“A word, after a word, after a word is power.” 

         - - Margaret Attwood

My head hurts. That is the most simple, direct and (with a nod to Ken Macrorie) “sharp and truly” honest way I can describe my reaction to this week’s readings.

There’s the urge to channel the parent within me, dope-slap these guys across the head and say: “oh, please, just stop picking on one another. Do you know how annoying you sound?”  Elbow and Harris are engaged in a he-said, she-said criticism over expressivists’ place in the world vs. traditional pedagogies. Even Elbow confesses this might be an “intersection of competing paranoias.” Faugly engages in the very Engfish Macrorie hopes to banish. Macrorie puts his writing eggs in one basket: Free writing will save us all from the dreaded creature, “Engfish!”

I’m annoyed because in their effort to perhaps “publish or perish,” to be the one with all the answers, they seem to have lost sight of what should be a common goal: to educate our children, encourage them to write, and to help them discover the thrill of crafting a truly great sentence.

My head hurt for another reason; I will admit at some point I did share in Elbow & Harris’ paranoia. I clearly don’t come down on one side or the other in the traditional vs. expressivist debate. Am I just wishy-washy, or the product of writing teachers who didn’t know how to teach writing? Am I haphazard in my approach or creative? I give my students free writing opportunities. We’re fully emerged in that right now with a project I absolutely love – the writing of their own “This I Believe” essays. But we also write strictly academic pieces in direct response to literature they’ve read. And yes, we even do the dreaded research paper, with (gasp!) a third-person point of view.

However, no matter what writing lesson I’m planning, of late I’ve realized that my inspiration seems to always be returning to the question “How did I learn how to do this?” And more often than not, I come back to the fact that I was taught early on to fall in love with great sentences – and for some reason, I wanted in the worst way to duplicate them, the sound, the feel, the flow, the energy. Recently, I have someone in my corner.

Consider picking up New York Times columnist Stanley Fish’s recently released book “How to Write A Sentence.” Here’s what Fish said that caught my attention:

“I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, for sentences that make you say, “Isn’t that something?” or “What a sentence!”

Fish told NPR, that “writing a fine sentence is a delicate process – but it’s a process that can be learned. He laments that many educators approach teaching the craft the wrong way – by relying on rules rather than examples...he believes “analyzing great sentences will tell you more about...what you can possibly hope to imitate than a set of sterile rules that seem often impossibly abstract.”

Consider it some food for thought. And for no other reason than simply the fact that I loved it so much, here’s the opening paragraph of Fish’s book:

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" " 'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?' " The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he liked sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.' " The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabor it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.

From:

How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One
By Stanley Fish
Hardcover, 176 pages
Harper
List price: $19.99

Amazon’s Kindle Price: $9.99

You gotta have faith...

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar," observed 
E.B. White...
 It was May, 1992. My husband had just graduated from a Massachusetts' law school, and we decided it would be cheaper to be unemployed with student-loan debt in our home state of Pennsylvania, than in New England.  I, privately, had made another decision, a promise to myself to find some way to pay the bills by writing. Writing what? I had no clue. But what I did know was that writing was the only enjoyable aspect of the public relations jobs I had held for the past six years. And I did it.

For years I pieced together jobs where the sole responsibility was writing - coupled with freelance assignments, and one tortuous year of saying - after my 3 kids were in bed - "thank you for calling Pottery Barn, can I have the customer id number on the back of your catalog?" If I identified myself as a writer, people would naturally say, "what do you write?" I would always respond "whatever anyone pays me to write." And it was true. I wrote to pay bills. The health column for a small weekly paper - I saw it as the PP& L bill. The fence in our backyard. Paid for by an edit of a horribly written state publication for senior citizens. I wrote about dentistry, about finance (you don't want to see my math SATs), about cow manure runoff, you name it....and the point is...

You gotta have faith to do this...faith in yourself to say "yes" to any request from any editor, and ultimately faith in the writing PROCESS.  But this isn't magical, mystical stuff. Writing is work.
It takes practice. And, again, you have to have faith that what you are pouring out onto that paper will EVENTUALLY be molded into something worthwhile.
I laughed out loud when I read Lynn's comment "Most great writers are insecure..." No. Duh. It's the nature of the beast. BUT they push through, and the question is HOW? and How can we pass on this motivation to our students? How can we convince them to have faith in their own abilities? Because if we don't, we end up with the problems addressed by both Tobin and Lynn: Tobin's claim that bad, boring, uninspired writing is due to bad, boring, uninspired teaching (this is too simplistic), and Lynn's valid point that plagiarism is an issue.


I'm sure we'll discuss the plagiarism issue in class, but my "solution" is threefold:
1) Demystify writing.This is something people can learn how to do, much like most everyone can learn how to ride a bike. All will not be Lance Armstrong, but nearly everyone can learn to make it down the block.
2) When used appropriately, I've seen the anti-plagiarism software, such as Turnitin.com work as both a deterrent and an instructional tool (to avoid the "I didn't know" defense.)
3) A renewed emphasis on the "good readers become good writers" approach. When I consider when, where, and how I've improved my writing (and every writer is ALWAYS looking for ways to continue this process), I return to the same thought - reading good writing coupled with practice, practice, practice.

Blog #1

Regarding Lynn’s Rhetoric & Composition, in his early chapters you can envision Lynn’s uphill struggle to convince his readers to think of the term rhetoric in a positive manner. Clearly this background was meant to add legitimacy and thwart the modern-day negative connotation of the word, but he has a daunting battle. The very night I read this, I had the news on and heard two different commentators in two different stories admonish politicians to “tone down the rhetoric” and “turn the tide of partisan rhetoric.”

Much of this early chapter seemed like deja vu for me, having completed a rhetorical theory course in my undergrad days – back in the stone ages, ala 1982 – the bucolic days of Reagan-speak, when people dubbed him our “great communicator” president. I personally blame the advent of the 3-word sound bite on him. He certainly knew how to craft and deliver the phrases that were big on flash, but in hindsight, perhaps short on substance. But rhetorically speaking, they worked. I vividly recall the professor I had, the type of teacher who literally jumps on chairs and desks and seems as if he’s had one too many visits to Starbucks. I distinctively recall how he noted Reagan could usually meet at least 3 out of 4 of the goals of rhetoric (which Lynn lists on page 11).

In one sense, while the people in our world given the task to persuade haven’t strayed far from rhetoric’s negative stereotype (though I do recall CBS news putting their foot down and saying every sound-bite from a politician must be 30 seconds in length to produce substance along with the flash), Lynn’s early chapters are a wonderful connect-the-dots sort of piece. They clearly show how classical/traditional rhetoric spilled over into composition (the Harvard link was fascinating), and how the two are irrevocably tied. I had never thought about the scientific influence – the ease in manufacturing paper, or the advent of the lead pencil! If you force yourself to think beyond what you think you know about these subjects, then there is an undisputable link between “rhetoric’s orality” and “composition’s textuality.” I’m always, always, always telling my students to read their work aloud, asking them to evaluate “how it sounds” to their ear, looking beyond its appearance on paper. The two must go hand in hand. Good writing is good writing, whether we hear it or see it.

There’s too much to cover in one blog re: Lynn, but bells went off for me in two areas: one, how we as teachers say we want to focus on invention or material, but if you look at many of our rubrics, they focus on final product only. FOCUS meaning F= focus, O= organization, C= content (a rather vague description), U= usage, and S= the equally vague “style.” The other area I found amusing is his take on Peter Elbow’s, Donald Graves’ and others’ approaches to process writing. Lynn seems uncomfortable at best with their warm, fuzzy way of thinking about writing, and I think wisely so. Creating a new paradigm for teaching writing does not have to be a “throw the baby out with the bath water” approach. There’s some good in past approaches, and most certainly room for new concepts. The individual pieces we read – Noth’s and specifically Hairston’s addressed this idea well. Page 86 – Hairston’s twelve step list – was an ideal summary.