1977. Brent Henze
of PMLA, William Schaefer, as he concluded his term at the beginning of 1978. As we will see, this sense of intellectual ferment also influenced the conduct of composition in 1977.
We don’t mean to paint an entirely negative portrait of the state of the Union, higher education, and English studies in 1977. There were exhilarating moments and positive developments too in the wake of the celebration of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. Achievements in the space program thrilled Americans, and Rocky Balboa triumphed over Apollo Creed (as Alex Haley’s ancestors had triumphed over tremendous adversity in Roots) in a manner that somehow vindicated American individualism and ethnicities. Not for nothing was Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” the sunny and bright Song of the Year 1977. But from our current perspective it is difficult to understand the 1970s in general and 1977 in particular as anything less than anxious and difficult.
Sidebar: The Birth of TOPOI
Hugh Burns
In just 1977, when the world was more analog than digital, before word processors had replaced typewriters, when consultants were paid big bucks to explain the differences between hardware and software, I started programming computers.
Two years before, the United States Congress had created a line item in the personnel budget of the United States Air Force Academy mandating that the Department of Defense authorize one “slot” for a certified doctoral rhetorician to direct composition and speech courses in Colorado Springs so that future Air Force generals would not receive poorly reasoned, poorly edited, and massively stupid letters from second lieutenants—or so I was told.
In any event I was ordered to conclude my duties as a detachment Commander outfitted in fatigues on the eleven-square mile island of Ie Shima in the middle of the East China Sea and to PCS (permanently change station) to the University of Texas at Austin to complete a PhD in rhetoric—before returning to the USAF Academy as Course Director of Composition and Speech. In January 1977, I arrived on the spacious forty acres at the University of Texas at Austin and began my doctoral program.
On a Monday in January, I attended my first rhetoric course—and my first computer science course. By day and in a well-window-lit seminar room, I was led by James L. Kinneavy through Aristotle’s Rhetoric, chapter by chapter, proof by proof, enthymeme by enthymeme, counterpart by counterpart, to recover the wonders of heuristics and the available designs of verbal reasoning about uncertainty. By night and in an underground computing center, I was guided by George H. Culp loop-by-loop, string-by-string, and if-then-by-goto-statement, to discover the delights of algorithms and the available designs of mathematical reasoning about certainty. For weeks, sealed up in the basement of UT’s Parlin Hall between book cases and working with two dumb terminals hardwired (thanks to Susan Wittig’s National Science Foundation Grant) to a Digital DEC-10 mainframe computer in the Humanities Research Center off Guadalupe drag, I wrote computer programs that “knew” the answers to every clever multiple-choice or true-false question I could think to ask about English grammar and American literature. I programmed software to respond either “Correct” or “Incorrect” to such questions as “True or false? The principal principle for principals principally is to be principled.” Then, just as the blue bonnets started painting the Texas hill country, I had an idea: what if computers were stupid and humans were smart, what would happen?
In other words, what if the principal principles of designing computer-assisted instruction were not certain? What would happen if, following Aristotle’s first enthymeme topic in his Rhetoric about considering opposites, I started programming computers not to “know” the correct answer it transmitted to the green CRT screen? Would users suspend disbelief? Would my punch cards be bent, mutilated, or torn? Would my graduate committee allow me to bring an analytical engine into Parlin Hall’s humanities garden? Would I have any friends outside of this basement? Would I graduate? Would I eventually prevent second lieutenants from sending poorly reasoned, poorly edited, and massively stupid letters to three-star generals? Would, more importantly, writers invent better arguments, find better evidence, and truly search for the available means of persuasion?
And so it happened. In 1977, I wrote a computer program called TOPOI. The program invited writers to answer open-ended questions derived from Aristotle’s twenty-eight enthymemes on topics of their choice. I programmed in BASIC and the computer did what I asked it to do: stimulate one writer at a time to discover, recover, wonder, or think about their definitions and key terms; their reasons to trust, their explanations, and their specific details; their private opinions, their public perceptions, their causes and effects; their costs, conditions, and better ways; their responsibilities to research in libraries, archives, and even books. There was no time limit. There was no final score. There was no right answer. There was only a close encounter of the rhetorical invention kind. There were only questions. A dissertation followed.
In 1977, I first asked not what my students could do for me on a dumb terminal, but what I could do for my students with all the available means of technology. In 1977, I learned that I could program a computer to be artificially intelligent, and I was proud of it. In 1977, with a deeper sense of purpose and audience, I began to teach by asking students what they thought about, what they wanted to say, what they wanted write about, and what they wanted to do for others.
True or false? A principal pioneering computational rhetorician is still asking questions and still investigating human creativity, humane consciousness, and harmonious chaos.
4 Composition in 1977: The National Conversation
What might be done in response to all of these difficulties, all of this sense of crisis and controversy, all of this attention to the nation’s literacy woes? That was the problem that faced writing teachers and professionals struggling to develop the field of rhetoric and composition in 1977. There was no shortage of solutions proposed by departments of English that were using composition as a place to work out their own difficulties and that were in the midst of being both challenged and galvanized intellectually.
Old Time Religions: Traditionalism and Current Traditionalism
Not every proposed solution was innovative, of course. As you might expect from the counter-reformation voices we quoted in the previous chapter, some people prescribed a stiff dose of traditional medicines: a focus on the expository modes and/or on “ basic skills,” a Great Books curriculum, and other measures associated with what Richard Young in an essay published in 1978 dubbed “current-traditionalism” in composition.13 Young’s essay called attention to the resiliency of current-traditional pedagogy in the nation’s composition courses: the “emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; an analysis of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and research paper” (31). Proceeding from a positivist, “windowpane” view toward language, current traditionalism depended on the publication of handbooks to reinforce its obsession with correctness and with static forms such as the five-paragraph essay and the research paper. To teachers of writing who lacked formal training and who were comfortable teaching as they had been taught themselves, current-traditionalism offered a formulaic approach to invention (if invention was considered at all), a linear view of composing that reduced revision pretty much to correction, and a “bottom-up,” not a “top down,” approach to instruction (i.e., instruction began with words, sentences, and then paragraphs, rather than proceeding from overall plans and strategies that then generate local sentences and paragraphs). Many teachers of current-traditionalism, dedicated and experienced or not, mainly understood themselves to be assignors and correctors of papers that tended to be required year after year; learning to compose was regarded largely as a matter of learning rules for logic and etiquette.14
For many teachers of writing, learning to write was also a matter of learning forms known as the expository modes. Advocates of the so-called modes—description, narration, exposition, and argumentation—could trace their instruction to the nineteenth-century work of Alexander Bain, who held that each mode had “its own subject matter, its own organizational forms, and its own language” (D’Angelo, Conceptual 115); descriptive