Opportunities for Classical Rhetoric
in Required Writing Courses
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Opportunities for Classical Rhetoric
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It’s not news that our students come to us with a few different ideas about what to expect in a college or university setting. Such variance in expectations is probably even greater in basic writing or first-semester writing courses in which the students are making their initial attempts at higher education, some just a few months removed from high school and others a number of years removed from any formal education. I’ve discovered, though, that—no matter what their expectations were--most of my students seem to accept the marquee names of classical rhetoric as somehow fitting in a college or university setting, and the students tend to bend their efforts toward learning what these ancient names can do for their contemporary needs.
In the modern era of composition studies, many scholars and practitioners have made use of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric to convey precepts of brainstorming, organizing, and delivering writing assignments. A survey of textbooks and journal articles would likely reveal that this reliance on classical rhetoric is utilized more in first-year writing classes than in basic writing classes, but some fundamentals can be applied easily and effectively in all levels of undergraduate writing instruction.
One idea borrowed from the Ancient Greeks is that sequence of communication assignments known as the progymnasmata. The principal attraction of this series for modern teachers of writing is that each assignment can be modified for local and contemporary interests, and each assignment builds upon the previous ones. Thus, writers who are tentative in their abilities to produce college-level writing might well find comfort in such a system. Although there is some variance in how different classical teachers ordered the sequence, Frank D’Angelo suggests this version in his textbook Composition in the Classical Tradition:
Each of the 12 assignment types depends on the types earlier in the sequence so that, for example, students would need to understand the characteristics of a narrative before writing an adequate description, and so forth. Here is a link to my own version of this assignment sequence for a first-semester writing class: http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/bolin/eng101syl.html. My version can easily be modified to fit other contexts such as a basic writing course.
Furthermore, because classical rhetoric offers a number of systematic ways to study communication, one can take advantage of yet another feature when confronting issues in contemporary writing classes. An important consideration is the use of stasis theory, often credited to Hermagoras, to determine help students learn about intellectual property. Often, students are given definitions of plagiarism that, at first blush, seem quite direct but that, in practice, turn out to be almost useless. The standard definition might go something like this: “Using another’s ideas without giving proper credit is plagiarism.” However, student writers—and not just basic writers—are left wondering how much of the vast network of information is considered common knowledge or how much paraphrasing is allowed with scant or no attribution. Stasis theory can help the writing teacher set class policy and help the student writers understand the intricacies of intellectual property.
Following are the four questions stases, including commentary about plagiarism:
Conjecture: The first step, of course, is to ask if plagiarism has occurred in any given situation. For most teachers, that question arises because of suspicion. While reading student papers, we come across one that trips an internal alarm. The paper, or a passage in the paper, sounds out of place with the student’s usual voice or with our perception of what a student’s voice ought to sound like. Richard Murphy describes two such occurrences, one involving a student who plagiarized from Joyce scholarship for a paper on Joyce’s “The Dead,” and the other involving a student who wrote a riveting personal account of battling anorexia. The first student did, indeed, plagiarize, but the second student did not and only admitted to doing so after realizing that Murphy believed strongly that she did and would continue interrogating her about her sensitive personal battles until she admitted plagiarizing (Murphy ). In both cases, the flow of the students’ prose, more sophisticated than he hadexpected, triggered his suspicions.
Murphy’s essay serves to remind us that sometimes our suspicions can lead us clumsily astray when we attempt to confront students with charges of plagiarism. He implies that we teachers of writing have become too sensitive to the potential that our students will try to cheat us, that they will not take seriously our carefully crafted assignments, that they respect us so little they will attempt dishonesty. His experiences remind us of the importance of carrying through with conjecture; we must be comfortably close to certain before we confront a student about possible plagiarism. This need for near certainty moves us into the next stasis.
Definition. Once the teacher determines that something happened, something out of the ordinary, at any rate, the teacher must then examine whether or not that event can be defined as plagiarism. This is no easy task when you consider that almost every definition available is distressingly vague. So many policies define plagiarism as the presenting of others’ ideas as one’s own, but such an imprecise definition does not distinguish between ideas that are common knowledge in certain circles and ideas that are more esoteric. Complicating matters even more, Darsie Bowden offers a survey of the uses of plagiarism, including the giving of aid in a writing center (Bowden). So strictly do we adhere to the doctrine of intellectual property in capitalist societies that we err on the side of the ridiculous, worrying that offering possible phrases to student writers, even holding their pens during a session, might cultivate in the student writing the fruits of our own imagination.
An additional problem to address is that some teachers factor in student intent when they define plagiarism while others do not. The thinking here is that students have been instructed in how to provide proper attribution so any deviation from that system must be intentional. A cursory look at the policies of a number of universities, however, shows a propensity for allowing the occasional mistake in attribution. Even so, if the university or department policy is too vague in defining plagiarism, each teacher must attempt a more Aristotelian one by taking a particular incident and placing it into or out of a larger, more general classification called plagiarism. In the case described at the beginning of this presentation, one would have to try to classify the selling of an original paper to a paper mill as plagiarism in order to punish that student and to set the precedent for future classes.
Quality. Related, then, to defining a particular act as plagiarism is the third step—deciding how egregious the act is. Even if we decide that plagiarism has been committed, we might also want to explore the degree of malice involved. Perhaps the student became lost in the confusing jargon of a particular discipline and then resorted to copying large sections. Perhaps the student waited until the 11th hour to begin writing the paper, and the plagiarism was more the result of carelessness than malevolence. These considerations qualify the definition of plagiarism and help to determine how we will administer punishment or admonishment. For example, one might decide that the student who bought the paper from an Internet paper mill was clearly dishonest in attempting to receive credit for someone else’s work. However, one might also determine that the student who wrote a paper and then sold it to an Internet paper mill was—while not entirely blameless—a degree less dishonest because that student did not attempt to achieve any academic gain in the course.
Procedure. Finally, the determining and defining must result in some action, preferably in line with a previously stated policy. With the move from the specific to the general in the stases, each incident of plagiarism can be scrutinized according to the existing policy, along with all the contextual matter and other circumstances, to determine exactly what procedure should be employed in each case. However, this attention to procedure for each case necessitates a review of the work going on behind the scenes. We might ask what our own work in reducing plagiarism involves. There are at least two schools of thought regarding procedure and policy. The first is to spend time and resources attempting to identify and punish plagiarism as it occurs. The second is to invest that time and those resources into teaching about intellectual property in an effort to diminish occurrences of plagiarism. We tend toward one or the other depending upon personality, circumstance, and teaching philosophy. Moreover, this stage of the stases helps encourage consistent examination of the efficacy of our policy.
Questions
Assignment sequences
Classical rhetoric
Intellectual property
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