KEEPING UP ON RHETORIC

In its function of nagging careless students, the Committee on the Use of English by Students works to good effect. Its warnings and summonses enforced by threats of English F do much to inculcate the idea that English A sets a minimum standard for upper class men as well as freshmen. But in dealing with particular cases, the ways of the Committee are inscrutable.

It will not divulge the source of citations. And in most cases it has in its own possession only a general complaint. On these bases it prescribes extra rhetorical training. If the Committee does not know the particular fault of the student, the work is entirely at random. If it does, the work is more to the point, but somewhat out of its proper setting in the student's mind. In no case does he know, except by conjecture, on what occasion, how, and in the opinion of what instructor, he committed his mistakes.

The justification of this slipshod connection between error and its correction is an avowedly personal one. The secrecy is designed to protect instructors from unpopularity among students whom they report. On its face, this apprehensive anonymity is unscholarly and harmful. For, each upper classman, not a transfer student, has passed or anticipated English A. He knows the elements of composition. Yet in cases of deficiency, in default of specific allegation, he must make a more or less general review of rhetorical principles To confront him with his actual written errors and thus to remind him also of the specific conditions under which he fell into the faults, would be more efficacious and take much less time. Under the present guarded procedure, this is impossible. A change in the Committee's rules upon this point would benefit both general academic frankness and rhetorical improvement.