Rogerian Principles and the Writing Classroom: A History of Intention and (Mis)Interpretation

Abstract

During WWII psychologist Carl Rogers introduced a verbal counseling technique that could be utilized by clergy, teachers, and USO workers to help veterans overcome problems of readjustment. Rogers's arhetorical principles were adapted for the writing classroom by Young, Becker, and Pike—an adaptation that later led composition historian James Berlin to misinterpret the implementation of Rogers's principles in his study of a WWII communication program. These misinterpretations of Rogers's original intent have resulted in debate over the rhetorical or arhetorical nature of Rogerian rhetoric and have led to an inaccurate association between Rogerian rhetoric and expressivist and therapeutic writing.

Notes

¹My thanks to RR reviewers Paul Bator and Janice Lauer for their detailed and helpful revision recommendations, and to my colleagues Robin Veder and Mary Richards for their generous advice on early drafts.

² Rhetoric and Reality is required reading for many PhD programs in rhetoric and composition and as such has informed, and continues to inform, a majority of scholars in the field. Sharon Crowley cites Rhetoric and Reality as the source for her statement that “[o]ne truly radical communication skills program … was implemented at the University of Denver” (Composition 172). And David Russell refers to Rhetoric and Reality several times in support of his treatment of communications courses and expressivist writing instruction.

³Although Young, Becker, and Pike defer to Anatol Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates as a foundation for their theory, Rapoport is rarely mentioned as the initiator of either the strategies for or the terms Rogerian argument or Rogerian rhetoric.

⁴See Halasek; Bator; Hairston; and Ede.

⁵It is now (many years following the publication of the Rogers and Young et al.'s discussion) possible for Rogers's strategy of “listening” to a reader's point of view to succeed in a synchronous online chat environment, where a writer has a present/absent audience, and the reader is capable of presenting immediate feedback to the writer.

⁶Young, Becker, and Pike insist that the other two prongs of their Rogerian argument strategy for writers are an alternative to conventional argument, but their proposal of delineating “the area within which he believes the reader's position to be valid” and convincing the reader that he and the writer have “moral qualities (honesty, integrity, and good will)” in common seem little more than a watered-down version of Aristotle's very conventional appeal to ethos (275).

⁷Rogers did later validate his person-centered approach through the formation of the Carl Rogers Institute for Peace, an organization that helped ease social tensions in such troubled areas as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Central America. Perhaps it was this successful approach to social and political conflict resolution that initially attracted Young et al. to Rogers's principles and convinced them to attempt an adaptation of those same principles as an alternative to the agonistic type of argument taught in the writing classroom.

⁸The conventions of the Institute of General Semantics state that the term general semantics is not capitalized.

⁹In his introductory chapter to Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin does identify the use of general semantics as “a device for propaganda analysis” (10) and does give Denver credit for promoting “cooperative rather then competitive thinking” (101).

¹⁰Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke conducted a study for the War Department in the spring of 1943 and concluded that “nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations” due to “a thing called psychoneurosis” (11). By 1946 at least 40 percent of men receiving pensions for a physical disability were labeled as psychoneurotics, but only 10 percent of that 40 percent had seen combat.

¹¹Archival evidence from the University of Denver reveals that enrollment rose “by 57 percent compared to the pre-war enrollments of 1939” and “the percent of Veterans on campus rose to 60 percent” (Zazzarino).

¹²Elbow sees the terms expressivist or expressionist as problematic and credits them both as terms of “disapproval” coined by Berlin. In defining the terms as “writing that expresses what I feel, see, think,” Elbow concludes that they are “indistinguishable from any other kind of writing” (“Binary Thinking” 20).

¹³See also Halasek for an insightful analysis of ways in which Elbow's “Believing Game” can be applied to Rogerian principles.