Ideology and Freshman Textbook Production: The Place of Theory in Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

Of hundreds of pounds of freshman writing books produced each year, few are constructed with any overt indication that composition theory has ever existed. This essay argues that material presented in these numerous textbooks bears little relation to large work on composition theory that is widely available. The textbooks, with some important and hopeful exceptions, engage in a presentation of written language that appears to deny composition theory. Behind this appearance, however, are books which actually present unconscious theory. Two primary and mostly unacknowledged theories dominate writing textbooks: 1) a truncated version of five classical canons, and 2) modes of discoursebasically, exposition, description, narration, and argument along with various attachments. Both these tacit theories are illustrated by excerpts of various kinds of writing. These excerpts derive from a wide range of writing that has usually been published before and function as illuminating examples. The origin of modes in work of Alexander Bain has received extensive and excellent treatment.' Robert Connors writes that modes have been the most influential classification scheme of last hundred years (444). This system of categorizing writing exerted wide influence because of its presentation in Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric. Unlike modes, however, unconscious use of classical canons has received scant attention in discussions of writing textbooks, even though this structure forms many composition books. The five canons, widely used since Aristotle's time, had become a fixture in classical rhetoric by time of Hermagoras (Kennedy, Art 304). Cicero discusses five canons, or parts, of rhetoric in Book I of On Character of Orator (62). Here, Cicero, through his literary spokesman Crassus, lists