"We would train them in the ability to speak carefully and coherently with the same goal of making a point that we require in writing.... It is unclear to me that there is a reason to classify oral suasion as something lesser than the written version, as long as students are instructed that they are to maintain a basic, tempered poise, without relying on volume or colorful rhetoric to stand in for logic.
Some will object that students will need to be able to craft arguments in writing in their future endeavors. But to channel the modern kind of skeptical response: Will they, though? How elaborate do memos get? And especially, are enough students really likely to need writing that it must be drilled into all of them?... To be sure, only formal writing can harbor 'Beloved' or 'Ulysses,' extended scientific proofs or detailed historical documentation. However, when it comes to individuals expressing their intelligence for assignments or teaching, I cannot see that writing is the only legitimate and effective vehicle."
He specifies that he's not talking about "the mano a mano of debating or the thrilling but colloquial speechmaking of preaching." He's interested in what he calls "formal oratory."
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I’m sorry but this makes little sense. If you can speak well, you can write well. If you can write well, you can speak well.
To be a good speaker you must be able to write a good speech.
Kind of like the Socratic method that Professor Althouse used at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The student had to be prepared and know the material in order to explain it to the class and professor.
Formal oratory was once the way of things. We've certainly lost that. We've also lost the ability to write long form that is logical, grammatically correct, or has prose appeal (I plead guilty). We've all become accustomed to hearing things and reading things in short bites...or bytes. Anything long form is too much to read. Who has the time! I get that. My mind has been retrained to think and read differently, hear differently since the onset- or onslaught- of the internet.
For those of you who have lived without and with the internet, think about how your mind worked pre-net and post-net. It's different. Noticeably so.
That said, I think Glenn Greenwald just started up (last night if I'm not mistaken) a live podcast with call in questions and comments. With us taking part in the discussion. I missed last night because I had something important to do (like catch up on the latest episode of "Foundation"). But it's something that could push you over the top, Ann. Maybe oral commenters instead of this written form. Think of the fun for you and Meade! (just kidding).
Seriously- think of your commenters sending in oral arguments. You could listen to them on your walks instead of great books. What a way to start a day.
Sociologist Erving Goffman said that if someone says he has torn up his prepared remarks in order to talk to you directly, he has torn up the wrong speech.
Why not both? My kids’ senior English teacher requires orations and papers, depending on the topic (and possibly, his mood). He’s a gifted young man who loves his kids. This “either” business is ridiculous. It’s important to be able to communicate in written and spoken forms, and to recognize the differences.
Cheryl @ 7:05: “…this ‘either’ business is ridiculous…”. I agree, but I rather suspect McWhorter knows that perfectly well, and is merely employing an old rhetorical device, of false choice or straw man* to sharpen his point, which is the power of disciplined speech. It complements and extends one’s ability to explain and persuade. It also builds confidence in one’s public self and one’s right to be heard.
*apologies to the ladies. If they feel slighted by the absence of straw women, they should of course agitate for them.
Isn't McWhorter promoting a book?
Yeah, great...and just for kicks let's demand it in Latin or Pentameter. You know, because of all the free time we all have...
Debating is a start. One can learn that generally it is difficult to persuade anyone of anything; if one succeeds, it might be by means of a trick rather than "content." I think I see what McWhorter means: a proper speech is intended to persuade, but the speaker in some ways makes it difficult for herself or himself. Calling for a longish attention span; trying to show people that if you believe in one thing, you should probably believe as much in something different that you tend to resist. I used to wish I could get students to read great speeches aloud, to get some idea how they "work." Lincoln's amazing two-minute or so "Gettysburg." JFK's Inaugural.
"Fourth of July Oration" became a sneering way of saying: a speech that is empty except for an undeserved self-congratulation. Obviously even a bad FOJ speech is likely to suggest "we" aspire to goals that we have never quite achieved; we have to keep striving. Such things as racism and poverty are problems; the American Founding does not solve these problems all by itself, but it helps us find the lawful, peaceful means of doing so. I don't know how to get this across to the woke, who live in Twitter land.
I was at a Fourth of July in a U.S. town once. Generally the speeches were not very good. Then someone read from Lincoln's Second Inaugural. Wow.
Kids would do well to participate in the dramatic arts. Best training ground for the confidence and skills for effective public speaking.
I prefer written speech. It seems oral speech is being reduced to grunts and growls.
Rather than a choice between writing essays or speaking them, I wish students had the option to experience an educational environment that allows them to develop critical thinking skills and to conceive and express ideas that are not necessarily in lockstep with those of the current, leftist educational establishment.
More than a century ago, there was a movement to get schools to teach students how to express themselves through Mind and Hand, words and things. Obviously, the latter failed as being able to make something useful is denigrated in school more than it was in 1940. And now teaching the oral side of rhetoric is in disrepair. Not surprising since it would require a lot of class time to just give the presentation and then a judgmental grading.
All traceable back, as Paul Graham wrote in his 2004 essay, 'The Age of the Essay' to dumping of the teaching of rhetoric into the English department to give the literary theorists a captive pool of students to exploit. So students wrote about literature. Something of which 99% had little interest. Graded by an English professor, who was never selected for their writing or speaking ability. Then their acolytes descended into the high schools to impose a poor duplicate of the teachings on bored teenagers.
As this charade continued on, the more treacherous portions has fallen by the wayside out of expediency in meeting district test score goals.
======The Age of the Essay - Paul Graham
"The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
"With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
"How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years."
http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
"when it comes to individuals expressing their intelligence for assignments or teaching, I cannot see that writing is the only legitimate and effective vehicle."
Who said it is? Oratory used to be common, oral examination standard, in lots of places. But with the advance of mass (higher) education, writing was more efficient to "express intelligence" etc.: a high school teacher with a dozen classes, or a college instructor with any class over 15 or so, is going to rely on written assignments more than "formal oratory." Who has the time?
By the way, if we just measure intelligence at the beginning of high school or college, why does it need to be "expressed" again and again?
"He specifies that he's not talking about "the mano a mano of debating or the thrilling but colloquial speechmaking of preaching." He's interested in what he calls "formal oratory.""
Why is such oratory more valuable than debate or preaching, either as an expression of intelligence or as practice for serious work later on?
This is why my kids attend a classical education school.
This is because of the Blacks.
Speech and written speech - just not the same. But you come up against a glass ceiling in your career unless you can do both. It's interesting that McWhorter thinks that at this point it's more essential to teach coherent, effective speech "without volume or colorful rhetoric" than to teach writing. It's as if he wants to strip out certain verbal habits rather than to teach an effective, interesting use of the spoken word.
Two possibilities: You write a speech and memorize it. Or you cultivate the ability to learn your material, organize it in your head, and speak it clearly, with organization, cause coming before effect, so forth.
I taught English to a class one summer, a marginalized community. Their speech was FULL of what I called "non-specific referent". Probably prepositions or something. The "th" words; "this", "that", "there", "them", et tedious cetera. There are only so many of these after a specific noun before everything is lost. You can clear it up in conversation. It took some serious effort to make the case that it didn't work in writing or making an oral presentation.
Point is, it's not the same as writing and there is always something.....
When students are allowed to speak instead of write what they need to share, it's much easier for kids who can neither write nor read to slip through the cracks. I would worry a curriculum that favored speaking over writing would let more students graduate without knowing how to read. As a student teacher long ago, I asked a kid to write down some of his beautiful poetry so I could help him get some of it published. While he and I had a good relationship, he kept putting me off. When the dawn broke over my marblehead, I realized he wasn't writing down his poetry because he couldn't. He had made it to his freshman year in high school with the maximum number of grade retentions still unable to read. We found a reading specialist to help this very bright and creative young man learn to both read and write. He brought a copy of Hamlet to me on his graduation day and asked me open it to any page. I opened it to "We know what we are but know not what we may be." And then he read Shakespeare to me.
I took speech class at my Iowa high school, and gave 4-H presentations at the county fair and state fair. There was nothing like that offered in college. Class participation, even Socratic style, is not the same. The people who ran 4-H in those days knew what they were doing. They held a 4-H basketball tournament in March, and for your club to be eligible someone from your club had to give a presentation at the county fair in July.
In general, I'm ok with a person able to speak well and provide their thoughts in an oratory manner rather than writing. You can earn a living giving speeches. However, I've found as a professional that you can say many things, but until actual work is done and documented, you don't get paid.
Both exercises require the student to organize their thinking into communicable, logical thought flows. In turn, this discipline improves the quality of thinking and benefits the student. It's a terrific idea. Why not require both?
Anything complex is better in writing. Its impossible to hear someone talk for 15 minutes about a complex topic and remember what they said 10 minutes ago in any detail. If I write a 5 page essay, its quite easy to go back and see what I wrote on Page 1 and compare it to page 5.
Further, speech runs into the problem that some people talk well, and others don't. Some people hate speaking in front of groups of people. Some people have speech impediments. etc. There's much more bias when people talk, because you are constantly aware of the sex, attractiveness, race, etc. of who is talking. writting is almost completely objective. WHich is why some people are always starting their comments out with "As a X" in order to gain points
I've been working in corporate America was 30 or more years. Talks/Lectures/Meetings are almost always more inefficient then communication by memo. Positions that look reasonable when spoken by a well dressed, attractive executive, look much less reasonable when put on paper and every can look at it and analyze it.
Mike Sylwester said...
This is because of the Blacks.
My God, you people are repulsive.
This is still taught - you just need to look for it. My sons are in the honors core curriculum at Baylor; it requires 2 semesters of Rhetoric, where they are taught both to write AND speak persuasively. They learn to give their own speeches, and they study famous speeches to learn why they work so well. My younger son's all-boys middle school had "bard" competitions, where students would recite poetry on stage on festival days. The winner for each grade won points for his house. I think small stuff like those bard competitions teaches young kids that public speaking is a skill they need and want.
That being said, the public schools they attended - which were some of the best on offer - didn't even teach writing, let alone speech. My older son struggled to learn to write well when he left public MS for a Jesuit HS. Thankfully his HS English department was amazing, and he was well-prepared to write in college.
Oratory is a declining art, and I agree with McWhorter that a good education would include such speaking as part of it- that used to be one of the purposes of debate clubs. My education was sadly deficient in such things, and professionally it hindered me for number of years. However, even worse is that students today aren't even being taught to write well. I can usually guess the age of a commenter by simply analyzing the the comments themselves. It is rare to see a comment by someone under the age of 30 that isn't filled with misspellings and grammatical errors of all kinds.
To the first two commenters in this thread:
That is only true for some people- the writing and delivering of speeches being the same thing. However, I think McWhorter is not simply, or even mostly, addressing the ability to write and deliver a speech- he is talking about extemporaneous speaking. The ability to be called forth to talk about something without prior preparation- something I was called on to do regularly only after I had long graduated from college. Really, the first time I was ever called on to such a thing was during an oral exam in graduate school defending an original research proposal, which was part of the requirements for a Ph.D. I could know the subject inside and out, but I couldn't anticipate all the questions the three examiners would ask, and didn't anticipate more than a couple of them.
Yes, writing and speaking are complementary, but they really aren't the same thing.
Is John McWhorter delicately approaching the third rail of what used to be called "Ebonics"?
Go take a look at Engineering students. One of the most valuable classes I took in college was one called "Technical Writing", where we were taught to present information clearly and concisely, without buzzwords and acronyms, just speaking plain English to explain difficult concepts.....and once you are working, that same experience in presenting in written form is of tremendous help in review meetings with management.
Perhaps students would benefit from the technique I'm using to prepare lecture videos. I work better from a script, but it would take me forever to write the script from scratch. Fortunately, there is software, available even from YouTube, that creates a transcript from an audio recording. I can create a "rough draft" recording, get the transcript, edit the written transcript, then record my final version from the edited script. This activity draws a clear connection between written and oral communication, and it helps me create much better quality recordings for students to study from.
What Tim said. I still remember my first exam in Technical Writing. The Prof came into the room and clamped a C clamp to the desk in the front of the room. He wanted a description such that someone could tell what it looked like and how to use it – without a picture or diagram. It was an extremely useful exercise that served me well in my career.
I taught "Public Speaking" in my Management classes at the local college back in the 90s. This, after I used to tremble in the leg and vocal regions whenever I had to speak in front of a group of people. I am also a published writer. Sometimes I write just like I would speak, uninterrupted, to another person, or a small group. Most times my prose on paper is not meant to be read aloud. They can be two separate things, or the same or similar.
If I want my students to write an essay, I want an essay, not a speech or an essay read aloud. Teach one, teach the other, or teach them together. But don't give students the choice as they will always select the easier route. And that road less traveled, makes little difference in sharpening those skills.
My work required me to write (which I did the bare minimum of) and to speak in public (which I did far more of than the average librarian, not counting the occasional actual history class as an adjunct). Come to think of it, I did more public speaking to the actual public than most professors of any kind. I got some gift cards and meals for my shows, too.
I forced myself on stage in high school (though not at MY school--there I was backstage) and in college took a public speaking course in the theater department. That was a lucky stroke, since Betty Mae Collins helped me develop both my voice and my confidence to use it. (Being around the theater students quickly cured me of most thespian leanings.)
When time allows, I write out, practice, and revise, but inevitably what is delivered is different in some way from what's on the page.
History grad school of course required seminar presentations and oral exams. I was lucky there too, being far more expert on my subject by then than the committee were . . . it was a very pleasant chat.
Around here, almost everyone is an effective writer whether their ideas make much sense to me or not.
There could be courses in speech, or rhtoric. Of course those could also be signs of white privilege, communicating clearly.
When I went to Simon Fraser Univ. in the 90's, there was an overt effort there on public speaking. So, every class that I had to write a paper for, I also had to present it publically. I hated that second part because it forced me to deal with my fear of public speaking. That, of course, was the reason that SFU promoted that approach.
It is unclear to me that there is a reason to classify oral suasion as something lesser than the written version
Let me help you:
1: Oral suasion relies on things like tone that have no relationship to teh actual quality of the argument. An individual who stutters when talking may have the better argument, but lose because the other person sounded better. So oral suasion promotes the wrong metrics
2: The blind can get your written argument in Braille form, and so address what you say the exact same way as everyone else. That's not true for the deaf, since they lose out on all the tonal complexities. So writing is much more inclusive
3: Even those who aren't deaf can still be hard of hearing, and so potentially miss parts of your argument. Hard of seeing can just spend some extra time reading, and still get the same effect as everyone else
4: Learning how to write in intelligent and persuasive short memo is an important part of learning how to write, so that part of his argument is specious.
5: Written argument is inherently superior. Because once you've written it, I can examine it, search on it, establish I know exactly what you're trying to say, and look things up to find out how much of what you're writing is BS. All on my time frame, not yours
6: "And especially, are enough students really likely to need writing that it must be drilled into all of them?"
If you can't write you're an illiterate loser who's properly cut out of most of society. So since the purpose of education should be to make people into functional members of society, yes ever single damn student should be forced to learn how to think, how to organize their thoughts, and how to write them out in a way that might be persuasive (assuming your thoughts aren't idiotic) to other people who have no connection to them.
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