The design of prose

the long version

In moments of frustration or despair teachers of English have been known to complain. "Some students couldn't draw an inference if they saw a rabbit track in the snow." This witticism may help teachers to accept their apparent failure, or even to excuse it, but it badly misses the point as an explanation of students' difficulties in critical reading and in writing. Drawing an inference from such evidence as a rabbit track in the snow requires having some specific kinds of knowledge to start with. A person unfamiliar with rabbits could infer little more from a track than that some object, creature, or other physical phenomenon had disturbed the otherwise smooth and uniform surface of the snow. To identify the cause of the disturbance as a rabbit he would have to know the specific effects of footsteps on snow and have to be able to distinguish a rabbit track from that of other small animals. To tell which direction the rabbit was going he would have to know the disposition of the parts of a rabbit's foot and their relation to its body; to estimate its size, something about the proportion between a rabbit's foot and its body; to estimate its speed, the correspondences between size of foot and distance between tracks. And if a person knew enough about rabbits' physiological traits and about their habits he could draw even subtler and more precise inferences from some tracks in the snow. The point is that, without the knowledge essential for framing relevant questions, and experience in drawing particular kinds of inferences, no bit of evidence—be it a rabbit track, a spot of moving light in a cloud chamber, or the most beautifully constructed of Macaulay's paragraphs—can possibly yield any very significant inferences. This inability to draw inferences is an important source of the difficulty which many students experience when first confronted with prose selections for analysis, whether they are expected to study the contents of the works, to use them as models for prose composition, or to infer from them various principles of rhetoric or argumentation. Some rudimentary principles of literary criticism are a part of most high school English programs, but seldom is the analysis of prose given adequate attention. The consequences are twofold: first, the almost exclusive emphasis upon poetry, drama, and fiction seems to imply that expository and argumentative prose, as well as the familiar essay, represent a "lower" kind of art and are therefore unworthy of the same disciplined, self-conscious analysis and critical appreciation as other literary forms; second, the sketchy treatment of prose works leaves students with few principles to apply when analyzing prose—they come to a prose work as men from the tropics to a rabbit track in the snow, not knowing quite what they are experiencing or what questions to ask if they are to draw useful inferences. This book is designed to help eliminate this difficulty and to develop skills in the analysis of prose, other people's as well as one's own. The exercises on the readings are intended to supply some of the generalizations that readers inexperienced at prose analysis may lack and to raise some of the relevant questions on which inferences must be based. As the title of the book suggests, the exercises focus both on what is being said and on the means by which it is said. They are based upon several assumptions: first, that analysis of prose may be as intrinsically worthwhile as analysis, say, of a sonnet by Shakespeare or of a short story by Henry James; second, that study either of formal characteristics apart from meaning and purpose or of meaning and purpose apart from formal characteristics is essentially a fruitless activity; third, that ability to write clear and well-organized prose depends greatly upon ability to read accurately and critically; and, fourth, that an understanding of rhetorical, logical, and grammatical principles can contribute to a writer's effectiveness—that is to say, theory can influence practice. Rather than prescribe various rhetorical principles commonly found in handbooks on rhetoric and composition —many of which are little more than generalized statements of readers' intuitive responses to specific instances of oral or written expression—we encourage readers to infer "rules" of rhetoric from writers' practice by means of exercises which direct their attention to various details of order, arrangement, sentence and paragraph structure, diction, figurative language, persuasive devices, and so forth. Some remarks on the exercises themselves are now in order. The first broad aim of this book, the improvement of reading skills, we see as a necessary prelude to its second, the discovery and refining of those syntactic, logical, semantic, stylistic, and rhetorical principles essential to effective writing. Both of these aims are reflected directly in the content of the exercises and in our classifications of them, as well as in the theme suggestions at the end of each chapter, which draw upon the implications of the exercises