A Review of John Duffy's Essay "The Good Writer" (2017)

John Duffy is an associate professor of English and the O'Malley Director of the University Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. He recently coedited the essay collection Literacy, Economy, and Power, and his book, Writing from These Roots, was awarded the 2009 Outstanding Book Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Duffy has been an NCTE member since 2000.

How does a person who is content and who has led a life through many successful accomplishments teach others the rhetoric of virtue?

I knew I would love Duffy's article once I read "'we as postmodern skeptical academics,' as Patricia Bizzell has written, 'are habitually fearful that any talk of teaching virtue will tend to introduce exclusions, as socially privileged groups in our diverse nation arrogate to themselves the right to define what virtue is taught'"

I have a virtue that I attempt to adhere to in regards to my diabetic condition and whenever somebody writes to be read by an audience they enter into ethical decisions about the voice that they will use. Both my diet and a writer's voice are choices made best by rational decisions. To me then, Duffy's rationale for defining what it means to use rhetorical virtue as a basis for becoming a sound writer circumvents the postmodern political issues concerning virtue in a similar manner to my ethical decisions about what foods to eat. Having the appropriate disposition for choosing what works depending on conditions is almost always the best approach. What has politics and the perception of equality to do with writing when they are socially engineered by a ruling elite? To me, political issues are a waste of time unless you are of the class of people that can afford to pay for government regulations that benefit you. Why get pulled in a meaningless quagmire when there is real work to be done? I like Duffy's essay because it addresses real issues of life and education: "the activitie[s] of 'living well ' throughout a lifetime" (233).

The author's key term is "virtue ethics" which he defines throughout the essay mostly because the term has held various meanings. In Duffy's definition virtue ethics contain ideas about virtues that seem to be closely related to common sense:  "virtues of reasoning well;" "virtues as cautionary folk wisdom;" "virtues as being the disposition to act in the right way;" virtues as "context-dependent . . . social in nature;" virtues are "learned;" they are "neither preordained nor immutable;" they may be "the traits, attitudes, and dispositions of character that we associate with a good person." And, virtue ethics takes into consideration both sides of an argument so as to open dialogue to the most reasonable solution or considerations.

I especially liked his placement of virtue ethics outside of "the particulars of human experience" (240) by using the reference to Kant who located them in human reason. He then discounts Kant's "'categorical imperatives'" and leaves his continuing argument on ethics of rhetoric to float effectively free from other forms of postmodern criticism. This is a strategic move on the part of the author because it allows him to address moral ambiguities as an "impetus for rhetorical action" (240).  He then describes rhetorical ethics as being "committed to the health of the reader-writer connection" (241). Thus, he circumvents the wrath of the social justice brigade, offers a solution that preserves valuable time and energy, and provides wisdom to the real problem of how to be a good writer.

Finally, he addresses the cultural cognitive dissonance issues within public argument and the agreement and disagreement on "the nature of fact" or "what evidence counts as evidence" (242). By questioning whether postmodernist ethics are "adequate for addressing the particular circumstances of the current cultural moment,"  and by keeping his proposition of rhetorical solutions "a priori" he maintains the reader-writer connection and provides a reasonable solution developed exactly through the methods that he recommends. He follows his sound reasoning with the gentle conclusion that "we perhaps need another language and another form of rhetorical ethics . . . found in the language of the virtues" (244).

I am glad to be reading Duffy's advice just at the time that I embark on my final essay which attempts to navigate and maintain the same type of reader-writer connection.