Internalizing Ethos: Final Report

2004-2005 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Project
Jonna Gjevre

Department of English and Philosophy

Introduction

One of the most widespread misconceptions about composition teachers is that we don’t teach “content.” In teaching our students writing strategies, we might draw upon readings from a wide variety of fields and disciplines; however, our responsibility is not to teach these disciplines and fields, but to teach argument methods. Field-specific knowledge about a subject area such as history is readily identified by students as “content,” but the art of argumentation has a transparency about it: students often don’t see that this art is the point. Thus, they may not fully internalize the idea that mastering and implementing rhetorical strategies is their most fundamental obligation in a composition course.

The Problem

Because argument cannot be taught in a vacuum, I rely on models and readings when teaching introductory through advanced rhetoric. Yet I often worry that my students are being sidetracked by the subject matter of the readings I’ve selected; that is, they pay more attention to the information or claims the writers are getting across and pay less attention to the rhetorical strategies and techniques being employed. I noticed a striking exception to this problem in March 2003: my Advanced Rhetoric students engaged with many readings arguing for or against the military action in Iraq; without exception, my students understood that their task was not to evaluate the validity of the claims they were reading but to understand and articulate the efficacy of the methods these writers employed. They could analyze, for example, how utterly compelling a monologic and assertive stance can be when a speaker is urging an audience to take immediate action, regardless of whether they agreed with the author’s claims. They could then discuss the costs and benefits of an assertive “ethos,” or character, and work on learning how and when to employ such an ethos. My problem, then, was to figure out how to reproduce this learning success when I next taught the Advanced Rhetoric course.

The Method

In the fall of 2004, I selected a “reading” for my spring 2005 Advanced Rhetoric class: Errol Morris’ documentary The Fog of War.  I had great hopes that this film, which comprises a series of conversations with Robert S. McNamara, would enhance students’ understanding of how rhetoricians achieve an effective ethos when arguing for a specific audience. (McNamara’s ethos, which alternates between didactic and confessional, is intensely monologic, seldom based in emotional appeals, and heavily reliant upon compressed (not expansive) examples as evidence.)  I also hoped that analyzing the visual rhetoric of Morris’ film, which alternated between enhancing and undercutting the speaker’s authority, would provide additional scaffolding for student learning. At the beginning of the Advanced Rhetoric course, I set forth my goals for the class, helping the students anticipate that the film would be explored as a case study in the use of rhetorical methods. After spending two months reading about classical rhetoric and analyzing the many dimensions contributing to a rhetorician’s ethos, we watched the film, and students wrote response papers critiquing McNamara’s rhetoric, which they then shared in class.

The Results

Results were mixed. Students found the film fascinating, but a few were sidetracked by the subject matter: that is, they were most interested in talking about the truth value of claims being made about the war in Vietnam, not about specific rhetorical aspects of McNamara’s self-presentation.

Specifically, these students were interested in knowing whether the film’s claims were “truthful”; they wanted to know if the speaker was right. I would characterize this as surface learning. Many of the fifteen students, however, did appear to achieve the deep learning I had hoped for.

Three examples will suffice. One student was fascinated by McNamara’s cagey ability to use confessional discourse while avoiding direct apologies. She became interested in the rhetoric of apology and followed up her analysis of the film by writing a research paper on public reactions to President Clinton’s apology for the Lewinsky affair. Another student differed from the others in being well-informed about the film’s subject matter; he developed an interest in the significance of the medium being employed. He was most interested in reflecting on the values and attitudes of the audience being targeted by McNamara’s discourse, and he also speculated that the presence of the camera created an immediacy and an audience awareness in the film that was not as prominent in McNamara’s books. Yet another student, who had never heard of McNamara before seeing the film, watched it for a second time over spring break and ended up writing a research paper on the ways in which filmmaker Errol Morris’ argument strategies complemented McNamara’s.  Essentially, they were learning about the complex set of conditions that make arguments “work.”

The Discussion

The struggle to make the art of argumentation less transparent to students will never go away. An argument can be like a beautiful piece of fabric: audiences see color and texture, but they may be less aware of weaving and knitting techniques, or color transfer and printing, as the methods behind the medium. Helping students uncover the strategies and techniques of rhetoricians continues to be a challenge—a challenge that I find deeply rewarding.

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