The Progymnasmata Prepares

In my first ten years of teaching, I struggled to find a satisfactory approach to teaching writing. After discovering the classical progymnasmata I spent the next ten years trying to figure out how to apply it in a classroom.

The progymnasmata was the primary mode of teaching composition and rhetoric for around 2000 years until early modernism. Its influence can be recognized in great writers like Plutarch, Saint John Chrysostom, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Milton. It trains students in 14 exercises that progress from concrete to abstract, normative to controversial, poetic to civic, and narrative to persuasive. The progymnasmata teaches students how to think about their writing painlessly.

The progymnasmata is not the same as the contemporary academic essay. It is a big mistake to begin teaching the academic essay before high school. High school students often struggle with writing the academic essay, and the solution has been to begin teaching this form at increasingly younger ages. However, the academic essay is not developmentally appropriate for younger students. The solution is teaching narration to children as young as 6 and then training with the progymnasmata through eighth grade.

In fact, the word progymnasmata literally means proto-exercises. In other words, the 14 exercises are designed to prepare students for later formal rhetoric.

The progymnasmata prepares students for the more rigorous and abstract work of the academic essay by making students comfortable with playing with words, by introducing the topics of invention, and by training students with a wide range of writing styles. It is the soil in which to sew the seeds of advanced writing.