Short or abridged pieces are favored. Permissions costs must also be affordable. More serious pedagogical and scholarly attention to the genre might result in a less conservative canon. The Teaching of Writing. Coles sets forth a thirty-lesson writing course that focuses on content by identifying an intellectual problem that the class will work on together throughout the semester.
Assignments pose increasingly difficult questions about the common problem.
Class discussion of students' essays creates a productive self-consciousness about using language. Through most of its history, instruction in rhetoric aimed to equip students to write or speak on any objective topic. The rhetor was to be knowledgeable and impersonal in treating subjects. In the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries, personal tastes and feelings became more acceptable, particularly in essays and narratives. 383 Elbow, Peter, ed.