Preterition

John had an interesting post about the five-paragraph theme several nights ago that jogged my memory. (I note also that his post yesterday concerned the passing of Clark Kerr, whose ideas have recently informed my thinking.) In reading yesterday’s New York Times, I was startled to see the following passage:

“As a student at Jefferson Davis High here, Rosa Arevelo seemed the ‘Texas miracle’ in motion. After years of classroom drills, she passed the high school exam required for graduation on her first try. . . At the University of Houston, though, Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph ‘persuasive essays’ for the state exam, she was stumped by her first writing assignment. She failed the college entrance exam in math twice, even with a year of remedial algebra. At 19, she gave up and went to trade school.”

Such synchronicity begs investigation.

According to John’s post, the authors of the Research in the Teaching of English essay he mentions attribute the five-paragraph theme to Pierre de la Ramée, later Latinized to Petrus Ramus or, finally, Peter Ramus, a sixteenth-century French scholar. According to Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, Ramus contended — contrary to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, upon whom he mounted vitriolic attacks — that invention and arrangement belong to dialectic, and that rhetoric only encompasses the study of style and delivery. From Father Ong, whose 91st birthday would have been November 30, we understand that Ramus invented the outline, that “Ramus’ streamlined reorganization of the age-old Western tradition of logic and rhetoric seemed to signal a reorganization of the whole of knowledge and indeed of the whole human lifeworld”, and that this was due in large part to the advent of “print technology” which “gave to visualist organization of thought and to textuality. . . a force unknown before, and in doing so effectively served pedagogical expediency and at the same time dissociated knowledge from discourse and gave it a quasi-monologic setting” (Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue vii, emphasis mine). And in that quotation, I think we’re starting to get at a possible correspondence between the NYT article and Ramus, as well as an understanding of why many writing teachers despise the five-paragraph theme (and why many others don’t).

Unfortunately, it’s a canard, and the five-paragraph theme didn’t originate with Ramus at all, but with the dispositio of the classical rhetoricians who preceded him. From Cicero, we understand that the forensic oration typically has five major parts:

1. exordium (introduction);
2. narratio (statement of facts);
3. confirmatio (proof);
4. refutatio (discrediting of opposing arguments);
5. peroratio (conclusion);

with the partitio or forecasting of the divisions of the oration sometimes fitting between the narratio and the confirmatio. But this is from Cicero’s rhetorical theory, and any reading of Cicero’s actual orations will demonstrate how often he strayed in practice from that theory, and how some parts were compressed to the point of elimination depending on the needs of his various audiences and others vastly expanded. We see in the Pro Milone, Pro Caelio, In Catilinam, Pro Ligario, and others that Cicero’s genius was in the application of abstract knowledge to situated practice and local contexts. Such contexts, as Rosa Arevelo discovered, are ill-served by Ramist “pedagogical expediency” and one-size-fits-all solutions. To again borrow the words of Father Ong, Peter Ramus was “the greatest master of the short-cut the world has ever known”, and short-cuts — whether a five-paragraph theme or a preemptive military strike — seldom offer lasting solutions.