Workways for theme-building (Rev. ed.)

Front matter

WORKWAYS

FOR

THEME-BUILDING

Part One: The Strategy of Planning a Course. 5 Section

1. For Teachers Who Have No Theory of Composition. 5

2. What ,1s Your Theory of Composition?. 5

3. Modern Facts about Rhetoric. 8

4. The Road to Results. 8

5. Review Is the Foundation of Success. 12

6. What’s the Use of Grammar?. 14

7. Planning a Course—The Five Elements. 19

8. The Lessons for a One-Year Course. 30

9. The Lessons for a Second-Year Course. 36

10. Some “Best Devices” for Handling Theme Topics... 38

Part Two: Comments on the Lessons. 44 WORKWAYS

for

Theme-Building, Revised

Section 1: For Teachers Who Have no Theory of Composition

In Sections 8 and 9 are definite suggestions as to the best order of lessons for different kinds of courses in Theme- Building. If you do not care about the reasons for the sug¬ gestions, but prefer to take them on trust, skip all the rest of Part One. Sections 2-7 are for those inquiring spirits who wish to see what underlies a text-maker’s advice.

Section 2: What Is Your Theory of Composition? (The only philosophical section of Workways)

I was once in conversation with a Commissioner of Edu¬ cation who had invited me to speak at a convention of super¬ intendents. He was a veteran who had during forty years, in two states, directed educational policy. “What,” I asked him, “would you most like to have said about this vexed problem of composition?” And he replied as follows:

“I am sure that the greatest need in teaching composi¬ tion is that pupils should be interested in the topics assigned. I would, for example, urge teachers to use local history and to arouse an eagerness for presenting the subjects with zest. If pupils are enlisted in such an enterprise, they will write well. If they do not like the subjects assigned, their themes will be full of errors. I would have no emphasis put on any rules or technicalities; I should rely on stimulating interest.” That is one theory of composition. It is held by many cap¬ tains of education; it is a generous and noble conception; it warms the heart; and there is doubtless some truth in it.

Another theory, more widely held and more esthetic, has been thus set forth by a very noted president of a famous American university: “There is a theory that the way to teach composition is to have pupils write constantly and on all sorts of topics. This is a fallacy. The way to teach young people how to write good English is to teach them to read good English.” That is a beautiful thesis, sanctioned by ages of rhetorical authority. It is bolstered by many an ancient maxim such as “Give your days and nights to the study of Addison”; “Make yourself a sedulous ape of the masters,” etc., etc.

The commissioner and the president would advise against the use of any textbook. In the serene regions where they live insphered the teaching of composition is a process by which ardent idealism kindles divine flame in the eager mind of youthful genius.

From such lofty idealism you may descend through all the grades of theory, down to a level where school composi¬ tion is regarded as nothing but a drive at minimum essen¬ tials. On what stage do you live? If you hold any general theory, it is useless to expect the best results from any text¬ book until you realize what your position is. You cannot plan a course to advantage until you have defined your principles to yourself. Then you can see where a textmaker’s ideas differ from yours and to what extent they are to be disregarded.

Workways does not invite any teacher to change his the¬ ory. It does not set forth any theory, because Theme-Build¬ ing is not based on such a foundation. These books simply record a practice that has been gradually developed during a quarter of a century of work with American students—a kind of practice that is very general among experienced teachers. If you have a theory of teaching, you will natu¬ rally suppose that I have one, and you will look for it and expect a conflict with it. Cease looking. Keep your ideal and study how it may be adapted to a working program.

I never could arrive at any such theory as “arousing eagerness” or “reading good books,” nor have I ever met any successful teacher who worked by such a theory. Every good teacher that I know does all he can to arouse eagerness and to encourage reading, but he never relies on such pleasures to produce results. He depends upon a definite, practical program of work. He no more succeeds by inspirational devices than an architect rears buildings by playing music to bricks and mortar—though he would not deny that Orpheus could do all the work with a lyre. He simply admits that he is not an Orpheus.

The age of the lyre seems to have passed. If you still have some faith in it, be thankful and lighten your labors as much as possible. But be skeptical. Keep an eye on the results and see if they are as firm as they should be. Com¬ pare your theory with the following statement, which is quoted from page 12 of the Pilot Booh for Sentence and Theme, Revised, and is the sixth of eight paragraphs about “securing results.”

“Most of our critics, who print exhortation or speak it* from platforms, are people who have no practice in the art of teaching. They use vague terms.and general assumptions which are misleading in the highest degree. They never de¬ scend to the minute and discouraging facts of daily life in the classroom, where an average teacher deals with average pupils who have the average amount of ignorance of rudi¬ ments and the average lack of ambition for excellence. Pro¬ fessors of literature, editors, administrators—all assume insensibly the gifted teacher and the eager pupil; they speak in terms of professional attainments, and speak in terms, not of means, but of beautiful achievement. They appreciate generously the results of such a course as that given in Sen¬ tence and Theme, but they are apt to be horrified at the only means yet known for reaching the results. They suppose that pleasing sentences are secured by dwelling in an esthetic atmosphere. The more you study their comments, the more you will perceive that this is the case. They sorely mislead us by never condescending to the humble means which we teachers have to use. A violin is not born of symphonies, but is manufactured in a shop where shavings and a glue pot are to be seen. Sentence and Theme tries to be a shop for real work.”

So does Theme-Building try to be a shop. Don’t be antagonized by the humble equipment, but adapt it to the higher methods and to your particular theory.

Section 3: Modern Facts about Rhetoric

Rhetoric has been until very recently a university sub¬ ject. It has been a fine art designed for a select body of college students who have had a thorough linguistic training and who are ambitious to improve the niceties of their style. Professors have made textbooks for this select class of ad¬ vanced students, and their treatises have been models for high-school books. Elementary knowledge has been presup¬ posed ; all the rudimentary skills have been assumed as matter of course; the ambition and pride and sensitiveness of the student have been taken for granted. And the assump¬ tions were reasonably true as late as 1890, or even 1900.

They are now true of only a very small percentage of high-school students. I quote from page 14 of the Pilot Book:

“The great change in the conditions of composition has come about within forty years, most of it within twenty years—too fast for us to keep up with. Any person fifty years old was educated in a different world from the one in which we now try to teach composition. ‘Why should my boy,’ exclaims an irate parent, ‘have to learn punctuation? I never had to learn it. I went through college without it.’ The answer is very simple: ‘You could not go through a good high school now without it.’ That is one little chip to show how the current of composition swirls and eddies where it never ran before. We teachers have to adjust ourselves to an unparalleled revolution in all the technique of an art. The method that secured results in 1890 is powerless in modern life. We must face the facts as they now are and adapt our technique to them.”

Section 4: The Road to Results

If a teacher is to fit the young people of today for the life that now is, he must adapt himself to the facts of mod¬ ern conditions. To old-fashioned or dainty people these facts may seem disagreeable. To cheerful dwellers amid things-as-they-are the facts are nowise disturbing. But they are peculiar.

The road to results now runs much more through rudi¬ ments than it used to. Indeed the track has changed so far and so suddenly that many a middle-aged teacher is placidly promenading in the shady lanes of antiquity, while the traf¬ fic of composition passes, unknown to him, upon a new and crowded highway. Here the sights and sounds are strange; to elderly people they may seem uncouth. But here they are, as certain as the sedans and trucks of our era. This manual is no place for an explanation of the new method of minimum essentials, or of all the new technique of teaching the elements—for example, the new knowledge of the spelling problem or the use of grammar as a rhetorical tool. That ground is covered in the Pilot Booh, pages 10-60. Any teacher who wishes to understand all these antecedents to a course in Theme-Building should apply to the publishers for a copy of the Pilot Booh for Sentence and Theme, Revised. It will be sent without charge.

I will present here some sample excerpts, so that you may judge whether the Pilot Booh would be of any use.

Take no advice on trust. “We teachers of English should be suspicious of all advice that is offered to us in this age of educational revolution. I want every teacher to read the following pages with a healthy skepticism and a deter¬ mination to try out the statements before accepting them. In every case where you are surprised or incredulous remem¬ ber that I was once equally incredulous. I was persuaded only by the hard knocks of experience, and I record here only what experience has taught me.”

Experience. “I had taught fifteen years before it occurred to me to publish anything about teaching composi¬ tion. All that while I worked along as a teacher should; keeping his eyes on the daily facts, seeing what Jack and Bill have failed to understand, and trying to find some way to make them understand. I had never so much as seen the cover of a pedagogical journal, never knew what an experi¬ ment or an investigation was, never had a thought of trying to tell anybody anything about teaching. I moiled along in a little school, hunting for devices that would start operations in the brains of Jack and Bill.”

The spelling mystery. “I can explain the mystery of spelling most vividly by giving a sketch of my own efforts to grapple with it. When I began to teach, in 1898, I was entirely unconscious that there was any mystery. I trust¬ fully dictated 25 words a day from a speller, advancing from autumn, yellow, and sword, through sickle, scythe, and squirrel, to garrulous, grotesque, and magnanimity . I never heard or read a word to show me that I was wasting the boys’ time. In 1914 I grew so bold as to formulate the truth —obvious enough now at last—in an article for the English

Journal, called ‘Intensive Spelling’.The student

who masters 100 forms has skill for mastering all forms. If he has the will to go on to a mastery of 300, he pan be cap¬ tain of his fate thenceforth. That is education; it is mental power. What seemed a dreary little arena of ‘only 300’ will be shown by the new knowledge to be a conquest of Canaan.”

The wrong kind of grammar. “Grammar is championed for several reasons, all poor: (1) That it ought not to be given up hurriedly; (2) that it is good mental training; (3) that it informs us about usage; (4) that it enables us to speak correctly. The last reason is the one most commonly

given; yet there is hardly any truth in it.You

may begin to guess that most of the antagonism to grammar is merely a dislike of certain elements that have always been the prominent ones in the textbooks of the past. I heartily share this dislike. I think that nearly all the study of forms and classifications and mechanical rules is worse than useless, that it is harmful. There is an entirely different conception of grammar, one which I attempted to explain in the School Review for April, 1916.”

Punctuation. “When I emerged from graduate courses in English and began to teach in a school, my mind was of course all full of West Saxon and Chaucerian pronunciation; I had notebooks on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which I thought would dazzle the seniors beneficially; I was stocked with gems of criticism and a wealth of literary sources. The subject of punctuation was nowhere visible on my horizon. But I thought it was well that young men bound for college should use periods at appropriate places and should so use commas as to ‘express their meaning.’ A very naive, comical tenderfoot I appear to myself now as I look back on the autumn of 1898 and recall my ignorance of the powers of schoolboys. ‘Express their meaning’! I might as well have expected them to express their sense of harmony on a pipeorgan before they knew the difference between manual keys

and pedal keys.The fact of experience is that

such drill teaches variety of forms, secures freedom of expres¬ sion, and is in the end a real stimulus to spontaneity.”

The difficulties of training in diction. “Some time our American schools w T ill do a great deal with vocabulary build¬ ing. In French schools such training bulks large; it is done with a well-developed technique and is effective. I am not arguing against vocabulary work; I am only saying that in present conditions a teacher should not attempt much of it until she has surveyed the dangers and knows the possibility of wasting time, unless she has unusual knowledge and skill.”

Paragraphs. “We have almost no knowledge of how authors make paragraphs, but we know a great deal about rhetorical recipes for manufacturing paragraphs. For my part, I have small faith that results can be secured in the ninth or tenth grades by any of these recipes—not even by the common one of building from a topic sentence. I have never seen in themes any proof that teachers secure notice¬ able improvement by teaching paragraph structure as a sep¬ arate type of composition. The whole question is subtle and involved in controversy; far be it from me to assert that I know all about it. I only assert that a teacher should not heedlessly take it for granted that good results will come from elaborate work with paragraphs. Her chance of suc¬ cess in that field is not good.”

Hitching to the stars. “The teacher who lacks the vision and the faith converts our harness into clanking chains. Thousands like her have made the essentials odious and have caused the fear which echoes in the English Journal. We should be grateful to an editor who keeps sounding the alarm against the tribe of rabid minimalists.

“But there is another tribe that does more damage and that is much more to be dreaded—the teachers who are impa¬ tient of means and expect to hitch to the stars without a harness. Some of them may make a showing with the upper tenth of a class (though I have never happened to see an

WOBKWAYS FOB example of their success); but they leave the ninety per cent in the mire, floundering, abandoned.The mini¬

mum essentials are a harness. By themselves they have no force, but without them the starry forces will never draw our wagons.”

• Section 5: Review Is the Foundation of Success

None of us like to use our precious time this year for doing last year’s work; we want to progress. Yet, in the present status of our education, there is no labor more fruitful than making last year’s foundation secure before we try to build on it; and no mistake is more disastrous than to assume that the foundation is firm. It is much more likely to be soft or full of holes.

Why is last year’s work never done? The answer is not pessimistic and is not a charge of incompetence against the teachers of certain years. It would appear that our educa¬ tional system has grown with such rapidity, has aspired so high, and has had to absorb such an increasing body of students of decreasing ability, that our teaching has not been able to insure a proper degree of thoroughness at any point in the line. The blame for low achievement seems not to lie, in any large measure, upon us teachers, but upon the material with which we deal. Certainly in this era we shall do no good if we reproach the teachers in the grades below us with not working hard enough. Perhaps a concrete illustration from my own small boarding-school will prove something: For twelve years I received into a tenth-year class the boys prepared by a colleague, and I passed these same boys on to the same colleague for their eleventh-year work; I was always disappointed because so much review of ninth-year rudiments was necessary before I could go ahead with what I thought my proper job in the tenth year. Though we compared notes and explained what was lacking and did our best to be thor¬ ough in the right ways, we could never satisfy ourselves by securing adequate preparation. The boys’ minds seemed never to have been habituated to right methods of study and carefulness; after making our best efforts in the ninth and tenth years it was still necessary to take time in the eleventh year for stopping the gaps that I had left in knowledge of rudiments. We quit finding fault with each other and accepted the twentieth-century facts as cheerfully as we could.

This does not mean that we resigned ourselves to a sad fate—by no means. Every-year we made some progress in the art of laying surer foundations. We advised each other as to what was most needed and strove harder to empha¬ size just those points in our teaching. Some such give-andtake of advice will be the only way, in any school, of avoiding the endless review of matters that are supposed to be taught earlier in the curriculum.

So general is the recognition of this lack of preparation in our schools that all recent good lists of minimum essen¬ tials demand, as a first requisite for any given year, “Estab¬ lishing the matters supposed to be taught in the previous year.” The makers of such lists realize the truth stated at the beginning of this Section: “Review is the foundation of success.”

To begin with Lesson 1 of Theme-Building and to go peacefully on with the improvement of sentences, without first discovering whether a review is necessary, would be courting defeat in the whole year’s program. In my own school I have never met a class that did not need review— though every class had been carefully trained. Every time I hurried over the necessary review I lost ground. Whenever I suppressed my impatience and was thorough in review, I achieved a greater total in the year’s results. Though it may be that there are teachers who err on the side of too much review, I have never heard of one. All the successful teachers that I know consider it their sacred duty to review essentials. Let me cite an example—a rather extreme one, but typical —which I heard from a man who was teaching seniors in a large suburban high school of a western city: “I found that they did not know letter forms; so I proceeded to teach the forms. For two weeks I did hardly anything else.” When I asked why seniors should not learn such mechanical mat¬ ters in a two-day review, he replied, “I can’t imagine why. I just observed that it was so. And I am not going to dis¬ grace the school and deceive these students by allowing them to graduate without knowing how to write a formal letter.” His wisdom seems to me beyond dispute—however harrow¬ ing it: may be to give up some senior literature for such a rudiment/ Can you quarrel with his notion of duty?

If the seniors in a certain American graduate school of business cannot write decently enough to earn a passing mark when judged by freshman standards, they are required to qualify themselves, or they lose their degree. (One year it was found that two-thirds of these college graduates were thus deficient.) If in a certain college of science a senior cannot avoid illiterate blunders, he cannot receive a diploma. In most of our universities there is now a provision that all freshmen who have not mastered high-school elements must take a special course, without any credit toward a degree; and most universities find that from ten to fifty per cent are as woefully lacking as that in junior high-school rudiments. These college and graduate-school rulings are proofs of the universal truth that every stage in education is a fraud unless it demands a mastery of previous stages. If college freshmen do not know what a sentence is (and a large fraction of them do not know), their instruction is a farce unless they first learn, by review, what a sentence is. Much more is this true of high-school students. There is no magic in any textbook that will remove the primal necessity of reviewing when we discover rudimentary ignorance. In many schools (among which is my own) the Appendix of Theme-Building is the most essential part of the book. (See further in the comments on the Anteroom, in Part Two of Workways.)

Section 6: What's the Use of Grammar?

Attaining a knowledge of sentences (as urged in Section 5 and in the Anteroom of Theme-Building) is only one rea¬ son for the review of grammar. A teacher who did not understand the other reason would find himself unable to plan a course in Theme-Building to good advantage. The rest of this Section explains the other reason—the rhetorical one.

The use of grammar for rhetorical purposes is not very generally understood. Just recently, for example, I have seen a syllabus of studies which, while it urged the need of gram¬ mar, gave no reason except that grammar was necessary for understanding correct idiom. The reason is doubtful; cer¬ tainly it is a very small one. A knowledge of sentence ele¬ ments is the only way I have discovered of teaching the average literal-minded student how to make his sentences

THEME-BUILDING (KEVISED EDITION)

pleasing. I might, if my time were unlimited, show him hundreds of examples of prepositions and conjunctions and participles, without teaching him any names or any formal syntax; and I might thus gradually lead him to subordinate his ideas and to use parallel structure in his sentences. If a student is far above the average, I can train him by a non¬ grammar method. But since I have no extra years for that roundabout method, and since the class is not composed of specially talented students, I must find a more rational way to work. How small my prejudice is for this method and how I have to rely on it can be judged from the next paragraph.

When I originally wrote Theme-Building, I was weary of being called a grammar extremist and wished to make a pure, uplifting textbook which should not contain any reference to the parts of speech. But if I had carried out my desire, I could not have talked about the ways of securing variety in sentences. It is useless to give an exhortation like “Subor¬ dinate your ideas”; the only way to be effective is to use such terms as “complex sentences” or “begin with modifiers.” Even those terms will remain vague abstractions unless the student has a ready understanding of subordinate clauses and prepositions. He will never have the understanding until he knows about adverbs, adverbial phrases, and adverb clauses—and much more. Much as I should like to evade grammar, I cannot if I am to do honest teaching. Therefore the first edition of Theme-Building depended much on gram¬ mar in the part that dealt with sentence-betterment. There lias been no escaping grammar in the revised edition. It is here because it is the only way yet found of securing results economically. I have no more theory about grammar for composition than I have about hoeing for vegetables: I dis¬ cover that cultivated plants will not flourish without hoeing, and I also discover that good results will not grow in sen¬ tences without grammar.

I offer in this paragraph an illustration of the way in which many esthetic people shudder at grammar, close their eyes to it, but prize the effect. A university professor, who had been reading some themes from my school commented thus: “Your boys are able to subordinate their ideas and to frame pleasing sentences. How do you secure those effects ?” I began to tell him about “the parts of speech, first, in order to have a ready knowledge of phrases, verbals, and”—but I saw that his eyes were drooping and that he thought I had switched to some unrelated topic. He had no curiosity about the true answer. He would never have credited it. His mind would not descend to such a humble, matter-of-fact process. No—he expected me to talk about beautiful generalities, like “seek to stimulate their ambition for excellence.” Being unwilling to bore him and bring myself low in his estima¬ tion, I abruptly stopped telling him the facts and put to him a question about “subordinating.” The light of interest relumed in his eyes, and he then proceeded to tell me about the right mode of stimulating ambition for excellence. He will never know how the results are achieved, but will abide calmly in his literary fancies.

If you know how to produce improvement by grammar, never attempt to tell such a critic about your procedure. He will think less of you. Say nothing about the facts of your method. Receive his commendations in respectful silence and ask him for advice. So doing, you shall acquire merit.

Any critic of high-school methods, if his ideas have been formed in academic bowers, assumes that improvement in composition comes from training in the use of words. For that supposition there is much warrant. It is true that the most noticeable difference between the style of a Steven¬ son and the style of an average boy is a difference in vocabu¬ lary. Any sensitive reader is hurt by the meager dullness of the boy s word-store; he is pleased by the variety and apt¬ ness of the diction in any composition written by a gifted student. It is this distinction in vocabulary that has always received most comment; to this the older generation of rheto¬ ricians gave their attention. They were right in so doinofor they were addressing a select lot of students, masters of Latin syntax, who knew the fundamentals and who were polishing their style. For us, today, in the actual conditions of American education, the suppositions have hardly any basis in fact. We are dealing with the whole multitude "whose stylistic foundations have never been laid. We are not put¬ ting on a polish; we are trying to make a framework stand up.

If, then, we direct our energies at smoothing and ampli¬ fying diction, we shall find ourselves trying to beautify iron with silver-polish. Our proper business is, first, to convert the iron to steel girders, and then—not till then—begin to consider the marble facing of the structure.

That means, in plain language, that we shall do most good to the greatest number of students, and have most to show for our labors, if we give training in the making of sturdy and varied sentences. If any student learns the knack of framing a variety of well-made sentences, he has made a great advance in composition, a noticeable and gratifying advance. Every student of average ability can learn that knack. Par¬ ents and principals will credit you with skill if you impart the ability to cast sentences in the molds of mature and agreeable forms.

This process of sentenee-improvement is begun in Sen¬ tence and Theme , but only begun. The first year of work in Theme-Building is a strengthening and extending of the simple principles—for example: (1) decrease the number of compound sentences, (2) begin with adverb clauses, (3) begin with phrases, (4) use, in many ways, appositives, (5) use verbals, (6) use two verbs with one subject. The nature of this sort of work I tried to explain in the Pilot Book, by the following illustration:

“How grammar is an engine for rhetorical purposes can be shown best by a comparison of professional skill with ninth-grade ignorance. The following pair of sentences from Treasure Island will serve the purpose, if we scan them closely and make three comments on them.

We pulled easily, by Silver’s directions, not to weary the hands prematurely; and, after quite a long passage, landed at the mouth of the second river—that which runs down the woody cleft of the Spyglass. Thence, bending to our left, we began to ascend the slope toward a plateau.