knew, of course, was the really important stuff—but this was not the province
of writing instruction” (p. 160).
Adams Sherman Hill developed the composition courses at Harvard in this
context, after two thirds of the 1872 freshman class failed the writing exam that
the school required for the first time as a way of separating the wheat from the
chaff. Although today we think of Harvard as being an elite institution with a
history of educating the children of wealthy and influential parents, it was a dif-
ferent place in the 19thcentury. Many of its students certainly came from afflu-
ent families, but it also had a fair number of students of middling means.
Moreover, as Geiger (1999, p. 48) noted, the goal of higher education in Amer-
ica during this period was to discipline the minds of unruly students, not to pro-
vide them with knowledge. Indeed, most professors saw their students as
intellectual midgets with little knowledge of and even less appreciation for the
liberal arts, so there was no expectation that they could actually produce
anything worth reading.
On this account, Bain’s (1866) reduction of rhetoric to composition and
composition to style was astutely in tune with the educational spirit of the times
and provided the perfect theoretical and pedagogical framework for composi-
tion instruction. Teachers did not have to concern themselves with how to teach
content or with how to help students generate content on their own. Instead, the
question that teachers had to answer was this: How do we teach style? The an-
swer lay in pedagogical structures that already were in place—the study of lit-
erature and grammar. If literature represented an older and purer level of
language, and if grammar provided a set of prescriptive rules for producing
such language, writing instruction necessarily must focus on reading literature
and studying grammar. Reading literature would edify the spirit, making stu-
dents better persons, and studying grammar would improve student writing,
making it clear, concise, and error free. It is this legacy that teachers bring into
today’s classrooms whenever they teach writing.
Modern Grammars
Much of what follows in this book is about modern grammars, so a lengthy
discussion is inappropriate here. I will note, however, that the 19thcentury
witnessed two important events related to the study of grammar: (a) the fossil-
ization of the idea that grammar is a prescriptive set of rules for producing
correct English, and (b) the establishment of the foundation for modern gram-
mars, which aredescriptiverather than prescriptive. Chapter 4 relates this
story in detail, but suffice it to say that scholars investigating the languages of
American Indians discovered that Latin-based rules could not be made to fit
A SHORT HISTORY OF GRAMMAR 15