What Should a Classical Writing Program Look Like?

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it would look like if modern-day writing instruction were fully informed by the classical rhetorical and poetic traditions. What would it look like if we appropriated the riches of these traditions for contemporary students? In my mind, a truly classical approach to writing instruction would embody five key principles:

Mimesis

There is no manner in which instruction in the modern classroom differs so much from its classical antecedents than in the way that the task of writing is related to the task of reading.

In the modern school, that relation can be defined primarily as an analytical one. A student reads a text, and then is asked to write about that text. The student’s task is to explain or interpret material that is presented to him for that purpose.

But in the classical school, the relation between writing and reading was primarily a mimetic one. A student read a text, and then was asked to write like that text. The works they read were presented explicitly as models for their own writing.

This difference in the relation between reading and writing had vast consequences for the tenor of instruction in the past. For one, it meant that students had the opportunity to work in a variety of genres: poetry, oratory, narrative, epistles. These are forms of writing that emerge out of lived life. The modern student writes in one genre only, and it is a strictly academic one.

The kinds of writing students were asked to do in the past provided scope for stylistic brio. They could play with voice, figure, and rhythm. This meant that their imaginative and aesthetic sensibilities were trained through their writing instruction. The analytical essay allows no scope to stylistic play, meaning that those sensibilities receive no enhancement through their writing instruction.

Most crucially, the analytic essay compels students to regard the works they study as artefacts, to be examined and dissected. It turns great books into dead things. But the mimetic approach to writing invites students to look on themselves as apprentices, emulating the works of the masters. It makes writing instruction a constant induction into a living tradition.

Invention

In the classical rhetorical tradition, there were five “canons” – or stages – of the orator’s task. These were invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Yet of these five canons, it was clear that invention bore an outsized importance. As the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium puts it, “of the five tasks of the speaker Invention is the most important and the most difficult.”

The reason for this is obvious. Invention simply refers to the process of coming up with things to say. It is not possible to organize, embellish, or memorize content that has not yet been generated. Invention involves the generation of ideas, the stage of the writing process on which everything else depends.

Anyone who has been in a room with students working on a writing assignment knows how crucial yet challenging this stage of writing can be for young people. The frustration of “not knowing what to say” can be intense, and is often the experience that turns a student off to writing for a lifetime.

And what does the modern approach to writing instruction offer students stuck in this mental quagmire? Empty forms – topic sentences and support, five paragraph essays, and a number of other structures that students are required to plug their ideas into. But of course, the whole problem is that the students don’t have the ideas in the first place. The modern approach to writing instruction wants to jump right past the stage of invention and move on to arrangement. But students cannot organize thoughts they do not yet have.

What is needed then is an approach to writing instruction that meets the students where they most need guidance – in the process of generating ideas. The classical rhetorical tradition was filled with such guidance. Rhetorical manuals were stuffed with different kinds of arguments that students could use to generate ideas. They were taught how to use topics and categories to generate thoughts, how to use logic and narrative to elaborate upon and strengthen their arguments. The writing instructor in the classical tradition did not say to students, “place your ideas here,” but rather, “here is where to go and find ideas.”

In this manner, as in so many others, the classical tradition demonstrates a far greater understanding of the nature and needs of the child than its modern rivals. By providing students writing instruction rooted in the tools of invention, rather than in empty forms, we offer them a course of study that augments their growth as both writers and thinkers.

Capaciousness

All learning results in an increased adequacy of the person to the world. When it comes to language, this growth is actually an increased adequacy to ourselves. Language is the portal to human experience – to the realm of desire, intention, belief, emotion, and rationality. So an increase in a student’s facility with language is an increase in their capacity to make sense of the endless varieties and conundrums of human experience.

A classical writing program is one directed towards enhancing a student’s facility with language, in order to render them more capable of understanding their own experience. It approaches writing as a form of prolonged reflection upon experience. It seeks to equip young people with the capacity to answer the ancient injunction, “know thyself.” It is through language that the self discloses itself to itself, and it is as an aid to that disclosure that the classical writing instructor presents his course of study.

A classical education is one that aims to cultivate the whole range of human potential – all the moral and intellectual capacities residing in the human soul. It purports to accomplish this by making students aware of these dimensions. In such a context, the teaching of writing obviously becomes key to the whole endeavor. It is not a subject, not even an overarching discipline. It is training in the basic modality through which the entire enterprise is accomplished. When writing, students are reflecting on human experience; when taught to write well, they are learning to reflect well on human experience. The result of this process should be an increased capaciousness of the student’s mind, an awareness of the dimensions of experience that could not arise in any other way.

Playfulness

Many young people find the writing process to be onerous and daunting. But I loved writing from a very early age. What I loved about it were what might be called its aesthetic dimensions – the play with voice, with figure of speech, with imagery. It was a delight in the resources of language itself, and in my increasing ability to wield those resources. It was only as I grew older that I learned how to deploy these resources in the framework of more structured, coherent arguments.

I do not think there was anything remarkable about this course of development. If there is anything that is likely to make writing appealing to a young person, it is that opportunity to play with the resources of language – to manipulate the structure of sentences for rhythm, for instance, or to write in different voices and genres.

It just so happens that these are the opportunities that modern writing instruction systematically withholds from students. The one genre in which middle and high school students write almost exclusively is the academic essay, and the one voice they are permitted to write in the faux-scholarly. The confines of such assignments leave almost no scope for the kind of inventive brio that alone draws a young person into the work of writing.

This was not how writing instruction looked in the classical world. Students wrote speeches and epistles in the voice of various historical or mythological figures, they wrote formal poetry (in Latin, of course), they partook in public debates that demanded energetic style and delivery. The authors chosen for the students’ study were chosen for their style, and the students were taught how to imitate that style.

A classical approach to writing is one that allows students to feel their burgeoning capacities for linguistic fecundity by exercising those capacities regularly. Another way of saying this is that classical writing instruction has roots in both the rhetorical and poetic traditions. A classical school is a place for a child to fall in love with the rhythm and structure and power of language, and to revel in their own increasing mastery of these things.

Public Discourse

Here is a statement I believe almost all classical educators would agree with: the purpose of school is not to prepare young people for college and career alone, but for the whole realm of social, civic, and cultural relations that constitute adult existence.

Yet when it comes to writing instruction, most schools – including many classical schools - continue to ask their students to compose in ways that are explicitly designed to prepare them to write in college. The writing students are asked to do in middle and high school is overwhelmingly “academic,” in ways that are meant to reflect the demands of college writing.

What would it look like to prepare students to write instead for the “real world” – that social, civic, and cultural world we might call the realm of discourse? Consider only the task of writing an introduction.

The common way this is taught to students now is that the opening of an essay should introduce the topic by starting from a level of generality and progressing towards the specificity of a thesis statement. This structure is designed for ease of grading more than anything else, since it allows the instructor to find the thesis in a predictable place.

What this approach omits is the primary task involved at the outset of any discourse, which is winning the attention of the audience. Teaching students to write for the world of discourse means teaching them strategies for winning the attention of a reader or listener. In the classroom, the student is not faced with this task, since the reader (the teacher) is assumed. But in the real world, the challenge facing the speaker is much steeper.

Classical writing instruction should prepare students for those challenges. It should prepare students to reason and speak in non-academic contexts. If we are serious about preparing young people for the whole of life, then our approach to writing instruction should reflect that commitment.

If you would like to learn more about what such an approach to writing instruction would look like, I invite you to take a look at my online course, Say More: A Classical Approach to Writing Instruction for High School and Middle School Students

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