EASE IN COMPOSITION STUDIES By C BRADLEY DILGER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2003 Copyright 2003 by C Bradley Dilger Dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, Elisa Vanina Dilger (1917–2000) and Mabel Fulton Boutwell (1911–2001). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, before all else, and for so many reasons, I thank my wife Erin Easterling. My doctoral committee—Greg Ulmer, Stephanie Smith, Blake Scott, and Joe Wilson—have guided this dissertation, helped me develop the long-term project it represents, supported other research, and allowed me to cultivate an eclectic focus. Sid Dobrin and Phil Wegner provided extremely valuable assistance throughout my graduate studies, gladly helping me whenever I requested advice, letters of reference, or a bit more time to finish an essay. Joe Martin and Lucille Schultz both helped a graduate student they had never met get a copy of a rare but very important dissertation which has helped focus this project immeasurably. Jeff Rice, Erich Nunn, and Traci Gardner read drafts of this dissertation or other related work, and provided valuable advice and suggestions. Jane Love helped develop the framework of the last chapter, which includes some of the trickiest material presented here. Bruce Leland and the faculty of Western Illinois University recently welcomed me to their campus and asked me to become their colleague. The players of the WTFL, past and present, have not contributed much which can be cited in this work, but have helped make it possible by cheerfully rumblin’ bumblin’ and stumblin’ through many Saturday mornings. Ronald L. Corbin helped me through high school and to the university. I aspire to his wisdom and sense of humor, and am proud to have been his student. In many ways, I still am. iv PREFACE Throughout this dissertation, “contemporary” is used to mean “at the time of writing being considered.” “Current” means at the time this dissertation is being written, e.g. 2002 and 2003. Many texts published during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are quoted in this work. Their distinctive orthography and typography—for example, frequently capitalizing of nouns, or typesetting single words or phrases in italics—is reproduced as faithfully as possible here. In many cases, this typography conveyed didactic emphasis, and it unquestionably has semantic content. Current rhetoric and composition handbooks make much of their use of four-color printing, extensive indexing, and tabbed binding; though Isaac Watts and his contemporaries did not have those means, they did employ the best available printing technologies to make writing easy. Standardizing or normalizing their work to meet current orthographic standards would erase valuable meanings which should be considered carefully. v TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv PREFACE . v LIST OF FIGURES . viii ABSTRACT . ix 1 INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Why Ease? . 1 1.2 Upon Further Review . 10 2 THE CONCEPT OF EASE . 14 2.1 Overwhelmed? The Answer is Easy! . 15 2.2 Historicizing and Defining Ease . 19 2.2.1 Historical and Popular Definitions . 21 2.2.2 Reforming Education in England, 1680–1740 . 25 2.2.3 Bringing Ease Home in America, 1880–1930 . 31 2.2.4 Humanizing Technology, 1939–1958 . 35 2.2.5 Computing Made Easy, 1984–present . 39 2.3 The Role of Ease Today . 45 3 EVALUATING EASE . 47 3.1 Is Ease Good or Bad? . 47 3.1.1 Technology and Ease . 48 3.1.2 The Ideology of Ease . 50 3.2 Critical Evaluation of Ease . 54 3.2.1 Benefits of Ease . 54 3.2.2 Problems Caused by Ease . 58 3.3 Conclusion . 78 3.4 Introduction . 79 3.4.1 The English Roots of Ease in Writing . 81 3.4.2 Transforming Philosophy to Pedagogy: Major Figures . 87 3.4.3 Caveat Facilitor . 94 3.4.4 Four Assumptions About Ease and Writing . 95 3.5 Students Should Find Writing Easy . 97 3.5.1 Early Exemplars . 101 vi 3.5.2 Strategies for Making Writing Easy . 105 3.5.3 Emotional Needs: Comfort and Familiarity . 111 3.5.4 It’s Just That Easy . 120 3.5.5 A Mixed Bag of Ease . 122 3.5.6 The Results . 124 3.6 Students Should Write Easy-To-Read Prose . 125 3.6.1 Clarity . 126 3.6.2 Brevity and Conciseness . 128 3.6.3 Simplicity . 131 3.7 Teaching Writing is Easy . 132 3.7.1 Textbooks and Other Tools . 135 3.7.2 The Curriculum . 137 3.7.3 Composition and the Institution . 141 3.8 Writing as Gatekeeper to a “Life of Ease” . 143 3.8.1 Ease, Vulgarity, and Gentility . 146 3.8.2 Writing and Upward Mobility . 148 3.9 Conclusion . 149 4 BEYOND EASE . 152 4.1 The Endurance of Ease . 152 4.2 The Transitional Apparatus . 161 4.2.1 The Principles of New Media . 162 4.2.2 Supplementing the essay . 171 4.2.3 The Logic of Conduction . 179 4.3 Supplementing Ease . 183 4.3.1 Translucence . 183 4.3.2 The Complex . 186 4.3.3 Repetition and Iteration . 188 WORKS CITED . 192 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH . 199 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 2.1 Kodak Advertisement, 1884. 20 3.1 LG Electronics Advertisement, 2001. 67 viii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy EASE IN COMPOSITION STUDIES By C Bradley Dilger August 2003 Chair: Gregory L. Ulmer Major Department: English For many Americans, the idea of “ease” shapes understanding of complexity and difficulty. Though many consider ease of use a twentieth-century phenomenon associated with personal computers, its origins date from the seventeenth century. “Ease in Composition Studies” investigates the role of ease in American culture, especially college-level writing. I begin by defining ease and tracing its history through four critical periods of development dating from 1700 to the present. I show that ease can be defined using a list of eight qualities opposed to other important concepts: comfort, transparency, effortlessness, simplicity, pragmatism, femininity, expediency, and pictorialism. Calling on the work of Evan Watkins, I show problems which can occur when ease is uncritically demanded or mobilized—as is frequently the case when consumer models of ease, based on simple transaction, appear in educational contexts. With ease defined, I demonstrate that current-traditional rhetoric, the simplified approach to writing developed in American nineteenth-century colleges, includes a pedagogy based on ease. Nineteenth-century composition portrays the act of writing, ix writing style, and teaching writing as easy, and position writing as the gatekeeper for the “life of ease.” By investigating textbooks, teaching methods, and strategies which writers of supposedly easy rhetorics use, and calling on the work of Lucille Schultz and Sharon Crowley, I identify specific connections between writing and ease, charting the transformation of ease in the classroom from close identification with “easy” pedagogical techniques (atomization, alliteration, and gradation) to a less clearly defined, but no less powerful concept. The connection of ease and writing established in current-traditional rhetoric was not disrupted by the pedagogical reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today ease shapes the development of teaching writing using computers and new media. Can composition instructors continue to mobilize ease to teach electronic “writing” technologies, given the differences in institutional practices and subject formation associated with them— what Greg Ulmer calls “electracy?” My research suggests otherwise. I conclude my dissertation by outlining an electrate supplement to ease: concepts suitable for practicing, learning, and teaching electronic discourse. x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION True ease in writing comes from art, not chance As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. —Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism 1.1 Why Ease? Robert Johnson’s outstanding book User-Centered Technology begins with a sort of apology for its ordinary focus. Johnson makes his case for working with the mundane, the common, and the everyday—common things which are so familiar that they are all but invisible. The concept of ease is often associated with this natural, comfortable character: it conjures up images of elegant simplicity, gracefulness, painless use, pleasant speed, and welcome diversion. But there is nothing simple about the way ease influences American culture and the practice of writing in American colleges and universities. Much of my research focuses on the role of ease in composition studies, the institution of English, and American culture. However, better understanding of ease is not my principal research concentration. My interest in ease is means, not end. As I see it today, my life’s work will be the development of physical and virtual writing environments, along with pedagogical practices, forms of communication and expression, and institutions which support them. I have spent a terrific amount of time studying ease because, as my first investigations suggested six years ago, ease has a huge role in the institution of composition studies, and a significant influence in the nascent electronic classroom. 1 2 Though I approach ease, electronic writing, information technology, new media, and hypermedia1 from the standpoint of composition studies, not media studies, I share many long-term research goals with Gregory Ulmer, my doctoral committee chair. In Heuretics and the recently published Internet Invention, Ulmer observes that the apparatus of literacy is in transition, being supplemented by the technology of digital computing. While print literacy remains the primary and most important communicative apparatus, its status is changing as the importance of the emerging apparatus grows. Like Ulmer, I see this ongoing shift as an opportunity for the humanities, especially the language arts.