to as Rhetoric and Reality throughout this chapter); and
5. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” 1988 (referred to as “Rhetoric and Ideology” throughout this chapter).
Throughout these works, Berlin insists that teachers become more reflexive about the ramification of their classroom practice for themselves, their students, their institutions, and the larger culture. The following challenge, one among many, is perhaps most representative of the “felt” dissonance that compelled him to this scholarship.16
The numerous recommendations of the “process”-centered approaches to writing instruction as superior to the “product”-centered approaches are not very useful. Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one’s competence as a composition instructor, it seems to me, resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student. (“Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories” 247)
Throughout these works, Berlin calls teachers to raise the stakes. His article, co-authored with Robert Inkster in 1980 (“Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice”), addresses the issue that would capture his intellectual and emotional energies for years to come: “we need to scrutinize carefully the epistemology implied by our practice in the teaching of composition” (14). More urgent, as illustrated in the above quoted passage from “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” Berlin ties the need to scrutinize the epistemology of practice directly to teachers’ competence, while in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century in American Colleges, his appeal expands to invoke a professional, teacher ethos and to foreground teaching as an ethical obligation. “One of the purposes of this study,” he writes, “has been to convince writing teachers of their importance. [. . .] Most students [. . .] learn what we teach them. For this reason, it is important to be aware of what we are teaching, in all its implications. [. . .] We owe it to our students and ourselves to make certain that we are providing the best advice that we can offer” (91–92). By 1987’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985, however, Berlin asks teachers to consider the implications of teaching beyond students’ personal welfare: “Our decision, then, about the kind of rhetoric we are to call upon in teaching writing,” he says, “has important implications for the behavior of our students—behavior that includes the personal, social, and political” (7). In “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” Berlin’s agenda is even more emphatically articulated as he writes: “It should now be apparent that a way of teaching is never innocent. [. . .] A rhetoric cannot escape the ideological question, and to ignore this is to fail our responsibilities as teachers and as citizens” (492–93). An abiding issue for Berlin, then, involves the responsibilities and obligations that teachers of writing can fulfill only by appreciating distinctions among rhetorics and their attendant writing processes.17
Berlin makes the connection between rhetoric and writing process explicit in yet another call for teachers of writing to understand the implications of their practices, as explained in his 1984 monograph, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Rhetorics are, he writes, multiple, varied, and changeable, characterized as “the codification of the unspeakable as well as the speakable. No rhetoric [. . .] is permanent, is embraced by all people, or even by some one person or group, at all times. A rhetoric changes” (1). The connection between rhetorics and writing processes, he says, has to do with the underlying assumptions of a specific rhetoric, for these determine
how the composing process is conceived and taught in the classroom. What goes into the process—the way in which invention, arrangement, and style are undertaken, or not undertaken, as is sometimes the case—is determined by the assumptions made, and often unexamined, about reality, writer/speaker, audience, and language. Each rhetoric, therefore, indicates the behavior appropriate to the composing situation. Beyond that, it directs the behavior of teacher and student in the classroom, making certain kinds of activity inevitable and other kinds impossible. (2)
There exists, then, at all times multiple rhetorics. In teaching writing, any sort of writing, we must inevitably use some process to teach the student, although notions of what constitute this process vary and emanate from both formal theory (institutionally legitimized) and informal theory (lore). Rhetorics have historically been concerned with notions of rhetorical situation/reality, speaker/writer, listener/reader, and language/discourse, while theories of writing process have variously addressed how the elements that constitute a writing process correlate with the elements of a particular theory of rhetoric. It is the relationship between rhetorics and processes that prescribes, or, according to Berlin, ought to prescribe, teaching and learning. Writing processes, then, represent material instantiations of theory and practice.
“Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice”
It is interesting to note the pastiche quality of James Berlin and Robert Inkster’s definition of rhetoric. Initially, they borrow Richard Young’s characterization of paradigm, a term that functions to allow/disallow what comes into the discipline, what is taught/not taught, what problems are deemed worthy/unworthy of inquiry, and what research is/is not valued for development. On the authority of “Abrams, Kinneavy, and other scholars,” Berlin and Inkster add the elements of the communication triangle—reality, writer, audience, and discourse—all of which must be reasonably justified for an “adequate conception of rhetoric” (2). Commenting on the recent emergence of alternative conceptions of rhetoric, they suggest that all these conceptions share a common feature: “the way in which the writer, the reader, and their relationship are imagined” (14).
But while the external components of current-traditional rhetoric are known, Berlin and Inkster write, the philosophical assumptions that underlie it are not so obvious. Their goal, then, is to explore current-traditional rhetoric, particularly its philosophical assumptions. The most important of these is epistemology, which, they say, involves “concepts of the mind, reality, and the relation between the two” (1). They then trace the epistemological assumptions of the current-traditional paradigm to assess its contribution to an adequate conception of “the rhetorical process,” which, they maintain, must account for the elements of the communication triangle: reality, writer, audience, discourse. “An adequate method of instruction in writing,” they write, “must give a prospective writer a conceptual framework that encourages exploration of each of the elements in the communication triangle in the attempt to bring forth discourse” (2). Changes in the way these elements of the communication triangle are imagined occasion further changes to “the way meaning is seen to occur and to be shared,” changes that are epistemological and thus carry profound ethical, social, and political ramifications (14).
Their method begins with an examination of the current-traditional paradigm’s historical origins, which, they say, will “provide a useful background” (1). They then proceed to examine four contemporary textbooks, using a cognitive map that entails reading the epistemological concepts of mind, reality, and the relation between the two across the communication triangle: reality, writer, audience, and discourse. They employ in this methodology a heuristic, which they explain is one of three available processes by which to work through any sort of cognitive or creative act. Placed along a continuum—algorithmic/heuristic/aleatory—the three available processes range procedurally from the algorithmic process, a strictly rule-governed process that produces predictable outcomes, to the aleatory process, which is completely random and produces unpredictable outcomes. The heuristic method, which is not a compromise between the poles but occupies “a wide middle ground of activities that are neither wholly rule-governed nor wholly random,” entails “a systematic way of moving toward satisfactory control of an ambiguous or problematic situation, but not to a single correct solution” (3). While Berlin and Inkster’s methodological benchmark draws upon the heuristic perspective, they incorporate the continuum itself into their interpretive matrix. This then becomes the underlying field by which they interpret the relation of reality and writer that constitutes the epistemology of the current-traditional
