James’ argument about human emotion. We began by asking our students to complete the following metaphorical pattern: “A human being may be called _____." After hearing the possibilities, which ranged from a souffle to the New Haven weather, the class chose “A human being may be called a sponge.” They explored its philosophical implications, this time trying to interpret the primary metaphor: “human beings,” they explained, “absorb external stimuli,” or “soak up information until saturated.” We then applied the same strategies to the central metaphor of James’ text—"the entire [human] organism may be called a sounding board.” Not coincidentally, our students learned an important strategy in composing: how to move their own language from early, metaphorical stages of thinking into later, more explicit or “expository” stages. They learned, too, about the alleged effacement of metaphor in a philosophical text.

For those students who had chosen to analyze Descartes, we designed a visual heuristic. Because many were puzzled by his attempt to locate the soul and passions in the pineal gland, we asked them to sketch Descartes’ version of the gland and to diagram ways in which the soul might “move” or function within the gland. As might be expected, no two drawings were alike. In an attempt to reach a definitive diagram, the students reexamined Descartes’ text, but found that his language was just ambiguous enough to offer neither a single nor conclusive point of juncture between the soul and gland. Although we could have suggested historical reasons for this ambiguity, more important was the students’ discovery of the ways in which philosophical argument is generated and of the ways in which conflicting interpretations can develop from and are supported by the same text.

We describe these heuristics at such length because the processes followed by our students were, though on a less sophisticated level, similar to those followed by James and Descartes in their exploration of human emotion. Both philosophers tested central assumptions about their discipline when they examined the conventional ways in which emotions or passions had been defined up to their time. Their invention of key metaphors— the sounding board, the watch, and even the pineal gland (which Descartes himself diagrammed in another work)— contributed greatly to the shaping of their arguments. For the students, such a link between invention and convention appeared as they learned how to control the conventions and evidence presented by a discipline, and they also learned to look for ways that implicit or explicit metaphors shaped their own prose and the academic writing of the university.

(5) Devoting a significant amount of class time to collaborative work kept the focus on the students’ writing and on the kinship between professional writers and apprentices in a discipline. Although we spent time as an entire class analyzing professional essays or questioning colleagues, collaborative workshops gave students the chance to practice methods of invention or strategies of revision and to define for themselves the modes of argumentation that delineate the conventions of a discipline.⁷ For those students who had trouble constructing a philosophical dialogue, for instance, we worked in small groups to analyze a section of Bedford’s essay and to identify the pivotal moves of philosophical argument and counterargument. Students identified argumentative performatives and warranting connectives, examined how Bedford clarifies or underscores a point by discounting possible criticisms,⁸ and explored the relationship between different sentences, as well as clauses within sentences. In these small groups, class members then presented their own assumptions about James or Descartes and responded to questions, objections, examples, or counter-examples from other students. What began as a self-conscious and often awkward imitation of Bedford’s strategies eventually developed into a genuine philosophical dialogue, one supported by examples drawn from the students’ own experience. In other collaborative workshops, students exchanged information, ideas, examples, and metaphors, and discussed what it was that constituted evidence—the “facts”—of a discipline. In each discipline, they gained an understanding of convention by exploring and develoing a vocabulary to describe the problems posed by its forms of writing. And they learned that argumentative exchange and compromise, and even collegial agreements to disagree, were all part of the process by which conventions operate.

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Our teaching of convention, based on these principles, addressed two pedagogical problems often met in the composition classroom, the first involving the relationship of teacher and student. When students initially write within a college setting, they often try to compose “what the teacher wants.” We suggested that they redefine this premise by shifting their focus from the teacher toward the discipline and its field of discourse: they as student writers are expected to meet a series of conventions agreed upon by members of an academic discipline. Identifying a supposed core of conventions for a particular discipline was, then, far less important than showing students how any presentation of material within a discipline is controlled implicitly or explicitly by a series of conventions, which they could learn to recognize.

This reassessment of the student-teacher relationship led us to consider the dialogue between ourselves and our colleagues as a dialogue between the disciplines themselves. Students who heard their teachers discussing articles in philosophy, biology and art history realized that scholars in other disciplines could and did discuss rhetoric, a topic that many had thought belonged exclusively to the English department. As one student remarked, “At [the beginning of the course], I considered having to go to a museum for an English paper shocking. Now looking back, I realize it was not an unreasonable assignment.” We tried to dispel notions about the departmentalization of education and encouraged students to connect the varied parts of the undergraduate curriculum through an analysis and comparison of convention.

If convention allowed us to make connections among the disciplines, it also addressed a second pedagogical problem, the alleged conflict between creative and expository writing. For many students, expository writing means, in practical terms, writing about “facts.” Yet most students assume that all facts are equal: fact in art history is granted the same status as fact in biology. We countered this assumption by suggesting that conventions determine what kind of evidence is deemed legitimate and, more importantly, control the ways in which evidence is presented; that is to say, facts are shaped creatively byrhetorical strategies.

Yet even when students learn that all facts are not the same, many will still conclude that facts, by definition, are limited and therefore boring. We proposed instead that effective and imaginative writing can occur within the academic essay when students discover why a discipline imposes limitations upon itself and when they learn how to work creatively within those limitations. Students usually discover, on their own, this need to work within limitations, but the discovery is often negative. They inadvertently break a convention; they offer personal opinions, for example, in the “materials and methods” section of a biology essay. If students were to learn, however, both the conventions imposed by a discipline, and the reasons why scholars have agreed on these limitations, their breaking of convention would no longer be the faux pas of the one-sentence opening paragraph. Instead, a broken convention would become for them what it is for many professionals, a calculated choice to transcend or alter the dialogue between members of the community. Students, as young members of our academic communities, should be introduced to the process of defining a discipline, an ongoing activity with an ever changing set of conventions.

In essence, then, our students learned that there is no qualitative difference between creative and expository writing, that both occur within a community defined by the conventions agreed upon by its readers and writers. And as our students learned these concepts, we as members of the English profession addressed others about the importance of written discourse in the composition classroom and the place of writing in the curriculum.

Within the English curriculum, we have been plagued by a disjunction between what we teach in composition courses and what we teach in literature courses. Some of this merely reflects a difference between introductory and more advanced levels of teaching: we have faced a great many ill-prepared students recently and have had to teach developmental courses that we would ordinarily consider preliminary. More fundamentally, however, the disjunction suggests differences in our attitudes toward and approaches to the teaching of composition and literature. As Maxine Hairston has explained, the new paradigm for teaching writing has as its principle feature a focus “on the writing process.”⁹ Contrary to Hairston, who herself argues the “need to continue giving students models of excellence to imitate” (88), some have taken this new paradigm to advocate the exclusion of written products from the composition classroom—specifically, literary or professionally-written products.

As a result, many English curricula now offer introductory writing courses in which nothing is read beside the students’ own compositions, followed by literature courses in which no connection is or can be made with the writing course.

Using the concept of convention can provide a transition from introductory to intermediate and advanced levels of the curriculum and can strengthen as well our pedagogy in both composition and literature courses. Theoretically, our training as literary scholars teaches us that written products are an integral part of the composing process, whether the writer is a student, a teacher, or a literary figure. To teach the composing process as simply a matter of inventing, drafting, revising, and editing—without including the act of reading—is to teach an inadequate model to our students.¹⁰ Convention provides a theoretically sound means of integrating reading into the model of composing and a practically viable means of integrating reading into the advanced composition classroom.