REHEARSAL

What kind of stylistic training might equip students for this polyglot voyage? Would it not be the same education that might equip us as we attempt to understand our colleagues in other fields, at least to "formulate our differences," even if we cannot agree on a common conceptual universe? For a start, it should teach the sensitivity and adaptability needed to move from one discourse-community to another. It will have to be some sort of rehearsal education, one that imagines particular occasions and then tries to formulate a discourse appropriate to them. Whatever the pedagogical techniques -- learning to write essays or lab reports, practising oral presentations for business or arguments for a law court, rehearsing a political speech -- the question would remain the same: Here is a situation; what discourse is appropriate to it? Such a paideia would differ from our current practices in elemental ways. It would not, for example, place so much stress on originality of thought and expression. Rather, it would recommend mastery of a received body of basic argumentation which could then be assembled into a mixture to fit the occasion. [Lanham 142-43]