Icing on the Cake

A few days ago, a colleague and I were discussing the content of Crowley and Hawhee’s chapter on delivery. (No, I don’t normally discuss this textbook over coffee, but she teaches our gifted education program at school, so I often pass along information I feel would be helpful to her in developing her program …) I explained to her how Greek writing initially had no punctuation, and passed along the authors’ advice of “waiting to put in larger marks of punctuation, like paragraphs and headers, until you’ve drafted the entire discourse at least once. Then outline it and use indentations and headers to mark the divisions of the discourse.” (p 413) She found this interesting, and we went off into other topics of discussion. When speaking with her yesterday, she thanked me for talking with her about the text, and said it had “freed” her to complete her written assignment for her graduate class. As she has always been a reluctant writer, she found the authors’ advice helpful in changing her mindset about writing. This, naturally, led me to consider how I teach writing to my fourth graders. Could this be an effective strategy in getting them to “open up” when it comes to writing?

Until recently, my own main purpose for writing has been academic: writing papers for school, work, professional communication, etc. Had I read the sections of this chapter pertaining to the above conversation without having read the preceding eleven chapters, I may have found them ridiculous. After all, isn’t it the job of classroom teachers to make sure that our students have a strong command of the English language, both verbal and written? However, in the scheme of things, and depending on the author’s purpose, it seems to make perfect sense. As an elementary teacher, I fully support the idea that students must learn the correct (or at least socially accepted) rules of grammar. This levels the playing field, so to speak, for effective communication to occur, both in verbal and written discourse. Once students understand the rules, they can figure out how to effectively break them, again depending on their purpose.

It seems to be a question of balance. How do we teach the students to write within the parameters of school expectations, while freeing them to express themselves without the confines of grammar and usage rules? Perhaps we can brainstorm an answer in tonight’s class discussion.

Finally, I refer back to the original topic of delivery. (By the way, I originally wrote the preceding sentence as, “Finally, back to the original topic of delivery.” But because it lacked a subject, I went back to edit. Here we go again with rules! I liked the sentence better in it’s original form.) Delivery, to me, seems to be the icing on the cake. It doesn’t matter how much time and energy one expends on the first four rhetorical canons; without effective delivery, whether it be oral, written, or visual, the discourse means little. It’s the power punch that appeals to the audience’s “eyes and ears” and gets them to pay attention to the message. Without it, you’ve wasted your time.