I '.(r)./1

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Mid-19th Century Writing Texts:
What Did They Look Like?
Looking at Some Feathers of a Lost Bird
o d ef; background on thi wor~.
and spring, I had the unusual opportunity to
work at the Library of Congress during a sabbatical leave.
There I was able to rummage through the cavernous and
labyrinthine stacks and to take a first hand look at the
Library's collection of early textbooks.
I started the
project thinking I would do one piece of work, but in fact,
as it so often happens, I ended up doing another. And it's
part of what I found that I want to share with you today;
it's early work, work-in-progress as it were, and I welcome
your thoughts about it as this is the first time I have
tried these ideas out on an audience larger than a writing
group I belong to.
I ended up focusing on two ideas: how we do history, and
what can happen when you take an up close look at any given
piece of historical terrain.
Some Thoughts About Doing History
Contemporary historians and historiographers explain
that history is not the objective or positivistic record of
events that it once seemed:
"a record of truth for the
instruction of mankind: (Blair, p. 398b). Repeatedly, they
draw the distinction between histor as e~e t (res gestae)
and histo~~ as acGaunt (historia rerum gestarum) (Stanford,
p. 1), between histo::i;:y as documenta y and histori as
rhetoric (LaCapra, pp. 15-44). Hayden White goes so far as
to say that "history is an intellectual enterprise akin to
rhetoric or poetic (LaCapra, p. 33)" and the French
historian Paul Veyne suggests that history is a "true
novel." ~ In another place, Veyne suggests that history is a
city, and that when we do history, "we visit what is still
visible of that city, the traces of it that remain."
While these students of history use different tropes to make
their point, they would seem to agree with Michael Stanford
that "a historian and a recording angel are two very
different things" (The Nature of Historical Knowledge, p.
127): the historian simply can't get it all.

----

In composition studies today, scholars such as Berlin,
Connors, Crowley, Halloran, Horner, Johnson, Murphy,
Stewart, and Vitanza have traced for us some insights into
the history of teaching writing and rhetoric in American
schools and colleges. As they do their work, they
repeatedly and generously say that their findings are
tentative, that there is much more investigation to be done,
that future study will turn up new ways of understanding
what has gone before. The call is to search for materials

2

that have not yet surfaced: student writing, other
unpublished materials, little known texts, little known
writers A likely temptation--certainly it was mine when I
began to look at little known 19th century texts--is to
think that with the recovery of new materials, those of us
interested in historical work can piece together the patches
or fill in the spaces, and that, working together, we can
write a single, unified history of writing instruction in
this country.
In fact, I would like to suggest that all we
can find are traces and fragments, or, if you will, the
feathers of a lost bird, and that we miss the point of
contemporary historians if we think that from the feathers
we can reconstruct the bird, or even worse, that there is
only one bird.

~-......_

~~

The advantage of seeing incompletely, o
part: , is that we make space for conv~sa>t"'i6ii;-space for
difference, space for perspectiV-e,--- ace for
multidimensionalit~--and that: 'n making this space, we are
more likely to take an ~nest stab at representing what was
real. Hen:r:..y,: Girm:rx.--- akes t: · e oint that "traditions should
be value f~
ne~ attempts to name the partial, the
particul-a-r; and the specific"; he goes on to say that
"postfuodernism argues for a view of history that is
~ent:ered, discontinuous, fragmented, and p:J:ui::: -- " (Border
._,~~/ossings, p. 122).
19th Century "First Books"

I\/

So to turn to the particular subject of this paper:
early 19th century writing texts.
In Robert Connors' essay
"The Rhetoric of Explanation," he documents that the text
that had the most influence on other composition books in
the early 19th century was John Walker's The Teacher's
Assistant. Originally publ1sHea in Eondon in 180 , the
nook's 1810 American edition made Walker, according to
Connors, "the exem lar for a whole school of compositio
pedago ," a pedagogy tfiat: Connors claims most seconaary
exfs used between 1815-1840 (p. 205). What I am interested
in here is a sam2ling of books that i ter~pt or complicat
the atterns of Walker's P.edago y an in some ways
nticipate contem orar pedagogy.
It's worthwhile noting
tnat w ile any generalization is fraught with peril, it
seems as if the books that most often veered away from
Walker were what I call First Books, books for be inners or
young composers, books intende t
G
t dents to
cmn osit:ion.
In "Tne Reform Tradition in Nineteenth-Century
Composition Teaching," William Woods argues that it is with
books for young students that education made its first move
from discipline centered to student centered teaching and
learning (p. 387).
The complete title of Walker's book is The Teacher's
Assistant in English Composition; or Easy Rules for Writing

3

Themes and Composing Exercises on Subjects Proper for the
Improvement of Youth of Both Sexes at School.
Like the
titles of many early 19th century texts, Walker's title
elaborates on (rather than simply names) what he is about in
his book: giving rules, or what came to be thought of as
principles of composition.
For each of the book's four
main sections--Themes, Regular Subjects, Eas Essa¥S, and
Narrative--Walker offers a page or Ewo o expianaEion.
In
fie section on Themes, for example, he defines a theme as
"the proving of some truth" and then lists the six-part
proof: the proposition, the reason, the confirmation, the
simile, the example, the testimony, and the conclusion. The
major part of the chapter then consists of 21 sample themes,
with each of the six-proofs labelled for eacll theme.
Each of the 21 themes is based on an aphorism ("Well-begun is
half done," "Nip sin in the bud," "No art can be acquired
without rules," etc.) and relies on abstract ideas, assumes
a shared world view and moral code, and cites authorities
such as the "moralists of all ages," "wise philosophers,"
and "ancient moralists."

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Walker's Principles--and the Ways They Are Challenged
As in many early books, the central d1recEives
teachers about teaching the composing process are
articulated in the "Preface," and elaborated in the
"Introduction." Different readers, I'm sure, might name or
see these points differently, but the points from Walker
that for me are central and that I am choosing to represent
are ~ . The italics are ine.

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is the art of speaking and writing the English language with
propriety" (quoted in Besig, p. 23). Thus there was no
place for composition until the child, having begun her
literacy study with the "word," was ready to move to more
complex forms, a process that invariably took years.
I find
this same sentiment in Rippingham's 1816 Rules for English
Composition, Rippingham writing, "The commencement in the
art of literary composition, requires nothing more than a
gentle exercise of reason. . . . The theory and idiom of the
lan uage must fir.st be attained; for w o ca e-xP,r-ess nis.
i eas n woras the elative de endenc o · hie
e as n t
-se·ef a i ned." R1ppingham, p. B2). Besig suggests that a
second reason that the study of composition lagged behind
udy of grammar is that the J2rimary teaching method,
following the study of Latin, was to memor i ze and rec1 e
r.
. A new me hod would be required for
e feac i"ng of
composition.
i
~ Besig argues that because school
masters ha
man sub'ects to teach (she cites one teacher
in as New ersey who was assigned to teach English, Latin,
Greek, arithmetick, algebra, trigonometry and sailing), they
of course preferred "hear in rules of_ :r:arn
- o c..orrect i p g /)
th es" (Besig, p. 24) . Following fnis emp as is on
//-..._
nremor'zing and rules, it is not surprising that when
composition began to make its way into the curriculum, it
was after the student had spent considerable time on
grammar.
Eventually students generated their own sentences
to practice the use of a grammatical principle (Parker
insists on this) , eventually they wrote from teacher-given
outlines, eventually they wrote original essays, but
initially, learning the composing process began with
memorizing rules and Walker's text is a principal
demonstration of that belief.
Two writers who interrupt these patterns are Charles
Morely i n is A Practical Guiae o Composi'ri on {1839) and
John Frost in his Easy Exercises for Composition (1839);
ore y EaugnE at the Green-Street Seminary in Albany and
Frost taught at Central High School in Philadelphia.
Both
of them argye EG a mo ~ e natural
o_ w it
than was common i n::other books.
In his Preface, Morely
writes, "Children and youth are taught to spell and read
what they do not understand, to define without understanding
the definitions, and to commit to memory the words of
grammar, rhetoric, . . . while scarcely a sentence is
understood. . . . The pupil should first gain thoughts,
clear conceptions of things, and then proceed to learn their
names--this is nature's process with the infant . . . " (p.
iv).
In a similar vein, Frost argues for a more natural way
of learning to write:
In teaching a child to express himself freely and
naturally in conversation, we do not begin by
systematically inculcating the rules of grammar;
but by presenting to him subjects suited to his

5

comprehension, and encouraging him to say whatever
occurs to him respecting them. Grammar follows
afterwards; and he has in a great measure acquired
his own language, before he commences the process
of analysing (sic) it according to scientific
principles.
The method which we pursue, in teaching the
art of written expression, is founded on the same
principle. We have encouraged the pupil to write
freely and boldly on a variety of subjects, which
we consider well suited to his comprehension, his
habits and associations. We trust that he has
begun to feel somewhat at home in the use of his
pen; and we believe that in consequence of this
preparatory course, he will be much less
embarrassed and disheartened than he otherwise
would on entering upon a systematic course of
exercises in the analysis and composition of
sentences.
(pp. 79-80)
While Morely includes a few pages on figurative language and
style at the end of his 96-page book, the major emphasis in
his book is on the practice of writing. While he doesn't
follow the then common practice of beginning the study of
writing with the study of grammar, and while he doesn't
follow Walker's injunction to begin with memorizing the
rules for writing, he does follow a Walker-like suggestion
of giving the student a text. But unlike Walker, Morely
makes the text available to the student: the student is
asked first to answer questions in response to the text,
then to write an essay from a skeleton or ellipsis of the
story, then to write the story from memory in the student's
own language. A significant leap from Walker occurs when
Morely asks the student to write, "What lesson do you learn
am th &~an¥~" EP=· ~)
Frost is signif ican y inoepenoent
from Walker and from the better known textbook writers of
his day in his insistence on starting not with rules for
grammar or for writin , but wi~ wriEin ·
f.
The first
an
aJor section of his book is devoted to composing, the
last two and smaller sections to sentence structure and
figurative language.
In Frost's "Concluding Remarks'' at the
end of his book, he quotes The Reverend J. Joyce who with
the Reverends W. Shepherd and Lant Carpenter wrote a twovolume work in 1817 called Systematic Education:
"Schemes
have been given by Walker and others for the e'ting, out
we eeI s rong ooub s as to the propriety of shackling the
minds of young people with those kinds of forms.
If they
attempt to write on a subject of imagination, let the
imagination have fair and full play for the exercise of its
powers . . . " (p. 120). Certainly Frost is interested not
primarily in carefully laid out schemes for writing or
formulas, but in the development of the writer's
imagination.

'>

6

Looking at the Ta.b..l.g of Content
f several books
graphically represen
e ai'"f-~erence between Frost and his
colleagues writing at the same time. Here, for example, is
the Table of Contents from Parker's 1832 Progressive
Exercises, from Frost's 1839 Easy Exercises, and from
Qua ~enbos' 1851 First Lessons '--n ~ pes.:i:.E :ion!';'.-----~
2. 1 - Young writers cannot be ex ected ta inuent matt~~
eac ers 'oug t 'C o expect not ing from- ten-der-yout
ut
memory; judgment and invention will come by degrees, and
ought not to be forced upon the delicate intellects of
children too soon" (pp. 4-5) .

As this second point announces, the key to Walker's
composition pedagogy is memory, and contrary to the title's
suggestion, the student is not--at least as a beginning
writer--"writing themes" or "composing exercises" as we
~ would understand those writerly activities.
In Walker's
\t pedagogy, the pupil must co2 and emorize the rules for
~~~~~~ each kind of text; the teacner then reads a selected-from-~ ~
the-book theme to the class, discusses the theme, reads it a
v
~ec;;:.a~time, then instructs the pupil to write down--from
'.JJJ
memor -what he remembers of the written-by-an-adult text.
~/-::)
~te Cher corrects what the pupil has written, and has the
~· 1
pupil make a clean copy of the corrected text in order to
"imprint the corrections in the pupil's mind, and insensibly
make them his own" (p. 7). So persuaded is Walker that
students cannot (should not?) begin by writing their own
themes that he cautions against students having a copy of
the book, for the student, knowing that the best text she
could produce would be the one that most closely resembled
the printed text, might suffer a strong temptation not to
memorize what she had heard, but to copy the text that was
in the book.

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From the rules that Walker lays out for the sec~ion of
his text called "Regular Subjects," we can assume that he
believes students will eventually compose original essays.
Connors notes that the rules, especially as re-formulated by
Daniel Jaudon, are really an inventional strategy, asking
students, for example, to define or explain their subject,
to show the cause of it, to show whether the subject was
ancient or modern
("Rhetoric of Explanation," pp. 204-206).
While indeed that seems likely, it is nonetheless true, that
in Walker's text--a text intended for young writers--he does
not think students can begin learning to write by writing.
William Russell, in his 1823 Grammar of ComRosition, seems
to share Wal~er s opinion Enat s f uaenfs begin with
memorizing rules and studying the writing of others before
they begin to write original texts. Here is Russell in his
"Intl:'oduction":

~

7

When the pupil has reviewed the principles of
composition, contained in the rules of rhetoric,
he is prepared to apply them; but not, in the
first instance, to exercises of his own. Such a
~rans~ i&
~s ~oo aBrup , and 'E'C>o tliff 1cult for
the minds of youth, and has generally the effect
of embarrassing or disgusting them. The learner
should be permitted first to trace the application
of the rules of rhetoric in the writings of
others. This stage of practice he finds easy and
interesting. It also serves to prepare him for
transferring to his own compositions the rules
which he has been applying to those of other
writers. (p. xiii)
It is in the face of directives like these that writers who
hold an opposite point of view stand out. Frost is
especially important here because of his pronounced
difference.

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P-7

Frost believed that at the same time that young
students were learning grammatical principles, they could
write original compositions. As noted earlier, his little
book contains no elaborate rules; in addition, it contains
no sample essays on abstract topics, and does not make
memory part of the writing process.
I ste~
Frost begins
by asking students to write in response to familiar pictures
and scenes, giving what he calls, "a few simple directions
as to the mode of rendering each object or scene the subject
of a short essay in composition" (p. 9).
In the first
section on animals, for example, one of the pictures is
entitled "A Cat that has stolen a Bird." The directions to
the student read simply, "You have a very good hint in this ~
picture for a short description and story. A single look at
it will set your invention at work'' (p. 14). Another
woodcut is of a peacock, the direction reading, "Beauty and
pride belong to the peacock. You can easily originate some
good reflections on his character" (p. 17).
Another feature that is unique to Frost is his belief
that students could be in wr· 'ng with writing. Parker, to
cite one of the netter know textbook wFit;e-rs, f'or example,
prescribed beginning with mental gymnastics. He directs
students to fol ow a seven-ste:g "study of the subject"
before taking up the pen to record a single idea (pp. 6869).
Frost, on the other hand, encourages students to begin
by writing "freely and boldly," and not to edit prematurely:
"the first and most important thing," he writes, "is to be
able to originate observations on the subjects presented and
to express them in such language as [the writer's] feelings
prompt.
If he feel a constant solicitude lest he should
make a trifling mistake, this will chill his feelings and
give his writing an unpleasant air of stiffness and
constraint" (pp. 58-59). So Frost is not only saying a
student can write original essays, he is also saying

8

students can begin the writing process with writing.
Frost transparency)

(show

Frost-~

There is a great deal more to be said about
especially about his debt to the Swiss reformer Pestalozzi
and Pestalozzi's follower Elizabeth Mayo. The poin ~ I want
to make here is that he was very certain students could
write original compositions, even if their first/ a't tempts
were very short.
/
/

While Easy Exercises was the first book that I know of
that asked students to write in response to a visual prompt,
an anonymous 1854 book entitled The Illustrated Composition
Book uses a similar technique.
Instead, however, of using
many engravings as Frost does, this writer uses a handful of
more elaborate sketches and gives up to eight prompts for
each one. The first woodcut, for example, is of an Edenic
scene. Like the other cuts in the book, it appears at the
top of the page, surrounded' by eight writing prompts (the
creation story, gardens, animals, Adam and Eve, morning,
happiness, or birds); the rest of the 8x10 page is left
blank for the student to actually write on.
Both Frost and the author of The Illustrated
Composition BooJt offer suggestions for field research as an
heuristic:
Frost invites students to interview people
working in tl'ie trades and professions; the 1854 writer tells
students:~'You must study, converse, observe, go into the
fields, 'nto cities, into factories, on board ships, and
wherev
information can be gained" (p. 1) . If students
were no longer memorizing themes, and if they did not have
lar e stores of information at hand (they were not all
pursuing classical courses of study) , they needed to get
t eir information from other sources. Frost and others
elieved that students could do field research to discover
subjects and evidence and could write in response to
observation.
for or

In essence, Walker's text treats exposition, argument,
and narrative.
From today's vantage point, the absence of
any reference to personal writing is ~picuous f even the
sample narratives are of classical stories rather than
stories that would emerge from the writer's life. Two of
the sample narratives, for example, that students would
memorize and then copy are "Fidelity Respected by Enemies"
(an account of the Battle of Philippi) and "The false
Happiness of Tyrants" (an account of Damocles and
Dionysius). Sketches and Outlines (from which the student
would reconstruct a narrative) are given for topics such as
these:
"Courage and Judgment United in Necessity" (the
story of a Roman battle with the Albans) and "Friendship

9

Continuing after Death," (an account of the friendship of
Titus Volumnius and Marcus Lucullus).
In none of the essays
the student hears is there any attempt to cite or value
personal experience, and certainly not the experience of the
student.
It's as if the student is outside of the composin
process, and is studying not writing, but scribal activity.
In Walker's pedagogy, students never do get to what Walker
calls "that terrible task of writing their own thoughts" (p.
166) •
As Connors points out in his essay "Personal Writing
Assignments," Walker's pedagogy was "was picked up and used
by other authors, especially in the United States, where the
common schools were teaching composition to an ever-larger
percentage of children" (p. 171). The connection Connors
draws is that "Newer composition texts also offered lists
and lists of potential subject assignments, all of which
/
were comp e e y,
t:er- y_ relentless !
f m erso
" (pp. 170171 .
n act , iE may have been true that many of the
\
better known books, such as Parker's (like Walker's),
focused exclusively on the impersonal, but there's another 1
point to be made, and that is that the lesser known writers
of the first books, the books for introductory courses, did,
/ _ indeed focus on personal writing.
~

Again, Frost is a key player here.
In dozens of places
in Easy Exercises, he asks students to write out of their
personal experience. The same is true of the author of The
Illustrated Composition Book and of Charles Brookfield in
his First Book in Composition.(add Morely?)
Clearly, by
asking students to write about the familiar and the
personal, these writers overcome the argument that students
had nothing to say, and they invite students to write in
their own voice, not in imitation of a learned, adult voice.
Here are a few samples from from Frost. A picture entitled
"Boy telling about his studies at school," directs the
s t u enEs, "You can here describe the picture and, then give
an account of your own studies at school" (p. 21); another
scene is entitled "Girls at school." The directions to the
student are "Describe tile p1ct:ure fully.
Say what you
please about schools" (p. 22); another scene invites the
students to "Describe your own ideas of a pleasant summer
holiday" (24); and yet another asks "What kind of reading do
you prefer?" (p. 25)
What's so clear in these assignments,
is that while the student is given a prompt, the student is
absolutely encouraged to write out of her own experience.
When Frost does provide a model for how students can respond
to a picture, he also says, "The pupil can follow this or
any similar course ~htJ he following pictures, or write any
other thoughts which tlley may suggest" (p. 10). The author
of The Illustrated Composition Book also makes space for
studen~
o proouce persona! wr1f1ng.
students are invited
to write about the part of the world they would like to
travel in, about their family to a friend, about a comet

J

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they may have seen, about the farm where a friend lives.
And there is personal writing in both Brookfield and Morely.
What Do the Interruptions Mean?
A number of First Books, therefore, in a number of ways
interrupt and compicate the formulas and schemes laid out by
Walker and his followers.
The question that remains is What
does it mean to investigate work--such as these First Books-that have not yet made their way into our history in any
significant way? (-What ~-P..!: Opose is a list of possible ways
of reading these interruptions. There are no doubt other
. of them for today. I
ways as well, bu~ this is my - reading
will mention ~h~of these ways rather quickly, and talk
about one in a bit of detail:
.............

·-

1.
At least in the past, the educational hierarchy has
assigned more value to what happens at higher levels of
education than to what happens at lower levels.
In
speculating about why the approach to composing advocated in
some of these First Books was not widely known or broadly
picked up and replicated in secondary and post-secondary
writing classes, several thoughts come to mind.
For the
most part, writers of these books taught in the lower or
secondary schools and did not have a ready made group of
students who were preparing for teaching careers and thus ,
likely to use these works in their teaching; in addition,
there was no natural way for these writers and their work to
influence the way writing was being taught in the
universities (in educational hierarchies, new ideas have
typically travelled down into the schools, not up into the
universities); and finally, these writers did not write
extensively about their work in the journals of the times.

2.
The contributions of other thinkers emerge and the
presence of other zeitgeists is felt.
Some of the other
forces at play, other ways of viewing the world, of viewing
education can come forward with the investigation of new
materials.
From looking at Frost's text next to a book he
edited by Elizabeth Mayo on object teaching, it is clear
that it is from her work that he came to the idea of having
students write in response to objects, of gathering ideas
not from words, but from things. And it is also clear that
the driving force behind the idea of object teaching was the
Swiss reformer Johann Pestalozzi.
3.
The direct, hands-on treatment of writing instruction
provided in these First Books provides an interesting
corollary to the careers toward which these students were
heading. Common and secondary schools were preparing
students for trades and professions; in Easy Exercises,
students write stories and anecdotes about the usefulness of
the farmer and the carpenter, about the ways in which
haymaking supports all other trades and professions, about

11

beautiful edifices reared by the labor of the stone mason.
In The Illustrated Composition Book, students are told that
"all classes of people--farmers, mechanics, merchants, and
professional men--must write so many letters,
advertisements, notices, agreements," and that "the
composition of [these texts] must be accurate to insure
success in business" (p. 1). This attention to and
appreciation of labor and the working class--and to writing
as a means of successful participation in the world of work-were not apparent in the better known books and certainly
not in the upper level books. One reading of this seems to
·c
be that students in the lower grades, some of whom were
r C~c}
clearly not heading toward college, studied some of the
:~"\. -eii,c,
writing techniques we value today.
Or Cj)

0

f;Def
4. Chan~e is o ten refig,ured on the mar
In a
wonderful dissertation on margins in a science class, Ann
Haley Oliphant, following Wendell Berry, says this about
those places on the earth that are at the edges, the edge of
a field, the edge of the sea: margins in the natural world
are often dismissed as unimportant or irrelevant; margins
represent less stable, less predictable environments;
margins can only be described in relation to something else.
It is also true t at, in the margins, new varieties of life
are constantly b ng created through unanticipated,
uncontrolled, and unplanned cross-pollination and
intermingling; th
the richness in activity, meaning, and
responsiveness occurring in the margins may not be easily
detected; and th
observers must get in deep in the margins
to sense the
value of these diverse places.
I want to argue that the books that I'm looking at that
interrupt or destabilize the mainline patterns of
instruction are indeed books at the edges, books on the
margins.
I would argue that what makes them marginal is
that they were written by little known writers, they often
had a short shelf life i they were used with beginning
students, often children. I would further argue that like
natural margins, they are the site of new ~arieties of life
and that they represent not a monoculture, but a
polyculture, a culture that supports life of all kinds and 8
celebrates diversity and freedom, Ebey; :r-e :lae_e_s ofS AFOP~
possibility .
.ai~~~~~~-.Y.ou
e _ r.o wlia :r ve s:aid earli"6 , ne
important value of looking at little known first books is
that they pointing to a site of inquiry that hasn't yet
received much study from historians. Understandably, people
doing historical study begin at the center (however that is
perceived), not at the margins.
In the margins, however, we
can find passages
om Easy Exercises to illustrate~ /t -r;_~lfBerlin ~ :n-ot1ons
expressionist or romantic pedagogy,
passages that anticipate the kind of free writing that we
know of from Peter Elbow, passages that warn against
premature editing that we have from Mike Rose. And
certainly, writing exercises and assignments from any number

1

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~onnors'

. j-+

s~\

~~Y

of little known First Books can revise Robert
claim /;
that there was an absence of personal writing in early 19th // \ ~~ ·
century composition texts. One of the things that happens
when you wander around in the margins is that you see from a
,_1v\\UV,S
different distance, up close and in deep as it were, and
V
that makes different things visible.
conclusion
It seems to me that trying to uncover traces of the
history of writing instruction is like looking for the
feathers of a lost bird. From the feathers we can tell
something about the bird, but hard as we try, we can never
recapture the bird. What we have are various writers
saying, it looked like this, it looked like that. And what
quickly becomes clear, is that we're looking not at one
bird, but at many birds, and that people see them in
different lights and from different perspectives. A reading
of First Books, those books that were written for young
writers and that often interrupted the patterns of better
known upper level books, suggests that there are other
feathers, other birds waiting to be glimpsed. Henry Giroux
writes, there is not a single past that is the object for
memory, "there are multiple pasts" (p. 8).
I would simply
speak to the delight of catching a new bird on the wing, a
bird that lives at the edge, or if you will, a bird that
lives not at the center of the field, but at the margins.

----

/~Q![fr;_ 07•-t,e-t
1

Mid-19th Century Writing Texts:
What Did They Look Like?
or, Looking at Some Feathers of a Lost Bird
Some Thoughts About Doing History
Contemporary historians and historiographers explain
that history is not the objective or positivistic record of
events that it once seemed:
"a record of truth for the
instruction of mankind: (Blair, p. 398b} . Repeatedly, they
draw the distinction between history as event (res gestae}
and history as account (historia rerum gestarum} (Stanford,
p. 1}, between history as documentary and history as
rhetoric (LaCapra, pp. 15-44}. Hayden White goes so far as
to say that "history is an intellectual enterprise akin to
rhetoric or poetic (LaCapra, p. 33}" and the French
historian Paul Veyne suggests that history is a "true
novel." In another place, Veyne suggests that history is a
city, and that when we do history, "we visit what is still
visible of that city, the traces of it that remain."
While these students of history use different tropes to make
their point, they would seem to agree with Michael Stanford
that "a historian and a recording angel are two very
different things" (The Nature of Historical Knowledge, p.
127}: the historian simply can't get it all.
In composition studies today, It±
anel scholars such as Berlin, Connors,
Crowley, Halloran, Horner, Johnson, Murphy, Stewart, and
Vitanza have traced for us some insights into the history of
teaching writing and rhetoric in American schools and
colleges. As they do their work, they repeatedly and
generously say that their findings are tentative, that there
is much more investigation to be done, that future study
will turn up new ways of understanding what has gone before.
The call is to search for materials that have not yet
surfaced:
student writing, other unpublished materials,
little known texts, little known writers A likely
temptation--certainly it was mine when I began to look at
little known 19th century texts--is to think that with the
recovery of new materials, those of us interested in
historical work can piece together the patches or fill in
the spaces, and that, working together, we can write a
single, unified history of writing instruction in this
country.
In fact, I would like to suggest that all we can
find are traces and f ragments, or, if you will, the feathers
of a lost bird, and that we miss the point of contemporary
historians if we think that from the feathers we can
reconstruct the bird, or even worse, that there is only one
bird.

~-;a-n
_-Pr~ c;,£-=-Er-RJtli£~Lt-

The advantage of seeing incompletely, of seeing in
parts, is that we make space for conversation, space for
difference, space for perspective, space for

~or

Pvt

I~
~~

~~'

11Jr

\
multidimensionality--and that in making this space, we are
more likely to take an honest stab at representing what was
real. Henry Giroux makes the point that "traditions should
be valued for their attempts to name the partial, the
particular, and the specific"; he goes on to say that
"postmodernism argues for a view of history that is
decentered, discontinuous, fragmented, and plural" (Border
Crossings, p. 122).
Early and Mid 19th Century "First Books"

So to turn to the particular subject of this paper:
early 19th century writing texts.
In Robert Connors' essay
"The Rhetoric of Explanation," he documents that the text
that had the most influence on other composition books in
the early 19th century was John Walker's The Teacher's
Assistant. Originally published in London in 1801, the
book's 1810 American edition made Walker, according to
Connors, "the exemplar for a whole school of composition
pedagogy," a pedagogy that Connors claims most secondary
texts used between 1815-1840 (p. 205) . What I am interested
in here is a sampling of books that interrupt or complicate
the patterns of Walker's pedagogy and in some ways
anticipate contemporary pedagogy. It's worthwhile noting
that while any generalization is fraught with peril, it
seems as if the books that most often veered away from
Walker were what I call First Books, books for beginners or
young composers, books intended to introduce students to
composition.
In "The Reform Tradition in Nineteenth-Century
Composition Teaching," William Woods argues that it is with
books for young students that education made its first move
from discipline centered to student centered teaching and
learning (p. 387) .
The complete title of Walker's book is The Teacher's
Assistant in English Composition; or Easy Rules for Writing
Themes and Composing Exercises on Subjects Proper for the
Improvement of Youth of Both Sexes at School. Like the
titles of many early 19th century texts, Walker's title
elaborates on (rather than simply names) what he is about in
his book: giving rules, or what came to be thought of as
principles of composition.
For each of the book's four
main sections--Themes, Regular Subjects, Easy Essays, and
Narrative--Walker offers a page or two of explanation. In
the section on Themes, for example, he defines a theme as
"the proving of some truth" and then lists the six-part
proof:
the proposition, the reason, the confirmation, the
simile, the example, the testimony, and the conclusion. The
major part of the chapter then consists of 21 sample themes,
with each of the six-proofs labelled for each theme. Each
of the 21 themes is based on an aphorism ("Well-begun is
half done," "Nip sin in the bud," "No art can be acquired
without rules," etc.) and relies on abstract ideas, assumes
a shared world view and moral code, and cites authorities

//<.

such as the "moralists of all ages," "wise
and "ancient moralists."
Walker's Principles--and the Ways They Are Challenged
As in many early books, the central directives to
teachers about teaching the composing process are
articulated in the "Preface," and elaborated in the
"Introduction." Different readers, I'm sure, might name or
see these points differently, but the points from Walker
that for me are central and that I am choosing to represent
are four.
The italics are mine.

1. The place from which the student begins writing is
listening to the teacher read and explain the rules (in
prose and in verse) for a particular kind of discourse. The
student copies the rules as she hears them and then commits
them to memory.
As anyone who has looked even briefly at early
composition textbooks, the rule was to start with the rules,
not with practice.
In 1935, Emily Besig wrote a
dissertation at Cornell entitled "The History of Composition
Teaching in the Secondary Schools before 1900." Two points
she makes in that work are these:
(1) that composition and
grammar were both introduced into the American school about
1750 and that Franklin's Academy in Philadelphia was the
first school to recognize composition as an important part
of the curriculum, and (2) that the study and teaching of
composition lagged behind the study and teaching of grammar
for three reasons.

v

Besig argues that most textb 6~ters, fol
Lindley Murray, believed that the tudy of gramma
necessary beginning place for literacy pract""ices, Murray
writing in the Preface to his 1795 grammar "English Grammar
is the art of speaking and writing the English language with
propriety" (quoted in Besig, p. 23). Thus there was no
place for composition until the child, having begun her
literacy study with the "word," was ready to move to more
complex forms, a process that invariably took years ~
I find
this same sentiment in Rippingham's 1816 Rules for English
Composition, Rippingham writing, "The commencement in the
art of literary composition, requires nothing more than a
gentle exercise of reason. • . . The theory and idiom of the
language must first be attained; for who can express his
ideas by words the relative dependency of which he has not
.eer ined." (Rippingham, p. B2). Besig suggests that a
econd eason that the study of composition lagged behind
study of grammar is that the primar teaching method,
following the study o
atin, was to memorize and recite
rules. A new _)lle-'Eh~ would be required for the teaching of
composition. (_fina_ll.y , Besig argues that because school
masters had so many subjects to teach (she cites one teacher

4

in East New Jersey who was assigned to teach English, Latin,
Greek, arithmetick, algebra, trigonometry and sailing) , they
of course preferred "hearing :tJJ.le,s_o.f_q ammar to correcting
th es" ~Besig, p. 24). Following this emphasis on
memorizing and rules, it is not surprising that when
composition began to make its way into the curriculum, it
was after the student had spent considerable time on
grammar.
Eventually students generated their own sentences
to practice the use of a grammatical principle (Parker
insists on this), eventually they wrote from teacher-given
outlines, eventually they wrote original essays, but
initially, learning the composing process began with
memorizing rules and Walker's text is a principal
demonstration of that belief.
Two .writers who interrupt these patterns are Charles
Morely in his A Practical Guide to Composition (1839) and
John Frost in his Easy Exercises for Composition (1839);
Morely taught at the Green-Street Seminary in Albany and
Frost taught at Central High School in Philadelphia. Both
of them argue for a more natural way of learning to write
than was common in other books.
In his Preface, Morely
writes, "Children and youth are taught to spell and read
what they do not understand, to define without understanding
the definitions, and to commit to memory the words of
grammar, rhetoric, . . . while scarcely a sentence is
understood. . . . The pupil should first gain thoughts,
clear conceptions of things, and then proceed to learn their
names--this is nature's process with the infant . . . " (p.
iv) • In a similar vein, Frost argues for a more natural way
of learning to write:
In teaching a child to express himself freely and
naturally in conversation, we do not begin by
systematically inculcating the rules of grammar;
but by presenting to him subjects suited to his
comprehension, and encouraging him to say whatever
occurs to him respecting them. Grammar follows
afterwards; and he has in a great measure acquired
his own language, before he commences the process
of analysing (sic) it according to scientific
principles.
The method which we pursue, in teaching the
art of written expression, is founded on the same
principle. We have encouraged the pupil to write
freely and boldly on a variety of subjects, which
we consider well suited to his comprehension, his
habits and associations. We trust that he has
begun to feel somewhat at home in the use of his
pen; and we believe that in consequence of this
preparatory course, he will be much less
embarrassed and disheartened than he otherwise
would on entering upon a systematic course of

exercises in the analysis and composition
sentences.
(pp. 79-80}
While Morely includes a few pages on figurative language and
style at the end of his 96-page book, the major emphasis in
his book is on the practice of writing. While he doesn't
follow the then common practice of beginning the study of
writing with the study of grammar, and while he doesn't
follow Walker's injunction to begin with memorizing the
rules for writing, he does follow a Walker-like suggestion
of giving the student a text. But unlike Walker, Morely
makes the text available to the student: the student is
asked first to answer questions in response to the text,
then to write an essay from a skeleton or ellipsis of the
story, then to write the story from memory in the student's
own language. A significant leap from Walker occurs when
Morely asks the student to write, "What lesson do you learn
from the story?" (p. 9). Frost is significantly independent
from Walker and from the better known textbook writers of
his day in his insistence on starting not with rules for
grammar or for writing, but with writing itself. The first
and major section of his book is devoted to composing, the
last two and smaller sections to sentence structure and
figurative language.
In Frost's "Concluding Remarks" at the
end of his book, he quotes The Reverend J. Joyce who with
the Reverends W. Shepherd and Lant Carpenter wrote a twovolume work in 1817 called Systematic Education:
"Schemes
have been given by Walker and others for theme-writing, but
we feel strong doubts as to the propriety of shackling the
minds of young people with those kinds of forms.
If they
attempt to write on a subject of imagination, let the
imagination have fair and full play for the exercise of its
powers . . . " (p. 120). Certainly Frost is interested not
primarily in carefully laid out schemes for writing or
formulas, but in the development of the writer's
imagination.
Looking at the Table of Contents of several books
graphically represents the difference between Frost and his
colleagues writing at the same time. Here, for example, is
the Table of Contents from Parker's 1832 Progressive
Exercises, from Frost's 1839 Easy Exercises, and from
Quackenbos' 1851 First Lessons in Composition.

2. Young writers cannot be expected to invent matter.
Teachers "ought to expect nothing from tender youth but
memory; judgment and invention will come by degrees, and
ought not to be forced upon the delicate intellects of
children too soon" (pp. 4-5).
As this second point announces, the key to Walker's
composition pedagogy is memory, and contrary to the title's
suggestion, the student is not--at least as a beginning

6

writer--"writing themes" or "composing exercises" as we
would understand those writerly activities. In Walker's
pedagogy, the pupil must copy and memorize the rules for
each kind of text; the teacher then reads a selected-fromthe-book theme to the class, discusses the theme, reads it a
second time, then instructs the pupil to write down--from
memory--what he remembers of the written-by-an-adult text.
The teacher corrects what the pupil has written, and has the
pupil make a clean copy of the corrected text in order to
"imprint the corrections in the pupil's mind, and insensibly
make them his own" (p. 7). So persuaded is Walker that
students cannot (should not?) begin by writing their own
themes that he cautions against students having a copy of
the book, for the student, knowing that the best text she
could produce would be the one that most closely resembled
the printed text, might suffer a strong temptation not to
memorize what she had heard, but to copy the text that was
in the book.
When I first found the section added to later editions
of Walker's text called "Hints for Correcting and Improving
Juvenile Compositions" (pp. 221-239), I thought that this
might be the section in which students were taught to write
their own themes; but, not so. In this section, teachers
are told how to work with students in such areas as
structure, redundancy, word choice, but the theme or essay
the student is "writing," is still a version of the text
that the teacher originally read to the class.
From the rules that Walker lays out for the section of
his text called "Regular Subjects," we can assume that he
believes students will eventually compose original essays.
Connors notes that the rules, especially as re-formulated by
Daniel Jaudon, are really an inventional strategy, asking
students, for example, to define or explain their subject,
to show the cause of it, to show whether the subject was
ancient or modern ("Rhetoric of Explanation," pp. 204-206).
While indeed that seems likely, it is nonetheless true, that
in Walker's text--a text intended for young writers--he does
not think students can begin learning to write by writing.
William Russell, in his 1823 Grammar of Composition, seems
to share Walker's opinion that students begin with
memorizing rules and studying the writing of others before
they begin to write original texts. Here is Russell in his
"Introduction":
When the pupil has reviewed the principles of
composition, contained in the rules of rhetoric,
he is prepared to apply them; but not, in the
first instance, to exercises of his own. Such a
transition is too abrupt, and too difficult for
the minds of youth, and has generally the effect
of embarrassing or disgusting them. The learner
should be permitted first to trace the application

7

of the rules of rhetoric in the writings of
others. This stage of practice he finds easy and
interesting . . It also serves to prepare him for
transferring to his own compositions the rules
which he has been applying to those of other
writers. (p. xiii)
It is in the face of directives like these that writers who
hold an opposite point of view stand out. Frost is
especially important here because of his pronounced
difference.
Frost believed that at the same time that young
students were learning grammatical principles, they could
write original compositions. As noted earlier, his little
book contains no elaborate rules; in addition, it contains
no sample essays on abstract topics, and does not make
memory part of the writing process.
Instead, Frost begins
by asking students to write in response to familiar pictures
and scenes, giving what he calls, "a few simple directions
as to the mode of rendering each object or scene the subject
of a short essay in composition" (p. 9).
In the first
section on animals, for example, one of the pictures is
entitled "A Cat that has stolen a Bird." The directions to
the student read simply, "You have a very good hint in this
picture for a short description and story . A single look at
it will set your invention at work" (p. 14). Another
woodcut is of a peacock, the direction reading, "Beauty and
pride belong to the peacock. You can easily originate some
good reflections on his character" (p. 17).
Another feature that is unique to Frost is his belief
that students could begin writing with writing. Parker, to
cite one of the better known textbook writers, for example,
prescribed beginning with mental gymnastics. He directs
students to follow a seven-step "study of the subject"
before taking up the pen to record a single idea {pp. 6869).
Frost, on the other hand, encourages students to begin
by writing "freely and boldly," and not to edit prematurely:
"the first and most important thing," he writes, "is to be
able to originate observations on the subjects presented and
to express them in such language as [the writer's) feelings
prompt.
If he feel a constant solicitude lest he should
make a trifling mistake, this will chill his feelings and
I
give his writing an unpleasant air of stiffness and
constraint" (pp. 58-59) . So Frost is not only saying a
student can write original essays, he is also saying
students can begin the writing process with writing.
(show
Frost transparency)

I

There is a great deal more to be said about Frost-especially about his debt to the swiss reformer Pestalozzi
and Pestalozzi's follower Elizabeth Mayo. The point I want
to make here is that he was very certain students could

8

write original compositions, even if their first attempts
were very short.
While Easy Exercises was the first book that I know of
that asked students to write in response to a visual prompt,
an anonymous 1854 book entitled The Illustrated Composition
Book uses a similar technique. Instead, however, of using
many engravings as Frost does, this writer uses a handful of
more elaborate sketches and gives up to eight prompts for
each one. The first woodcut, for example, is of an Edenic
scene. Like the other cuts in the book, it appears at the
top of the page, surrounded by eight writing prompts (the
creation story, gardens, animals, Adam and Eve, morning,
--h~~Jl'
happiness, or birds); the rest of the 8x10 page is left
I''
blank for the student to actually write on.
Both Frost and the author of The Illustrated
Composition Book offer suggestions for field research as an
heuristic: Frost invites students to interview people
working in the trades and professions; the 1854 writer tells
students: "You must study, converse, observe, go into the
fields, into cities, into factories, on board ships, and
wherever information can be gained" (p. 1). If students
were no longer memorizing themes, and if they did not have
large stores of information at hand (they were not all
pursuing classical courses of study), they needed to get
their information from other sources. Frost and others
believed that students could do field research to discover
subjects and evidence and could write in response to
observation.
3. In Walker's pedagogy, there are no guidelines for or
examples of personal or experiential writing.

In essence, Walker's text treats exposition, argument,
and narrative. From today's vantage point, the absence of
any reference to personal writing is conspicuous; even the
sample narratives are of classical stories rather than
stories that would emerge from the writer's life. Two of
the sample narratives, for example, that students would
memorize and then copy are "Fidelity Respected by Enemies"
(an account of the Battle of Philippi) and "The false
Happiness of Tyrants" (an account of Damocles and
Dionysius). Sketches and Outlines (from which the student
would reconstruct a narrative) are given for topics such as
these: "Courage and Judgment United in Necessity" (the
story of a Roman battle with the Albans) and "Friendship
Continuing after Death," (an account of the friendship of
Titus Volumnius and Marcus Lucullus) • In none of the essays
the student hears is there any attempt to cite or value
personal experience, and certainly not the experience of the
student. It's as if the student is outside of the composing
process, and is studying not writing, but scribal activity.
In Walker's pedagogy, students never do get to what Walker

9

calls "that terrible task of writing their own thoughts" (p.
166).
As Connors points out in his essay "Personal Writing
Assignments," Walker's pedagogy was "was picked up and used
by other authors, especially in the United States, where the
common schools were teaching composition to an ever-larger
percentage of children" (p. 171) . The connection Connors
draws is that "Newer composition texts also offered lists
and lists of potential subject assignments, all of which
were completely, utterly, relentlessly impersonal" (pp. 170171). In fact, it may have been true that many of the
better known books, such as Parker's (like Walker's),
focused exclusively on the impersonal, but there's another
point to be made, and that is that the lesser known writers
of the first books, the books for introductory courses, did,
indeed focus on personal writing.
Again, Frost is a key player here.
In dozens of places
in Easy Exercises, he asks students to write out of their
personal experience. The same is true of the author of The
Illustrated Composition Book and of Charles Brookfield in
his First Book in Composition.(add Morely?)
Clearly, by
asking students to write about the familiar and the
personal, these writers overcome the argument that students
had nothing to say, and they invite students to write in
their own voice, not in imitation of a learned, adult voice.
Here are a few samples from from Frost. A picture entitled
"Boy telling about his studies at school," directs the
students, "You can here describe the picture and, then give
an account of your own studies at school" (p. 21); another
scene is entitled "Girls at school." The directions to the
student are "Describe the picture fully.
Say what you
please about schools" (p. 22); another scene invites the
students to "Describe your own ideas of a pleasant summer
holiday" (24); and yet another asks "What kind of reading do
you prefer?" (p. 25) What's so clear in these assignments,
is that while the student is given a prompt, the student is
absolutely encouraged to write out of her own experience.
When Frost does provide a model for how students can respond
to a picture, he also
s, "The pupil can follow this or
any similar course w'tht fi following pictures, or write any
other thoughts whic
- ey may suggest" (p. 10). The author
of The Illustrated Composition Book also makes space for
students to produce personal writing. Students are invited
to write about the part of the world they would like to
travel in, about their family to a friend, about a comet
they may have seen, about the farm where a friend lives.
And there is personal writing in both Brookfield and Morely.
What Do the Interruptions Mean?

A number o~~l~~ Books, therefore, in a number of ways
interrupt and co~ e the formulas and schemes laid out by

10

Walker and his followers.
The question that remains is What
does it mean to investigate work--such as these First Books-that have not yet made their way into our history in any
significant way? What I propose is a list of possible ways
of reading these complications.
1. History as account is an organic process. Expecting the
story to keep changing is perhaps the most obvious way to
integrate new materials into our way of understanding the
history of teaching composition. I've now heard several
versions of the story of the Dean of a celebrated medical
school welcoming new students with words something like
these:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, You are about to embark on a
rigorous course of study for many years. One thing you need
to know is that by the time you graduate, half of what you
will have learned here will be obsolete. The problem is we
don't know which half." I don't know that our historical
knowledge changes that rapidly, but change it does as more
and more people work in the area, as new materials emerge,
as new readings of old materials emerge, as changes in the
culture make their impact felt on our work.
One important value of looking closely at these First
Books is that they expand our knowledge of the history of
teaching writing by pointing to a site('Ehat hasn't ye
tq,~~,rreceived much study from historians: 1the lower schools.
f
~
Clearly, there is a history here, and clearly it has an
interconnectedness with the secondary and post-secondary
teaching of writing; we just haven't _yet explored enough of
that history or its impact on other levels of education.
One could, for example, use passages from Easy
Exercises to illustrate James Berlin's notions of
expressionist or romantic pedagogy. There are also passages
in that text which, one could argue, anticipate the kind of
free writing that we know of from Peter Elbow or the warning
against premature editing that we have from Mike Rose. And
certainly, writing exercises and assignments from any number
of little known First Books can revise Robert Connors' claim
that there was an absence of personal writing in early 19th
century composition texts.
2. At least in the past, the educational hierarchy has
assigned more value to what happens at higher levels of
education than to what happens at lower levels. In
speculating about why the approach to composing advocated in
some of these First Books was not widely known or broadly
picked up and replicated in secondary and post-secondary
writing classes, several thoughts come to mind.
For the
most part, writers of these books taught in the lower or
secondary schools and did not have a ready made group of
students who were preparing for teaching careers and thus
likely to use these works in their teaching; in addition,
there was no natural way for these writers and their work to
influence the way writing was being taught in the
universities (in educational hierarchies, new ideas have

11
typically travelled down into the schools, not up into the
universities); and finally, these writers did not write
extensively about their work in the journals of the times.
3.
The contributions of other thinkers emerge and the
presence of other zeitgeists is felt. Some of the other

forces at play, other ways of viewing the world, of viewing
education can come forward with the investigation of new
materials.
From looking at Frost's text next to a book he
edited by Elizabeth Mayo on object teaching, it is clear
that it is from her work that he came to the idea of having
students write in response to objects, of gathering ideas
not from words, but from things. And it is also clear that
the driving force behind the idea of object teaching was the
Swiss reformer Johann Pestalozzi.
4.
The direct, hands-on treatment of writing instruction
provided in these First Books provides an interesting
corollary to the careers toward which these students were
heading. Common and secondary schools were preparing
students for trades and professions; in Easy Exercises,

students write stories and anecdotes about the usefulness of
the farmer and the carpenter, about the ways in which
haymaking supports all other trades and professions, about
beautiful edifices reared by the labor of the stone mason.
In The Illustrated Composition Book, students are told that
"all classes of people--farmers, mechanics, merchants, and
professional men--must write so many letters,
·advertisements, notices, agreements," and that "the
composition of [these texts] must be accurate to insure
success in business" (p. 1). This attention to and
appreciation of labor and the working class--and to writing
as a means of successful participation in the world of work-were not apparent in the better known books and certainly
not in the upper level books. One reading of this seems to
be that students in the lower grades, some of whom were
clearly not heading toward college, studied some of the
writing techniques we value today.

conclusion
It seems to me that trying to uncover traces of the
history of writing instruction is like looking for the
feathers of a lost bird. From the feathers we can tell
something about the bird, but hard as we try, we can never
recapture the bird. What we have are various writers
saying, it looked like this, it looked like that. And what
quickly becomes clear, is that we're looking not at one
bird, but at many birds, and that people see them in
different lights and from different perspectives. A reading
of First Books, those books that were written for young
writers and that often interrupted the patterns of better
known upper level books, suggests that there are other
feathers, other birds waiting to be glimpsed. Henry Giroux

12

writes, there is not a single past that is the object for
memory, "there are multiple pasts" (p. 8). I would simply
speak to the delight of catching a new bird on the wing.

/

Thursday, l October
Dear Friends:
Here is my first crack at writing abo
the material I
worked with this past winter/spring
need to use some
version of this for the New Hampshire conference, so it has
some talky sounds to it, but I am also looking toward an
essay to send out, so it has some of those features too. I
look forward to your feedback, esp. about the overall
design--and the main point of the paper. Right now I seem
to be using Frost, et.al. to say something about history.
Do I want to leave it that way? I'm not even sure what
other questions I want to ask you, but they're the big ones.
I'm leaving this single spaced because I think that makes it
easier to see the proportion, overall design, etc.
Oc-r.''5'
See you all Monday, 7:30 pm, at my house, to look at
Marjorie's paper (forthcoming) and this. I'll make some tea
and coffee. And there will probably be a chocolate cookie
somewhere around.

