“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