Dogmatism and Teaching Writing by Alexandra Glynn






But some writers are sure, and it shows in their work. Emerson writes: “The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also” (299). Almost every sentence he writes is like this. True, he is learned and well-read, and has practiced his craft a great deal. He knows he has the universal audience as his audience. But also, he is sure.

A writer has to be sure what he thinks. Pinker writes about the writer that “the writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks” (29). And what about Aristotle? Aristotle writes in his Rhetoric that “in all cases persuasion is the result either of the judges themselves been affected in a certain manner, or because they consider the speakers to be of a certain character, or because something has been demonstrated” (345). Now, leaving aside for a moment the affecting of the feelings of the judges and the character of the speaker or writer, I ask, how can something be recognized as demonstrated to be true by an audience, if the rhetor himself doesn’t even recognize it?

These days students are not very sure what they think, and they are afraid to dogmatically recognize truth. So their writing effectiveness, their ability to persuade their audience, suffers. Audiences, especially modern young audiences, can spot a fake a mile away and will not suffer them.

Why are students not certain? This leads us to questions of morals and good and evil. Quintilian said that a rhetor should be a good man speaking well. And this is the ideal. That is, we hope that the good are sure, and are sure about the good, and can argue the good persuasively. But what do we find? We find that the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, as the poet says. The passionate intensity reflects in the writing. The worst are not just trying to persuade, they are trying to robotize, to complete a conquering of. The good, on the other hand, are not trying to do this—either because they aren’t quite convinced that the good is the best way to go, or because they are afraid to impose their good view, that is, to replace the evil view with a good view, for some unfathomable reason. They are afraid to achieve total victory, which they should not be. But the worst want fanatically dedicated clones. And what a persuader seeks to achieve in an audience, he will never achieve, unless he seeks it.

The problem, thus, is with the good. They are told not to be dogmatic. So the passionate intensity, and the persuasiveness, is left to the non-good. Now, as we saw above, Quintilian relates goodness to writing, to rhetoric studies. In our day, this is not done; usually those who practice and teach the craft move politely past these arguments about good and evil, to focus on sentences and word choices, and the like. But these mechanics turn out well, or far better than normal, if the one who is writing is certain. Look at the rhetoric of most politicians. It tends to be periphrastic, because the politicians are very sure what they want, which is power, money, prestige, and leverage. But they can’t say this, so they have to choose broad words that mean nothing, words like “hope” and “justice” and “democracy” and the like. And politicians have to use a lot of words, wound around in coiling clauses, but say nothing. Now if they were sure, dogmatic, they would be more effective. Instead, they all sound dishonest, because they generally are. Perhaps they are sure, but they don’t like to say what they are sure about, so they speak and proclaim that which they in heart do not agree to. Unclarity usually results.

So let’s pause for a moment to see how dogmatism and the nature of things shapes how a text or speech is received by an audience. Because I submit to you that we would do well to discuss dogmatism, or fanatical sureness, in writing, since we cannot get away from it. The problem, of course, besides the fact that at times people argue over what is good and what is evil, is what I call the inescapable relationship between dogmatism and the nature of things. For a person seems dogmatic to the multitudes if what the person says tends to agree with the nature of things, and the person does not seem dogmatic to the multitudes if what they say tends not to agree with the nature of things. Thus, if I vehemently deny my fanaticism and dogmatism, I will only be believed insofar as what I am dogmatic about aligns with the nature of things—truth(s), as it were. Take a flea versus God, for example. If I am dogmatic and fanatically dogmatic that a flea is God and should be worshipped as such, the multitudes will never allow it to be true that I get to be called a fanatical dogmatist, no matter how red-faced and strident I am about it. But if I tepidly claim that God is God, then I will be called a dogmatist and a fanatical dogmatist no matter how timidly I claim it. This is because the universal audience, the multitudes, thinks, according to natural law and the nature of things, whether a product of evolution or not, that God is God, and not a flea, or at least that the former is more likely to be true than the latter.

Until we decide questions of right and wrong, we can be certain we will continue to see wandering sentences, vague words, and students who try to mimic the teachers’ ideologies rather than say what they believe. But textbooks of our day strongly admonish teachers to teach both sides are right and there is no way to be sure of truth, or at least, they do not address this issue. The excellent textbook They Say, I Say is a bit of an example. What matters is arguing well, not arguing the truth. Disagreement is assumed and it’s just all an ongoing unsettled argument into which one is to cast one’s writing and see if one can be effective in the sea of arguments pulling every which way anchorless.

A possible alternative approach to teaching writing is to try first telling your students to write a paper arguing that stealing the social security check of the old woman next door is wrong. I submit to you that since we all universally agree on the rightness of this case, we will see clearer writing in such a piece than in one about a topic on which there is widespread disagreement. And let me give another option. In A. C. Grayling’s book, The God Argument, he says that “kindness,” among other things, is one thing we all agree on (8). It is a human value, he claims. Why not have students write about this, since they will naturally be more sure about it to start? In other words, it seems to me there is a space between “how I spent my summer vacation,” which is a clear attempt to avoid all controversy, and “take a side in the abortion debate,” which almost guarantees a horror show. Another thing we can all agree on is that the following are not just bad or inappropriate, they are evil: “torture, slavery, and cruelty to children,” as Christopher Hitchens states in the “Introduction” to The Portable Atheist.  A final suggestion I have of how to add to the teaching of writing, is to add lyric writing to the curriculum. Metered poetry is exceedingly dogmatic by nature, and the addition of a melody makes it the most powerful persuasive means known to humans. What is in your core being you don’t just say or write, you sing, and in such a catchy way (as advertisers do), that others are forced, even against their wills, to sing with you. Paul Fussell wrote that even though people disagree about why metered compositions are so popular, they agree that they are; he says that to some theorists, “(mostly romanticists), meter operates by inducing in the reader a state resembling hypnosis” (5). Just imagine if we told students their goal is to argue the reader into a such a complete adherence to our theses.

When we teach people to be effective writers, we might also mention the need to be right and sure, and the perils of being accused of dogmatism, and the relationship between rhetorical effectiveness and natural law.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Rhetoric [4th century BC]. Trans John H Freese [1939]. Cambridge: Loeb, 2006. Print.

Booth, Wayne. “The Rhetorical Stance.” College Composition and Communication 14.3 (Oct 1963): 139-145. Print.

Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding,” in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Second edition. Richard Ellna and Robert O’Clair (eds). New York: Norton, 1988. Print.

Emerson, Ralph W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. Print.

Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence. New York: Harper, 2012. Print.

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence. New York: Berkley Books, 2013. Print.

Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1979. Print.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say / I Say. New York: Norton, 2014. Print.

Grayling, A. C. The God Argument. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Hitchens, Christopher. “Introduction,” in The Portable Atheist. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007, pp xii-xxvi. Print.

Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,” in A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2014, pp 425-446. Print.

Strunk, William and E. B White. The Elements of Style. 4th edition. New York: Pearson, 2000. Print.

Young, Richard. “Concepts of art and the teaching of writing,” in The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing. James J Murphy (ed). New York: MLA, 1982, pp 130-142. Print.


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