By Alexandra Watson
Many rhetoric and composition instructors, including myself, employ the “Burkean Parlor” as a metaphor for students engaging in an ongoing intellectual conversation. The metaphor advises that, upon entering the parlor, “you listen for a while…then you put in your oar” (Burke 110-111). We might read this metaphor as a call for establishing credibility, or ethos, before contributing ideas in an academic context.
The Burkean parlor metaphor, when applied to student writers, neglects social reality by assuming that writers gain authority simply by demonstrating their engagement with other scholars. But not everyone is invited into the “parlors” of influence; in fact, many groups have been historically and systematically shut out of them.
This raises the question of whether ethos, the classic Aristotelian mode of persuasion associated with the speaker’s credibility, applies to the speaker as expressed in the writing or speech act, or about the essential character and identity of the speaker? They cannot be fully separated. We naturally assume that writers express their values and worldview through their writing. Furthermore, writing reflects the contexts of education, fluency with language, and level of familiarity with a field. Writers constantly reveal their subject positions, from the most explicit genres of memoir and personal essay to findings published in medical journals.
So what happens when a student writer has a crisis of ethos—whether because she is a first year student, or because of her subject position (as a woman, person of color, nonnative English speaker, and/or lower/working class student)? I argue for finding ways to encourage student writers to mobilize their identities. Rather than impeding one’s authority, articulating one’s subject position can liberate students to both thrive in and influence the development of academic spaces.
Many first year students experience imposter syndrome at institutions of higher education. In Laura Saltz and Nancy Sommers’ “The Novice as Expert,” they discuss how this feeling manifests in student writing. Student writers doubt their authority to make claims, resulting in a tendency to describe and summarize rather than analyze or synthesize. According to their study of undergraduate student writers at Harvard, students who “initially accept their status as novice” and see the goal of writing as going beyond fulfilling assignments see the greatest gains in their writing. Since they are experts on their own experience, they can articulate, assess and adjust their own ideas as they come across and engage with sources and classmates.
But there are other challenges to establishing authority through writing besides being a first year student. These especially affect writers from identity positions not historically considered authoritative. In “Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos,” Coretta Pittman reminds us that moral character was key to Artistotle’s definition of ethos—the idea that a good speaker needs to convince his readers that he has “good sense, good moral character, and good will” (qtd. in Pittman 44). But, as Pittman argues, not all citizens can be judged by the same standard of moral character. In the American context, black women’s narratives like Harriet Jacobs’ slave narrative indicate an “alternative form of virtue and morality”—“a negative ethos” remade into a positive one—predicated on “difference, strength, resilience, wittiness, astuteness, toughness, fortitude, and street smarts” (Pittman 51).
This speaks to Nedra Reynolds’ idea that ethos is more about the community’s character than the individual’s. Ethos is contextual and place-driven: Reynolds notes that other translations of the word include “An accustomed place,” “the abodes of men,” and “a habitual gathering place.” Or, as Michael Halloran says, “To have ethos is to manifest the virtues most valued by the culture to and for which one speaks” (qtd. in Reynolds 328). These values are often gendered; Reynolds explains that “when the knower is located as female in this culture, knowledge is experienced, constructed, and recalled in nonhierarchical, nonlinear, and nonobjective forms”(330). Reynolds then asks how we can create an “ethos from the margins.”
I love the idea of an “ethos from the margins,” not least because I’m professionally and personally invested in empowering those who lack power in society and, as a result, in rhetorical situations. But Reynolds doesn’t answer her own question. I want to suggest that an ethos from the margins means more than women accepting the ethos traditionally attributed to men—objective, hierarchical, linear—but also assessing the value of more “feminine” modes of expression: subjective, digressive. Like Pittman suggests, writers can construct an alternative form of virtue and morality. These constructions, in turn, influence the audience member to reconsider her understanding of authority.
I speak both as a consultant and teacher from an identity position of a twenty-eight year old woman of color from a working-class background, not a position traditionally considered authoritative. I work with many students whose positions are not—many of whom might both experience the alienation of identity and of being a “novice,” in the “sometimes painfully confusing states of their emerging authority as speakers and writers” (Reynolds 335).
So how do we use these theories to guide our work with students? I believe it is through a revised notion of authority, where identity and experience matter. Schmertz advocates a “pragmatics of naming—a self-conscious use of ethos—as a political tactic: a naming of ourselves and others that acknowledges the essences that naming creates and attempts to be aware of both the possibilities and limitations entailed in that naming”(88). This “self-conscious use of ethos” allows us to acknowledge and challenge the ways in which authority has historically been constructed.
In my own teaching and consulting, I welcome personal engagement with the material and task: I try to ask how they like the class and how they’re doing in it; what interests students in a given topic; and where their knowledge on the topic comes from. This invites students to articulate their relationship to the piece of writing: How much does this topic matter to them? What do they really think about the issue? Where does that way of thinking originate? I look for opportunities to note their own thoughts, and to demonstrate how they’re already responding to ideas in the field. The more a student can imagine that their writing will have real influence and impact on their emerging authority, the more likely it actually will. Looking at the bigger picture of their academic careers and choosing topics that engage the writer’s intellectual curiosity will help them build their ethos over time.
When a writer can articulate her relationship to the material, she might begin assessing opportunities to introduce this into her writing, based on the rhetorical situation. Writing teachers and writing center consultants, as experts on reading a rhetorical situation, and as varied experts in a range of disciplines and fields, can help guide this assessment. Where can the writer fairly represent an idea through paraphrase rather than quoting it? Where can the writer contribute analysis and synthesis? Is there space for the writer to use the first person? These strategies can be useful for everything from a case study to a personal statement.
As consultants, we also might learn to reveal and mobilize our own subject positions and expertise in our work with students—to present and assess how they have formed our ideas about reading and writing. In the particular rhetorical situation of the consultation or the classroom, we are the ones vested with authority. Allowing ourselves to recognize the authority each student carries with her not only empowers her to own her ethos, but also enhances our own.
Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.
Pittman, Coretta. “Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 2007, pp. 43–7., www.jstor.org/stable/40232512.
Reynolds, Nedra. “Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1993, pp. 325–338, www.jstor.org/stable/465805.
Schmertz, Johanna. “Constructing Essences: Ethos and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism.” Rhetoric Review Vol. 18, No. 1 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 82-91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/466091.
Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56, no. 1, 2004, pp. 124–149, www.jstor.org/stable/4140684.
Published April 27, 2017
