Some Thoughts on Arrangement

Donald C. Stewart

In Chapter 9 of Research on Written Composition, George Hillocks observes that “we need more information about the schemata, if any, which guide writers in producing various types of discourse and about the strategies requisite to the production of those types” (233). I fully agree with him, but I would like to extend the discussion to the whole subject of arrangement as it has come down to us from classical rhetoric and to the ways in which it manifests itself in modern composition theory and practice. This will not be a definitive statement on the subject. Rather, I propose to raise more questions than I will answer. But in so doing, I hope to engage my composition teaching colleagues in a little consciousness-raising on the subject of arrangement, organization, or form, whichever term one likes best.

Toward this end, therefore, I will proceed as follows: (1) offer a brief review of arrangement as it was presented by major classical rhetoricians and indicate the extent of their influence chronologically; (2) raise some questions about the extent to which the classical treatment of arrangement is still appropriated by the modern composition teacher and the ways in which this concept is tied to our notions of coherence; (3) raise further questions about the ways in which our concepts of arrangement and coherence are culture-bound; and (4) discuss the implications of the entire inquiry for modern composition theory and practice.1
Classical Concepts of Arrangement

Arrangement is the second of the five categories of rhetoric established by the rhetoricians of classical antiquity. Although the number of parts which a speech should contain varied somewhat in classical rhetorical manuals and treatises, a basic pattern was fairly consistent in all of them: an introduction, a background or state­ment of facts, an argument, a refutation, and a conclusion. Aristotle, whose treatment of arrangement almost seems an afterthought—he was much more interested in invention, having given two-thirds of his Rhetoric to it—cited only four parts: the introduction, the state­ment of facts, the proofs and cross examination, and the conclusion. Cicero created six, having broken his section on argument into two parts. Quintilian had five, with three subdivisions in the section on the introduction or exordium.

Despite these variations, the basic pattern endured for centuries. Even in the Middle Ages, when the tradition of rhetoric itself no longer had the continuity it did during classical times, one finds aspects of arrangement in the art of letter writing and in preaching (Murphy). Arrangement as a five-part scheme (or modified slightly but still retaining the essential divisions mentioned earlier) re­surfaces during the Renaissance, first in its classical mode, and then separated from style, memory, and delivery by Peter Ramus who linked invention and arrangement together under logic. In the eighteenth century, we find the classical representation of arrange­ment restored, for example, in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres.

There is considerable difference of opinion about the vitality of the classical tradition of rhetoric in the nineteenth century, and the extent to which early versions of modern composition courses adapted or modified aspects of that tradition (Stewart; Hochmuth and Murphy). It was most obviously apparent in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory by the first holder of Harvard’s Boylston Chair of Rhetoric: John Quincy Adams. However, during the nineteenth century we see, at least for the first fifty years, a continued flowering of the elocution movement, the emergence of a rhetorical belletristic tradition, and some original studies on delivery and voice (Austin; Rush)—all preceding the emergence of practical courses in composition which began to proliferate late in the century. The emphasis in the latter was on style. Invention got short shrift as did arrangement. Early required composition courses, like Harvard’s English A, put great emphasis on style and mechanical correctness and seriously neglected substantial presentation of both invention and arrangement.

For a good portion of the twentieth century—even today—we have known that arrangement is a relatively neglected subject (Larson). And when it is discussed, the idea of imposing some sort of preconceived order on a piece of discourse is much more popular than the idea of letting the discourse find its form. The reason is that the former is easier to teach and to evaluate; the latter is harder to produce and to evaluate. Teachers routinely take the path of least resistance (Knoblauch and Branrion 1-21).

In Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, Cy Knoblauch and Lil Brannon are severely critical of what they regard as modern adaptations of the pattern of arrangement from classical rhetoric, the ubiquitous and infamous five-paragraph essay, for example (29~4l).2 But Brannon and Knoblauch are not critical enough. In the first place, many writers and users of textbooks which advocate the five-paragraph essay apparently have little if any knowledge of classical rhetoric’s development and adaptation of the five-part oration. That ignorance causes them to become excessively rigid in insisting that students create a structure which was never that inflexible in the hands of the ancients. For example, Quintilian counseled his students to use some common sense in preparing speeches for judges. An introduction is unnecessary, he noted, if the judge already knows you and your client. A background is superfluous if the judge is already familiar with the facts of the case (1: 276). Proceed directly to the arguments, Quintiuian advised. He also counseled his pupils not to reject the inspiration of the moment (2: 299). It was all right to have a plan, he said, but let it be flexible and adaptable to the circumstances of the case. This advice runs directly counter to instructions given to students who find themselves locked into rigid outlines and inflexible organizational schemes into which their subjects are to be bent, twisted, stretched, and contorted.

Even more ironic is the fact that classical rhetoric gives us an alternative to the five-part structure and its unfortunate antece­dents, but, according to Fred Newton Scott, that alternative was ignored for nearly 2000 years (415-16). In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that a discourse “ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work” (128). It is an oversimplification—indeed, it is an error—to translate this concept as beginning, middle, and end or introduction, body, and conclusion. The latter are mechanical constructs. They perceive parts of a discourse joined together like machine parts. Plato’s concept is organic; note how he likens the structure of a discourse to a living organism. Thus, the structure of a speech evolves like a plant from a seed. Scott notes that one does not find this fundamental principle of modern aesthetics again until it appears in the conclusion to Herbert Spencer’s essay on the philosophy of style in the mid-nineteenth century (416). Today, when we advise students to let the subject they are writing on dictate its structure, we are essentially advising them to accept a principle of organic structure.3
Arrangement, Cohesion and Coherence

The problem of structure in discourse ultimately cannot be separated from our understanding of both cohesion and coherence. I do not intend to develop these topics because excellent scholarship is available on both (Witte and Faigley; Markels). I do, however, accept a distinction between them made by Stephen Witte and Lester Faigley: “Cohesion defines those mechanisms that hold a text to­gether, while coherence defines those underlying semantic relations that allow a text to be understood and used” (202). This distinction, and they point out that it is not original with them, is dear enough in its explanation of cohesion. Anyone who has employed sentence-combining activities understands what is meant by internal textual cues to link sentences and paragraphs in a particular stretch of discourse. Their definition of coherence is less dear, but it means, if I understand them correctly, the properties of a text which make it intelligible in a particular context to a particular reader. Thus, if I go to some effort to establish the differences between fountain and cone geysers while telling my teenage softball team how we are going to play hit-and-run, they will look at me as if I have suddenly gone insane. And my explanation might be perfectly cohesive with all kinds of good contrastive “however’s,” and “on the other hand’s,” but it will make no sense to the kids. To an audience of tourists in Yellowstone Park, however, watching an eruption of Old Faithful, which I have just identified as the park’s most famous cone geyser, it will cohere beautifully. As a matter of fact, a great deal of situation comedy is developed by material which is cohesive but not coherent . For example, a Yellowstone Park ranger, overhearing two camp caretakers discuss the desirability of shooting or at least severely frightening the District Ranger, might become unsettled until he learns that the District Ranger they refer to is not his immediate superior but a troublesome campground bear that they have nick named The District Ranger.

Coherence and Culture

The point I wish to examine now, however, is the extent to which our notions of coherence are culture-bound. I do not have sufficient language sophistication to explore cohesiveness in English sentences versus those of other languages, particularly those radically different from ours. However, coherence is another matter. Since it is tied to our understanding of contexts for dis­course, it is inevitably tied to our notions of the ways in which certain things belong together.

My thinking on this subject was initiated by George Campbell’s discussion, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, of those principles of thought which are the basis of the association of ideas. Of course, associationist psychology has long since been discarded, but these particular aspects of it, I believe, still have some validity. Campbell said that the basic principles of association are resemblance, contiguity, and causation (76-77). Now, one of the principal tenets in Benjamin Whorf’s Language, Thought, and Reality is that “all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same _picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated” (v).4 This leads me to pose several questions. (1) What is the basis for determining resemblance in cultures other than our own? For example, what factors of size, shape, sound, and color are thought to resemble each other in other cultures? Perhaps the more important question is, what causes errors of judgment (from our point of view, anyway) because of faulty assumptions derived from apparent resemblances? (2) What things belong in what relationship to each other? In our culture, we see appropriate places for houses, cars, sidewalks, etc Where do cultures which are decidedly non-western misread us and vice-versa? (3) What principles of induction and deduction exist in the thinking of other cultures? In all of these questions, I am assuming that what we call discourse which coheres or does not cohere may, in some instances, be dependent on our perception of the world in which we live as those perceptions are both reflected in and shaped by our language.

Consider the properties of languages which are quite different from English. Some have categories based on light and dark, others on freshness and dryness (one might note, however, the way in which the English term “green” connotes freshness when applied to vegetables, for example). Some languages simply have fewer words for colors than English does. For example, the natives of the island of Anjouan in the Comoro Islands near Madagascar, who speak Shinzwani, a language with strong affinities to Swahili, call a greenish-husked coconut black. Obviously, the color is doing more than representing literally a certain band on the spectrum. The phenomenon also occurs in English, however, in our use of black to designate a racial group whose skin color ranges from very light to very dark.

The larger point is that a culture’s language will tend to give its members a perception of which things resemble which; and the coherence of a passage of discourse, if it tacitly assumes resemblances between certain kinds of things, would be very different for different languages and cultures. The Comorans, by the way, have seven classes of objects represented in their language. These correspond roughly to semantic categories such as the following: humans, natural phenomena, abstract concepts, manufactured goods (or useful things), animals, body parts, and locations. I cannot explain this phenomenon except to observe that speakers of English, who group objects by masculine, feminine, and neuter categories, and who are always puzzled by European languages which ascribe masculine or feminine properties to objects we think of as neuter (Spanish’s el camino and la casa, for example), would find classifying objects as the Comorans do totally mind-boggling. But the point persists: the Comoran is going to see things in the abstract concepts class, for example, as belonging together. It is a principle of resemblance that would probably not even occur to the speaker of English.

Campbell’s second category, contiguity, presents similar prob­lems. For example, the English-speaking person, seeing a picture of a farmhouse, usually assumes the presence nearby of a barn. That is not a necessary connection for speakers of other languages. A Comoran, seeing a picture of a cow, for instance, will not assume a barn or a corral or a herd of cows, or even a pasture. In the Comoros, a cow is tethered individually and food is brought to it.5

The contiguity of family groupings is another trouble area. The generations of Americans who cut their anthropological teeth on Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture remember one of the mistakes made by early observers of the Dobu peoples in the East Indies. This was to assume that their primary in-group, like ours, is the imme­diate family. They later discovered that Dobus marry into groups which are hostile to their own. Primary in-groups actually consist of matriarchal or patriarchal relations. Since husbands and wives in the Dobu culture do not belong to each others’ primary in-groups, they live in a constant state of tension created by the hostility they feel toward members of each others’ families (130-45).

The third of Campbell’s principles, coherence produced by ideas of causality, or by inductive or deductive reasoning, is pretty common to all cultures. Whether or not people are superstitious or rational, they do perform inductive and deductive acts, and coherence built on those principles is likely to be cross-cultural. Ideas of what causes what, however, can be expected to vary cross-culturally.
Implications for Teaching Arrangement

Clearly, we cannot expect people to perceive the world through the eyes of persons whose languages and, hence, perceptions of the world differ radically from their own. However, I think it time for us to acknowledge this much: the teaching of arrangement in our composition classes over the past one hundred years has been largely a promoting of atrophied and inflexible structures which seriously inhibit perceptions which are not culture bound. A fur­ther and consequential effect is to seriously inhibit experimentation with organizational structures which do not reflect this tacit culture ­boundedness. Who can, in these times, justify the five-paragraph essay, the beginning-middle-end, or head-body-conclusion patterns when they are presented mechanically to students? It has been ten years now since Winston Weathers said:
One of our major tasks as teachers of composition is to Identify compositional options and teach students the mastery of the options and the liberating use of them. We must identify options in all areas in vocabulary, usage, sen­tence forms, dictional levels, paragraph types, ways of organizing material vito whole compositions [italics mine]; options in all that we mean by style. Without options, there can be no rhetoric, for there can be no adjustment to the diversity of communication occasions that confront us in our various lives . . . What I’ve been taught to construct is: the well-made box. I have been taught to put “what I have to say” into a container that is always remarkably the same, that—in spite of varying decorations—keeps to a basically conventional form: a solid bottom, four upright sides, a fine-fitting lid. Indeed, I may be free to put “what I have to say”’ in the plain box or in the ornate box, in the large box or the small box, in the fragile box or in the sturdy box. But always the box—squarish or rectangular. And I begin to wonder if there isn’t somewhere a round box or oval box or tubular box, if somewhere there isn’t some sort of container (1) that will allow me to package “what I have to say”’ without trimming my “content”’ to fit into a particular compositional mode, (2) that will actually encourage me to discover new things to say because of the very opportunity a newly-shaped container gives me (even though I can never escape containers—e.g., syntax—altogether), (3) that will be more suitable perhaps to my own mental processes, and (4) that will provide me with a greater rhetorical flexibility, allowing me to package what I have to say in more ways than one and thus reach more audiences than one. (5,1-2)

I suspect that there are at least two reasons why the “box” is still so assiduously taught. First, rigidly mechanical forms are easy to teach and easy to evaluate. Second, too many of our people think that their jobs are to teach students “academic discourse.” By aca­demic discourse, they mean practical matters such as writing book reports, essay questions, lab reports, and more theoretical works such as critical essays in various subject matter disciplines. Implicitly, however, they also mean that because this kind of discourse must be rigorously and tightly reasoned and should reflect the kinds of writing done in a particular discipline, it will necessarily be impersonal and be organized in a thesis, development, conclusion pattern. It will also screen out the off-the-wall transitions and juxtapositions of objects which are really quite common in current visual media and with which our students are quite familiar.

I think this much too narrow a conception of our tasks as teachers of composition. I think we should be preparing students to write a great many kinds of things for the variety of composing occasions which they will confront in “real” life. After all, one rarely writes only those papers required by one’s job. Angry citizens write letters to newspapers contesting building projects which they think waste taxpayers’ money. Husbands or wives give their spouses lists of tasks to perform, groceries to buy, etc. Friends are occasionally called upon to write eulogies of people who have died unexpectedly. For example, our department head has just requested from our faculty a collection of personal memories of one of our graduate students who died suddenly and completely unexpectedly of a stroke last January. The request came from his wife who is pregnant with their first child and who wishes to collect for that child some images of the father the child will never know. I do not think academic discourse is going to be suitable for this composing occasion.

My larger point is that I think we ought to be much more flexible in our thinking about arrangement than we have been. I am not advocating the abandonment of academic discourse. In one semes­ter, I would be very happy to see a student give me a paper explaining plate tectonics and its application to the geology of our region. But I would also like to have a meditation, containing reflec­tions on the choices one must make in life, and a paper in double voice dramatizing a strange and frustrating job interview.

If we are willing to do that, we turn the composition classroom into a place of liberation, not a place of confinement, and we draw on the full range of our students’ knowledge, experiences, and abilities. After all, isn’t that what we ought to be doing all of the time in the composition classroom?
Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas

NOTES
1With the editor’s permission, I wish to enter a brief disclaimer here. Readers of my recent work know of my resistance to traditional box-like patterns of organization. The original version of this essay began In a most unconventional fashion, but both the editors and the reviewers felt that it did not work. I have accepted that judgment, albeit with some reservations: it did work when I presented this paper at the 1986 CCCC meetings. I thus find myself in the paradoxical position of using a format which I find conventional and restrictive to argue for greater liberality in our conceptions about organization.
2Actually, I am not at all certain that we have dearly established the link between the classical pattern of arrangement and the emergence of the five-paragraph essay as a schoolroom exercise, or the emphasis on papers with a beginning, middle, and end, actually derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, not his Rhetoric, or even the pattern calling for an introduction, body, and conclusion, which might be a distortion of an organizational scheme presented in Plato’s Phaedrus. Knoblauch and Brannon are critical not only of contemporary rhetorical theory and practice but also of that of classical figures, particularly Cicero. For a response to their critique of Cicero’s concept of arrangement, see Richard Leo Enos, “Ciceronian Dispositio as an Architecture for Creativity In Composition: A Note for the Affirmative,” Rhetoric Review 4.1 (1985): 108-10.
3W. Ross Winterowd deals with the question of mechanical and organic form most recently in “Dispositio: The Concept of Form in Discourse” in Conqusition/ Rhetoric: A Synthesis. He is interested, as I am not, in sophisticated linguistic aspects of the problem, and I infer that he is not, as I am, disposed to argue the superiority of organic to mechanical form.
4The quotation actually occurs In Stuart Chase’s Foreword to language, Thought, and Reality, but he does not indicate the specific essay from which he took it.
5For information about the Comorans and for many insights into the languages of other peoples, I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Harriet Ottenheimer of the Kansas State University Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work.
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