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January 09, 2006
crafting rhetoric (genre 25.1/25)
Fahnestock, Jeanne. "Genre and Rhetorical Craft." Research in the Teaching of English 27:3 (1993): 265-71.
1 sentence summary aviva freedman defines genres too unclearly in her arguments against (much) explicit instruction, leaving their place relative to rhetoric uncertain; in rhetoric, some elements of genre have always been explicitly taught & should continue to be so.
265. important questions: "what level of specificity is required in the description of genre for teaching purposes? would it have to include all the details of language production in all the possible sentences?....if we decalre that all the adequate description of a genre means a hierarchically-ordered set of several hundred rules, like a computer program with embedded subroutines, we could certainly declare explicit teaching of any genre impossible."
266. of course, "at too abstract a level of description, genre distinctions could be as useless to teach at too precise a level of description"
267. miller's hierarchies make more sense to her than freedman's ways of describing the stuff; and then there's history, wherein "to freedman's questions about whether the explicit teaching of genre is necessary, possible, or useful, the practice of centuries would answer 'yes,' 'yes,' and 'yes.'"
268. "a comparison of the teaching of writing to the teaching of a craft" in freedman's presentation includes an "assertion that any craft is ever taught without a conscious awareness of technique"--jf disagrees: "freedman seems to imagine a silent blacksmith who passes on tactile knowledge to a watching apprentice without ever verbalizing a rationale for what is going on; nothing conscious need even occur in either head, master or pupil....there is tactile knowledge, yes, but there is also an overwhelming body of transmitted verbal explanation and systam. there is no craft or 'art' without an explication of its principles so that they can be applied across situations"
270. "many of the strategies [explicitly] taught are revivals of features in the classical rhetorical curriculum: the enthymeme, the picheireme revived in the toulmin model, the stases, and the common topics....it would be difficult to isolate these concepts from the setting in which they are taught, a setting that always includes the analysis of models, 'pushed output,' and the close mentoring of students--in short, all the devices of good pedagogy that freedman applauds. to test the efficacy of instruction in techne versus no instruction in techne, we would need a class of wolf children."
(okay, so maybe i just included that last bit because i love anybody who writes serious scholarly sentences about wolf-children.)
Posted by ttobryan at January 9, 2006 04:19 PM