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4 e r r o r “How Rouse makes his living is none of my business, but I venture that if he manages a decent livelihood it is only because he has somewhere or other submitted to enough socialization to equip him to do something for which somebody is willing to pay him” (852). So thundered Gerald Graff in the pages of College English in 1980, as part of a response to an article John Rouse had published in the same journal a year before. Not only was Graff’s tone sententious and overbearing, his question was also rhetorical to the point of being disingenuous, since how Rouse made his living should have been clear to anyone who had read his article, which was on the teaching of college writing and included a standard biographical note on its title page identifying him as “a teacher of English and an administrator in public schools” as well as the author of previous pieces in College English and of a book called The Completed Gesture: Myth, Character, and Education (1979, 1). So Rouse was a teacher and writer, “managing his livelihood” in much the same way as Graff, and probably drawing on much the same sort of skills and “socialization” in order to do so. Except not quite. For what Graff— who was identified by a similar note on the first page of his response as the chair of the English department at Northwestern University, as well as the author of articles in several prestigious literary journals and of a book published by the University of Chicago Press (1980, 851)—was hinting rather broadly at was that he didn’t know who this guy was, that Rouse (schoolteacher rather than professor; articles in College English rather than Salmagundi; book published by trade rather than university press) was not a player in the academic world Graff moved about in. And perhaps this seemed so important because Rouse had presumed to criticize the work of someone who was such a player, someone who by then had in fact become a kind of revered figure in the literary establishment, its sanctioned representative of the good teacher—and that was Mina Shaughnessy. Error 103 In many ways, Rouse had seemed to ask for precisely the sort of response he got from Graff and others.1 His 1979 article “The Politics of Composition” offered what I still see as a trenchant critique of Shaughnessy ’s 1977 Errors and Expectations, a book on the teaching of “basic” or underprepared college writers that had almost immediately gained the status of a classic. Rouse argued that Shaughnessy’s relentless focus on the teaching of grammar might in many cases actually hinder the attempts of anxious and inexperienced students to elaborate their thoughts effectively in writing. I agree. But his criticism was couched in language that sometimes seemed deliberately aimed to provoke: Rouse failed to acknowledge, for instance, the crucial political importance and difficulty of the role Shaughnessy took on in the late 1960s when she set up the first basic writing program at City College of New York, and thus found herself in charge of diagnosing and responding to the academic needs of thousands of newly admitted and severely underprepared open-admissions students. He also failed to note the clear sympathy and respect for such students that runs throughout Errors and Expectations and that all of her many admirers argue was central to Shaughnessy’s work as a teacher and intellectual. And he was either unaware of or did not see the need to mention her tragic and early death from cancer the year before in 1978. Instead, Rouse went ferociously on the attack, arguing that Shaughnessy’s “overriding need to socialize these young people in a manner politically acceptable accounts, I think, for her misinterpretations of student work and her disregard of known facts of language learning” (1979, 2). This rabble-rousing tone led right into Graff’s magisterial response, and a much-needed argument over teaching aims and strategies became clouded with competing accusations of elitism and pseudoradicalism, as snide guesses about Mina Shaughnessy’s psychopolitical needs or John Rouse’s means of earning a living were followed by insinuations about who really had the best interests of students in mind. “Is this submission with a cheerful smile? ‘Mrs. Shaughnessy, we do know our verbs and adverbs,’” sneered Rouse (8). “John Rouse’s article . . . illustrates the predicament of the thoughtful composition teacher today,” replied Graff, who then went on...

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