Three Most Important Concepts in Composition

For my own personal trinity of composition concepts, I need look no further than the Medieval and Renaissance scholars. I have long been a fan of the trivium and have considered tutoring my own children because I feel like too much of the knowledge today is dumbed down because institutions underestimate what young minds are capable of. Grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic have always been components of composition.

Certainly stodgy old concepts by long-dead philosophers need a certain amount of finagling to appeal to the 21st century crop of young writers. Even today, most new strategies use the trivium as their base but incorporate a more personalized learning style (i.e. expressivism). Actually, because the trivium was often studied under private tutelage or independently, the trivium was, in its original essence, an extremely personalized endeavor. The Socratic method, which involved the tutor-driven questioning of students (allowing the student to reach "true" conclusions through his own trial and error) grew out of Classical philosophy and remained during the trivium. I remember several years ago that the Socratic method was slowly becoming en vogue because of the book Socrates Cafe (Christopher Phillips 2001). I think that it was the institutionalization of the learning process in the 20th century that has paradoxically overcomplicated and oversimplified the learning process. Let's face it--not every teacher is a genius. With so many teaching philosophies floating around, an inexperienced teacher can get lost in pedagogy and end up dumbing down information.

Students need to learn grammar. Too many students make it to university with almost incomprehensibly low grammar skills. Poor grammar is the quickest way to misjudge someone's intelligence. Most of the time, people will be too distracted by horrible grammar and style to recognize even the most cogent of arguments.

Students need to learn rhetoric. If a student cannot organize his or her ideas with compelling language, even the best grammatical essay will resemble the work of a neophyte.

Students need to learn dialectic. Analyzing, interpreting, and presenting one's own insight about a given subject happens in any academic and non-academic field. In school, at work, in casual conversations with friends, dialectic is how we communicate our ideas to one another. Dialectic is, in a way, the verbal representation of one's self.

The direction of much of the educational field, unfortunately, has gone solely in the way of dialectic. Students adept at analyzing and interpreting literature can CLEP out of 12 hours of English but still have no clue how to write their own observations and/or arguments in a grammatically and rhetorically sound manner.

So these are my top three components for teaching composition, but they only work if one last concept is kept in mind: teachers need to quit underestimating students. Many times this happens (I speak from personal experience) because a teacher is too tired or "un-enthused" about their own subject that he or she does not take the time to figure out where students are struggling and try to help them understand potentially more difficult concepts.

My English teachers in high school emphasized these concepts. They graded harshly, but they also took the time to correct all of our mistakes. They taught us hard concepts and held us to high standards, and even though it was hard work, the rewards at the end were well worth the struggle. I never encountered anything near the level of scholarship I performed in high school English until graduate school (except Dr. Grass's and Dr. Couch's 4000 level courses).

A good teacher sets high standards (i.e. via the trivium), can relate to students by personalize lectures and grading with in depth commentary, and thus produce successful writers and scholars. .