Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

In its institutionalized form - freshman composition
- current-traditional writing instruction served the
academy as a useful mud fence, guarding it from the
unsupervised and uncontained sprawl of self-initiated
analytical or critical student discourse. As Plato
complained thousands of years ago, written discourses
have the habit of floating all over the place and of
getting into the wrong hands unless some means of
control is established over who can write and who
will be read [...]. Current-traditional rhetoric was
the control developed within the academy. When
students were instructed in it, all concerned could
rest assured that few students would produce writing
that demanded to be read and heeded. (153)
With this role as “useful mud fence,” Current-Traditional
rhetoric would seem to have had a definite purpose wholly
outside of “writing,” Crowley’s explanation of which I offered
earlier, but to which I would return for the purpose of
underscoring her meaning:
[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)
From Berlin and Crowley’s criticisms, it would seem that
Current-Traditional rhetoric was not simply about writing, but,
much more so, about thinking: correct and proper thinking. And
so, with that said, I would ask the question again: is the rise
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