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cannot be discussed because they are either illusory
[…] or they cannot be contained within acceptable
structures […]. This very exclusion, meanwhile,
encourages a mode of behavior that helps students in
their move up the corporate ladder – correctness in
usage, grammar, clothing, thought, and a certain
sterile objectivity and disinterestedness. (74-5)
Similar to Berlin, composition scholar Sharon Crowley also wrote
about the 19 th -Century “roots” of Current-Traditional Rhetoric in
her book The Methodical Memory. Late in her work, she offers an
estimation of that unspoken campaign for socialization for which
writing was used throughout American education in the 1800s and
much of the next century as well that is more scathing than
Berlin’s:
[L]ate nineteenth-century attempts to
standardize composition instruction may have sprung
from motives other than that of relieving composition
teachers from some of the burden of paper grading.
[L]anguage arts instruction was efficiently (because
silently) geared to include those whose manners and
class it reflected. Those whose manners were not
middle-class either adapted or were excluded.
[…]
The formal standards […] imposed on student
writers reflected ethical and social values fully as
much as intellectual ones. A discourse marked by
unity, coherence, and emphasis, stringently
construed, would of necessity reflect a strong sense
of limitations, of what was possible, as well as a
grasp of the proper relations of things in the
universe. (137-8)
What we have here, as Connors, Berlin, and Crowley have
observed, is rhetoric, in the form of those courses in freshman
composition new to American colleges and universities of the
1800s, becoming deluged by different streams of social and
cultural pressure – and adapting to it. To put things simply,
American society got what it had been asking for with the
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