The New York Times published an opinion piece the other day by Joe Cruz, who is the chair of the philosophy department at Williams College, called “What if Writing Isn’t Central to Thinking?” Cruz opens by noting that “most professors” believe that students learn to think “only by writing,” and now we are thrilled to see typos and errors in our students’ writing since it’s an indication that they didn’t just offload the assignment to AI. “But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought?”
Cruz argues that writing is of course useful, “but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement,” and that the research has been “inconclusive.” He shared a few links to a few cherry-picked/almost random articles to support this claim. Then he moves on to discuss Plato’s dialogue “Phaedrus,” in which Socrates criticized writing as offering the mere appearance of wisdom. Cruz, like Socrates, favors instead real-time interactions between people talking with each other to arrive at a version of “Truth”, aka dialectic and/or the Socratic method.
Okay, I’ll take that bait.
I’ll skip the studies/articles Cruz cites because I don’t think his readings of them are accurate. Teaching writing as a way of teaching students about thinking isn’t only traceable to the beginnings of WAC, and I believe that my field concluded a long time ago that writing (and reading) are activities that teach students how to think. But who ever said that writing is the only way to teach whatever it is Cruz means by “thinking?” In my experience, most professors believe that whatever discipline they are in is worth studying and teaching (and also writing about– I’ll come back to that) because it helps us learn to think.
Instead, I want to dwell on Cruz’s discussion of “Phaedrus.”
When I was a PhD student studying rhetoric in the previous century, the two Platonic dialogues I read in a couple of different classes were “Phaedrus” and “Gorgias” because these two dialogues are where Plato/Socrates has the most to say about rhetoric and writing. Socrates was no fan of rhetoric, and he is most critical of the practice of it in “Gorgias.” That’s a dialog where Socrates talks with Gorgias, who was an actual contemporary of Socrates and one of the most well-known sophists/orators/rhetoricians of Ancient Greece. “Gorgias” is also the dialog where Socrates describes rhetoric as being like “cookery,” which, as an enthusiastic home cook, has always tickled me.
“Phaedrus” as a whole is an example of what Plato/Socrates thinks is wrong with rhetoric in general and with writing in particular. The dialog is unusual in that it only has two “characters”: Socrates, and the young man Phaedrus, who is not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box. They run into each other outside of the walls of Athens, and Phaedrus is excited to share with Socrates a speech written by someone else (Lysias) about the virtues of love between an old man and a young man. Phaedrus reads this scripted speech to Socrates, which is clearly “wrong” and untruthful because Phaedrus (the young man) is reading the part of the old man, but also because the speech is written down.
Socrates tongue-n-cheek praises the speech but then makes up another speech, this one also completely inappropriate because it is delivered by Socrates (the old man) but from the point of view of a young man (Phaedrus). I’ve always thought there was an element of “Who is on first” with this exchange. Anyway, Socrates then launches into a long long LOOONNNGGG speech about the True (with a capital “T”) nature of love, which is actually about the nature of the soul, of philosophy, etc. After all that and probably about two-thirds of the way through the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus reflect on their different speeches. Then they discuss writing.
Socrates tells the story of how writing was an invention of the Egyptian god Theuth. He showed this invention to another god, Thamus, and Thamus has the same problems with writing as Socrates. Or vice versa. As Cruz points out, Socrates’ main complaint with writing is that the texts themselves “cannot speak, answer questions, or come to its own defense.” Socrates compares writing to paintings which “have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.”
When Socrates says writing cannot speak, I think we should interpret that literally. After all, ancient Greece was primarily an oral culture, and we don’t really know if Socrates was literate because he never wrote anything himself. All we know about him is through other writers, notably Plato. So when Socrates says that the problem with writing is that it cannot speak for itself, that is precisely what he means. In f2f classes, I will often demonstrate this by holding up the reading and saying, “What do you mean, Socrates?” and noting the lack of reply from the paper or the computer screen.
The other issue that complicates this is how often contemporary technologies make a lot of writing behave more like speech. Texting, electronic bulletin boards like Reddit, and the reviews/comments/threads on social media are all examples that immediately come to mind, but so are asynchronous online courses. I do a lot of discussions in my online courses, and as I tell students, these discussions are designed to take the place of the interactions/dialectic that we would have in a f2f class. Would Socrates think that these exchanges were what he meant by writing, or what he meant by speech?
Anyway, back to Cruz: like many academics who assign rather than teach writing, Cruz seems to think that one of the purposes of assigning his students papers is so he has something to grade. “Writing assignments serve practical needs of colleges and universities,” he writes. “When we receive a batch of 10-page essays, we can take them home, read a few, put them aside and grade the rest when the opportunity arises.” Of course, this is also one of the main strengths of literacy over orality: writing and reading enable separating content from a rhetor/speaker in a specific moment. Writing allows (requires) bureaucracy and it facilitates things like citation, both of which (Walter Ong argues in Orality and Literacy) enable governance and the ability to study. Written texts also last a lot longer than the writer. Socrates might have been adamantly against writing, but clearly Plato saw that it had some advantages; otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about this dialogue at all, would we?
Cruz goes on to describe how he allowed students to consult AI to produce final essays, but then he spoke with his students in “real-time” with a 45 minute oral exam. As I understand it, Plato saw “dialectic” as an exchange between different speakers, a conversation. Certainly Socrates asserts his authority/talks more than anyone else in all of the dialogs, and most of what Phaedrus has to say in this particular dialogue is things like “I agree, Socrates– of course you are right!” But Socrates isn’t quizzing Phaedrus either.
Like most people in my field, I teach courses that are small (25 or so) and discussion-based, settings where students and teachers “think aloud together, vigorously and sharply.” We accomplish this by discussing things like books and articles and videos, but we also do so by talking to each other about writing as a process. We talk about how our ideas are developing, we have peer review activities to discuss rough drafts, and I usually have at least some opportunities for students to revise an essay after a grade. I’d argue this is much much more similar to what Socrates meant by dialectic than Cruz’s oral exam.
Honestly, I’m not sure Cruz completely agrees with the implied answers to his provocative questioning of the value of writing. In the reader comment section on the New York Times site, he responded to another comment that was an interesting example of how Winston Churchill overcame a stutter and became a great speaker by first becoming a great writer. Cruz wrote (in part) “Agreed, writing is no small thing, and maybe on the short list of profound ways we’ve increased our ability to handle complex abstraction. I was trying to suggest that there are other paths alongside writing, no doubt with knock-on effects, positive and negative, that deserve a reckoning.”
Of course! I have all kinds of problems with oral exams, but like Cruz, I don’t have a script when I teach, and I want to “engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another.” Of course there are a lot of other ways to study and teach abstraction and thinking.
But isn’t it interesting that Cruz decided to write this down?