The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

A (failed) lesson in writing
The limits of rhetoric

In 1997 Marilyn Sternglass published her landmark study of the teaching of writing, Time to Know Them. Sternglass had followed the progress of nine adult students at the City College of New York over a span of six years. Only one of these students was white, and all of them could be described as basic or under-prepared writers. Several spoke English as a second language. All of them worked outside jobs while taking classes part-time. And all of them had failed the notorious CUNY WAT (Writing Assessment Test) several times over the years. The WAT was a timed, on-the-spot test of a student’s ability to produce a passage of Edited Academic English. Thankfully, it is no longer used, but in the 1990s CUNY students could not take advanced courses without first passing it. The irony was that while all of the students Sternglass worked with struggled to pass the WAT, they were also all successful in completing the writing assignments for the courses they had taken. The test, in other words, was telling most of them that they were unprepared to do the work of courses they had already passed. Through her years of work with these writers, Sternglass assembled a rich trove of data to support a simple and compelling argument: if we offer students enough time and support, they will learn how to write.

But time counted against these students in several ways. As working adults, they needed to divide their time and attention among jobs, family, and school. Most of them also needed time and practice, sometimes years of it, to gain a ready fluency in a language they did not speak at home. They needed, that is, to learn not simply how to put their thoughts into English but how to do so quickly and accurately with the clock ticking on a timed test. And they needed to make timely progress toward their degrees or risk losing their academic eligibility and funding. So the time Sternglass argued that students should be allowed was for them a valuable commodity indeed.

But note that time in her title applies not to students but to teachers. The students Sternglass studied did their best work in courses that pushed them to connect their writing with their own ideas and experiences. While they may thus need time to learn, we need time to know and help them. This profound if quiet insight flies against the common belief that good teachers begin by already knowing who their students are and what they need to learn. It suggests that our work begins instead in listening and response.

In this chapter I look at two failures of listening. I link these failures to what I see as an overconfidence in rhetoric—the belief that what someone really needs in order to write well is a system to follow in doing so. The first text I’ll look at is one of the most studied in Western literature and philosophy: Plato’s Phaedrus, written somewhere around 370 BCE. The second is Peter Dimock’s brief and absorbing 1990 novel, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. In both texts a teacher elaborates a detailed rhetoric—that is, a system for speaking effectively and gaining the assent of your listeners. But in neither case does it become clear that the teacher has fully persuaded his own listeners or students. Phaedrus never once gets a chance to give a speech of his own in the dialogue that bears his name, so it’s hard to tell what he may have learned or not from Socrates. And Jarlath, the narrator of A Short Rhetoric, admits at the end of his long, obsessively detailed discourse that the response he expects from his readers is silence. I am intrigued by these gaps between theory and execution. Both texts, it seems to me, end up pointing to the limits of rhetoric, to those moments when one can no longer depend on a system but must instead listen and respond in the moment.

A (failed) lesson in writing

I can’t imagine a much better way to begin talking with a student than:

Phaedrus, my friend! Where have you been? And where are you going? (1)

Which is, of course, the first line of the Phaedrus. Socrates greets Phaedrus as a person in motion, an agent, someone who has both a history (where have you been?) and plans of his own (where are you going?). Perhaps most important, he hails him as his equal, his friend.

Unfortunately, the conversation between the two doesn’t continue long in this vein. In the scenes that follow, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss several speeches on the nature of love and try to derive from them some principles of speechwriting or rhetoric. Plato’s dialogue is thus, among many things, an account of a lesson in writing—the first I know of in literature. In it Socrates has many moments of wit and eloquence, and Phaedrus shows some appealing flashes of irreverence. But as the impromptu class progresses, each falls more and more into a familiar role—with Socrates waxing didactic as the teacher and Phaedrus growing quiet and acquiescent as his pupil.

And if this is a lesson in writing, it’s not a particularly successful one. Phaedrus shows no more signs of being able to produce a good speech at the end of Plato’s dialogue than he does at its beginning. Quite the contrary. The longer his conversation with Socrates goes on, the less and less he has to say. I am intrigued by how two brilliant and well-intentioned men talking together can seem to teach each other so little. I’m interested, that is, in reading the Phaedrus as a failed writing class.

I realize that to do so, I need to bracket out the very sorts of things most readers have felt Plato’s dialogue is all about: the nature of love, the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, the limits of writing as a medium of expression. But it’s the oddly familiar shape and rhythm of the dialogue that most draws my attention. For it seems to me that, as Plato dramatizes it, the conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus goes off track in much the same way many classes in writing continue to go awry today. There is an eerie familiarity to this ancient writing lesson. I think we can learn some things about teaching through tracing not only what gets said in Plato’s dialogue but what happens in it.

So, then, to quickly recap the “action” of the dialogue: When Socrates runs across him just outside the walls of Athens, Phaedrus is carrying a copy of a speech written by one of Socrates’s political and intellectual rivals, Lysias, a logographer, or professional speechwriter. Phaedrus admires the speech and hopes to memorize it. The two men sit down by a stream together, and Socrates presses Phaedrus to read the speech (he doesn’t trust Phaedrus’s memory). Once Phaedrus has finished reading, Socrates offers several criticisms of the text, arguing that Lysias has actually not said very much about his subject, which has to do with the obsessive aspects of erotic love. A little put out but also a little amused, Phaedrus dares Socrates to do better. Socrates improvises a second speech, which Phaedrus also likes. But Socrates isn’t happy with that speech, and so he makes yet another, much longer one, the so-called Great Speech, which finally satisfies him (and Phaedrus yet again) and from which he then derives several general rules of rhetoric before launching into an extended closing digression on speech, writing, and memory. Noting that the heat of the afternoon has died down a bit, the two men share a closing prayer and part ways.

But the charm of the dialogue lies in the moment-by-moment interactions of Socrates and Phaedrus. When they first meet, both men seem in a playful and flirtatious mood. Socrates allows Phaedrus to lead him outside his usual haunts in the city to an idyllic spot under a “chaste-tree” by a stream in the woods (6). As Phaedrus remarks, coyly: “The stream is lovely, pure and clear: just right for girls to be playing nearby” (4). The speech he and Socrates are so interested in is written from the perspective of a man who wishes to seduce a beautiful youth without claiming to be in love with him. When Phaedrus offers to summarize the speech from memory, Socrates tells him instead to “show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend” (3). (Is that a scroll in your pocket, or . . . ?) Love, or something like it, is in the air. Phaedrus produces the scroll and reads Lysias’s speech, which is aimed at winning the favors of a younger man, to an older man, Socrates, who is openly flirting with him.

Lyisas’s speech begins with a simple proposition: “You understand my situation. I’ve told you how good it would be for us, in my opinion, if this worked out” (7). The speaker then lists in a business-like manner the many benefits the youth he is propositioning might expect to gain from their affair. When Phaedrus finishes, Socrates exclaims:

I’m in ecstasy . . . I was looking at you while you were reading and it seemed to me the speech had made you radiant with delight . . . I followed your lead, and following you I shared your Bacchic frenzy. (12)

But Phaedrus will have none of that. He tells Socrates to stop joking around, to say what he really thinks. And what Socrates clearly thinks is that he can make a better speech than this one by Lysias, whom he accuses of just “showing off” by finding various ways to say the same thing in different words (13). So Phaedrus dares Socrates to “stop playing hard to get” and deliver a better speech (15). Teasingly, he asks the older man, “Do you understand the situation?” and threatens never to recite another speech for Socrates again if he doesn’t produce one of his own on the spot (15). So Socrates gives in and improvises a speech criticizing the desire of men to possess the youths they lust for, like “wolves love lambs” (22). Midway through, he is so enraptured by the flow of his own words that he stops and asks Phaedrus if he isn’t “in the grip of something divine” (18)—even though, a few minutes later, Socrates will, like the lovers he criticizes, begin to regret the rush of emotion that overwhelmed him and decide that he needs to offer another speech in praise of real and chaste love instead.

What I find so appealing, at least at this point in the dialogue, is how readily the two friends banter with each other. Early on, when Phaedrus pretends to worry that he is too amateurish a speaker to do justice to Lyisas’s speech, Socrates exclaims, “Oh Phaedrus, if I don’t know my Phaedrus I must be forgetting who I am myself” (2). The Phaedrus he knows, he goes on to tease, was always “going to recite it even if he had to force an unwilling audience to listen” (3). But Phaedrus has a knack for ironic quotation, and so when Socrates later claims to be no match for Lysias as a speechmaker, it’s his turn to say, “Socrates, if I don’t know my Socrates, I must be forgetting who I am myself” (15). The two men speak as intimates, equals. Neither defers to the other; neither silences the other. Instead, their conversation is characterized by a friendly give and take.

But this changes—at precisely the moment, it seems to me, when Socrates comes to believe he knows something about love and rhetoric that Phaedrus does not. He decides he must deliver a second, more perfect speech. This “Great Speech” is a dense monologue that runs for twenty-two pages—or about the same length of the entire conversation preceding it. (In contrast, Lysias’s speech is only about five pages long, Socrates’s first speech, six.) But it’s worth noting a peculiar stutter in Plato’s text right before Socrates launches into the Great Speech. Stating that his inner daimonion has warned him against the impiety of his first speech, Socrates now disowns it, asserting instead, bizarrely, that its true author is Phaedrus, who “charmed me through your potion into delivering it myself” (25). Even more surprising, Phaedrus fails to dispute this odd charge. Instead, he surrenders his early willingness to banter with his friend for the role of a student eager to listen and learn from his master (“No words could be sweeter to my ears, Socrates . . . Most probably, Socrates” [26])—a meek pose he does not break out of until near the end of the dialogue.

By the time Socrates begins his Great Speech, then, Phaedrus has been linked to two discredited speeches—one by Lysias and the other by Socrates himself—even though Phaedrus has actually written neither. The language of the student is defined by what it fails to accomplish. But what makes things even worse in this case is that it’s not Phaedrus who gets to learn from these mistakes. Rather, it is Socrates who delivers the Great Speech as Phaedrus gazes at him, rapt and admiring, like one of the schoolboys in Dead Poets Society.

I won’t contest the eloquence of the Great Speech, although I am not among its admirers. The thrust of the speech is that even if love is a form of madness, it is a divine one that can lead to wisdom. Socrates begins by stating that he aims to “convince the wise if not the clever” (29) but ends up spending most of his time elaborating a fanciful metaphor of the soul as a chariot pulled by two winged horses—one of which “is good, the other not” (44). The driver must somehow manage this mismatched pair. However random and “clever” that conceit may seem, I find the stance Socrates takes toward the “beautiful boy” addressed in the speech even less convincing. His aim seems less to seduce than to uplift. Unlike Lysias, he shows no interest in what the boy might desire from a romantic relationship with him but aims instead to convince him to want something else, something higher. His attitude is didactic, patronizing.

As is his stance now toward Phaedrus. Immediately after his speech, Socrates gently chides Phaedrus for failing to understand several things, both small and large: the pride of Lysias, the meaning of an obscure idiom, the motives of politicians, and, most important, “what distinguishes good from bad writing” (49—51). Indeed, from this point on in their conversation, very little that Phaedrus has to say merits a reply from Socrates, who goes on to offer two improvised lectures—the first on the rules for good writing, the second on the differences between speech and writing—punctuated by brief affirmations and encouragements from Phaedrus. Consider, for example, this string of responses that Phaedrus makes at this point in the dialogue to a series of claims by Socrates:

Yes.

I think I understand.

Certainly.

We certainly do.

Right.

Clearly.

What a splendid thing, Socrates, he will have understood if he grasps that!

Of course. (60)

And so, if the dialogue begins with Socrates asking Phaedrus where he is headed, it ends up following a route that has been set by Socrates alone. Phaedrus drops out of the discussion as someone with something of his own to say. The lessons on writing at the end of the dialogue are presented to him, but he is not asked to do anything with them. They are lessons about writing but not in writing.

While it is somewhat beside the point, I’d also note that the actual advice Socrates offers about speechwriting is curiously uninspired. I say curiously because it so oddly and accurately anticipates the bromides offered by modern handbooks on composition. A good speech, Socrates suggests, should be “put together like a living creature,” with a head, body, and legs that are “fitting both to one another and to the whole work” (62). It should thus begin with a preamble that states the issue to be discussed and end with a recapitulation that summarizes what it has been about. In between, the speaker should lay out evidence and arguments for his position (62—67). It’s all a template for a kind of early five-paragraph theme (a structure Plato himself seems oddly to ignore in his own writing), and Socrates seems a little bored by his own advice, rushing through a quick series of names and references to get to the point he really wants to make—which is about the differences between writing and speech.

Socrates encapsulates this distinction in the famous tale of Thamus and Theuth—which he seems to invent on the spot. Theuth was the Egyptian god of writing. In Socrates’s story, he tells the king of Egypt, Thamus, that writing is “a potion for memory and wisdom” (79). But Thamus rejects this view (he is not as pliant a student as Phaedrus), arguing that writing will instead

introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external, and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. (79—80)

Critics since Derrida (1983) have seized upon the paradox of a critique of writing that comes to us in writing. We would not know the importance of “remembering,” that is, unless Plato’s (written) dialogue first “reminded” us of it. But I am more interested here in the role the story plays in the unfolding conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus. For in responding to the tale of Thamus and Theuth, Phaedrus shows a bit of spunk for a change, kidding Socrates that he’s “very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever you want” (80). But when Socrates then chides him for paying more attention to the origin of the story than to its meaning, Phaedrus immediately backs down, saying, “I deserved that, Socrates. And I agree that the Theban king was correct about writing” (80). He is clearly a student who knows just how far to push the teacher, to assert a note of independence without crossing the line into open disagreement.

And yet, I’m not convinced that his agreement with Socrates is fully sincere. A few pages after telling the story, Socrates decides it’s time to wrap up his lesson about writing. As any teacher might, he turns to his student for a summary:

SO: And now that we have agreed about this, Phaedrus, we are finally able to decide the issue.

PH: What issue is that?

SO: The issue which brought us to this point in the first place. We wanted to examine the attack made on Lysias on account of his writing speeches, and to ask which speeches are written artfully and which not. Now, I think we have answered that question clearly enough.

PH: So it seemed; but remind me again how we did it. (83)

Remind? After having just listened to a story whose entire point hinges on the importance of remembering ideas on your own rather than relying on writing to be reminded of them, Phaedrus, the ever attentive and clever student, now needs to be reminded of what’s been said? I have to imagine him smiling as he replies to Socrates. It’s as if he’s asking the teacher if this will be on the quiz. Socrates refuses to go for the bait, answering Phaedrus’s request with his own straightforward rehashing of his argument, if perhaps ending on the slightest note of exasperation: “This is the whole point of the argument we have been making” (83).

Of course, the problem is that we have not made an argument at all. Socrates has made an argument, to which Phaedrus, with a note of irony here and there, has acquiesced. I find it touching that in his final words of the dialogue, Phaedrus reasserts his status as Socrates’s equal: “Make it a prayer for me as well. Friends have everything in common” (86). But the dialogue never really gives him a chance to speak as an equal with Socrates. He reads the speech by Lysias, takes the blame for Socrates’s first speech, and spends the final part of the dialogue mostly searching for different ways to say “how true” or “I agree.”

And so, I read the Phaedrus as a cautionary tale. Socrates, it seems to me, suffers from what the literary critic Stanley Fish (1990) has called “theory hope.” He thinks he can help Phaedrus learn how to make a better speech by formulating a set of rules, a rhetoric, for doing so. He replaces Lysias as a model with himself and, despite his early flirtatiousness with Phaedrus, does not seem seriously interested in listening to much that the younger man has to say. There is a revealing moment midway through the dialogue, for instance, when Socrates pauses long enough to ask Phaedrus, “And if you have anything else to add about the art of speaking?” But when Phaedrus replies, “Only minor points, not worth making,” this allows Socrates to say “well, let’s leave minor points aside” (68) and turn back to his own argument. Phaedrus is left without even minor points of his own to make.

It might be argued that Plato’s dialogue itself works differently—that in allowing us to notice how Socrates steamrolls over Phaedrus, he opens up the possibility of imagining a different sort of conversation. I’d like to think that, but I still believe we first need to admit that the dialogue shows just how long it has been that teachers have preferred listening to themselves rather than to their students. There is a difference between having a conversation and simply having an audience for your ideas. People interested in student-centered teaching often praise a style of give-and-take inquiry they idealize as the Socratic Method. But the Phaedrus dramatizes nothing like an open-ended conversation. My worry is that, in fact, we still do approach the teaching of writing too much in the manner of Socrates. Yes, we need to ask students where they’ve been and where they’re going. We also need to learn to pause for an answer.