DFaye Anderson

Professor B. Gleason

ENGL 0862

Dec. 2014

Response #6

Error by Joseph Harris

                        This is better than reality TV, I thought, amused by Joseph Harris’ account of the firestorm between John Rouse and Gerald Graff.  “…if he manages  a decent livelihood it is only because he has somewhere or other submitted to enough socialization to equip him to do something for which somebody is willing to pay him,” Graff wrote of Rouse in the journal College English (417). Ouch!  At least the kids in the schoolyard are direct when they disparage your heritage.  

Rouse though, was no shrinking violet.  The dispute was provoked by his criticism of the book, Errors and Expectations by Mina Shaughnessy, a colleague of Graff’s.  According to Harris, Rouse “went ferociously on the attack….” accusing Shaughnessy of misunderstanding the needs of her basic writers because she was fixated on fixing them, on socializing them to make them “acceptable” (418).

Gentlemen! Go to your corners, I wanted to tell them.  Shaughnessy’s crime was to preach grammar over substance, over ideas. Proofreading and correcting for spelling, punctuation, etc. as opposed to revising for clarity, development and organization of ideas. “A primer on teaching correctness…” is how Harris describes it (419).  In addition, the focus was always on looking for what’s wrong with  a piece of writing, and never on what is working in the piece. Rouse felt Shaughnessy was dismissive of other “Englishes” and didn’t value what students bring from their cultures.  Then too, she did portray herself and friends as “pioneers” and the students as “new frontiers,” an unfortunate choice of words at best, for a practitioner of the art of communicating with words.

What intrigued me most, was the specter of the eternal split, the dichotomy, the Great Divide that man wrestles – the separation between  body and soul.  The body is the “fix my grammar” side (Graff), concerned with physical look of a piece, the mechanics of a piece of writing. The soul then is represented by the ideas expressed in a piece. (Rouse).  The body side is also the vocational side, the “get your hands dirty” side, and the intellectual part, the critical thinking side, is connected with the soul.

In that vein, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute (my emphasis), the proponent of vocational training for former slaves, himself a former slave, would represent the grammar side and W. E. B. Du Bois, the writer, poet, journalist and race man, represents the soul.  Therein lays the rub. Shaughnessy, a former faculty member here at CCNY, had pretty fair liberal credentials.  Speaking of basic skills writers, she said, “…problems with college writing stemmed not from a lack of intelligence, but from inexperience” (418). Yet, as Harris points out, she never asks her students to make connections in their writings to their lives or to speak to their feelings. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t even have students revise their work, so the opportunity to reconsider an idea, to develop it clearly, or to change one’s mind, is lost forever.

Of course, we don’t need to revise ideas if those ideas aren’t seen as valuable. One need not go back and rework a piece for development, or even energy or rhythm, if those things are not part of the conversation.  I see validity in both sides of this argument, though, as I age and learn, I find myself moving closer to Rouse’s thinking.  Developing facility in fixing run on sentences won’t make me a better writer. Who wants to read correctly punctuated blandness?  

Works Cited

Graff, Gerald. “The Politics of Composition: A Reply to John Rouse.” Teaching  Composition.      

            Ed. T. R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2008. 417. Print. 

Harris, Joseph. “Error.” Johnson 418.

Harris, Joseph. “Error.” Johnson 419.

Harris, Joseph. “Error.” Johnson 418.