Summary of "Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction"

• Article examines and the cultural and pedagogical forces through history that explain the obsession among composition instructors with mechanical correctness
• In the early 1800's, there was an American Renaissance during which there rose a "secular literary-intellectual culture in America", and this period also saw an increase in focus on grammatical correctness in schools.
• Linguistic anxiety and social pressures to be grammatically correct then began to appear as common usage errors and peculiarities of speech were pointed out and corrected.
• Colleges and freshman composition courses began to focus on error-free writing as good writing and teaching to the avoidance of error as opposed to "teaching genuine communicative competence".
• This continued into the mid-1880s, as college instructors were overworked, that they focused only on avoidance of errors in the papers they graded and issues such as style, organization, communication (rhetoric) were ignored.
• The early 1900's ushered in the "handbook era" led by Edwin C. Woolley's Handbook of Composition: A Compendium of Rules which became the basis of college level writing courses, emphasizing mechanical correctness: punctuation, spelling and grammar.
• The handbooks were relied on by graduate student instructors and the like but the problem with that is that the only knowledge that they were transmitting to the students were in those handbooks. There was little or no teaching of issues of rhetoric and style.
• In the 1930's, research began to bore out that grammar drills were not useful in improving student writing. Rhetoric, then, became the primary focus in the 1940's and 50's.
• The goal and challenge today is for composition instructors to find a balance between rhetoric and mechanics. The fact that we are at this stage in composition studies demonstrates that we are coming to constitute a genuine discipline.