by Guy Allen, from the Bedford anthology Teaching Writing, 3rd edition
[His basic idea is the power of personal writing]
Basic training exercises include collecting and revising examples of wordiness and cliches, replacing passives and forms of "to be" with active, specific verbs, replacing vagueness with detail, building parallel phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, and transforming weak writing into strong writing. -77
In other words, the expression of the self and its experience through language somehow develops the whole person, so that the evidence of development appears in the various things people do with their lives. -89
Grammar is not a dress code. Grammar, as Chomsky and other linguists have pointed out, is the internal system that allows us to generate and understand infinite new meanings from finite vocabulary. "The normal use of language is . . . free and undetermined but yet appropriate to situations, and it is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation" (Chomsky 56-59). The academic addiction to rigid, formal discourse situations is like putting on a tuxedo every time we step out of the house. -93
The work with language leads inevitably to work with the self and its life among other selves. The self uses sharpened language skills in a free and undetermined way to speak to itself and to speak to others. -95
The "writing problem" in our universities is really a humanism problem. We teach humanism and dodge its practice. We ask our students to study and understand meaning at the same time that we offer little opportunity for them to make original meaning. -95
Language is the tool of the human mind, whatever the mind's enterprise. Language can help us to live unconsciously, or it can help us to live consciously. -96
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Upside of Irrationality
by Dan Ariely
"Contrafreeloading," a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food. -60
That is, as long as fish, bird, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don't have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is--you guessed it--the commendably rational cat. -62
In my mind, one person who understands, better than anyone else, the delicate balance between the desire to feel pride of ownership and the wish to not spend too much time in the kitchen is Sandra Lee of "Semi-Homemade" fame. Lee has literally patented a precise equation delineating the point at which the crossover occurs: the "70/30 Semi-Homemade Philosophy." -87
The origami and Legos experiments taught us that we become attached to things that we invest effort in creating, and, once that happens, we start overvaluing these objects. Our next question was whether we are aware or unaware of our tendency to ascribe increased value to our beloved creatures. -97
The lack of difference between the two bidding approaches suggested not only that we overvalue our own creations but also that we are largely unaware of this tendency; we mistakenly think that others love our work as much as we do. -99
This would be nice, but the reality is that science is carried out by human beings. As such, scientists are constrained by the same 20-watt-per-hour computing device (the brain) and the same biases (such as a preference for our own creations) as other mortals. In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the "toothbrush theory." The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else's. -117
Look around. Do you notice a general revenge reaction on the part of the public in response to the increase of bad treatment on the part of companies and institutions? Do you encounter more rudeness, ignorance, nonchalance, and sometimes hostility in stores, on flights, at car rental counters, and so on than ever before? I am not sure who started this chicken and egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider--whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. -143
This cycle, which is what drive us to keep up with the Joneses, is also known as the hedonic treadmill. We look forward to the things that will make us happy, but we don't realize how short lived this happiness will be, and when adaptation hits we look for the next new thing. -175
The moral of the story? You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done. -179
Overall, this means that the improvement in the market efficiency for young professionals has come, to a certain extent, at the cost of market inefficiency for young romantic partners. -217
The most practical news is this: if we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short- or long term harm that can come to us. However, if we react to the emotion by making a decision, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of decisions that will continue to misguide us for a long time. -276
From "Clueless in Academe"
This is from the anthology, Teaching Composition, by Bedford St Martin...
[Discussing what unites different fields]
Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument. This argument literacy, the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated. - 33-34
In giving priority to ideas and arguments, however, I don't minimize the importance of qualities that can't be reduced to pure rationality--emotional intelligence, moral character, visual and aesthetic sensitivity, and creativity in storytelling and personal narrative. What I do claim is that training in these qualities will be incomplete if students are unable to translate them into persuasive public discourse. -34
Nor does privileging argumentation in the curriculum necessarily represent the ethnocentric or racist bias that some make it out to be. On the contrary, since effective argument starts with attentive listening, training in argument is central to multicultural understanding and respect for otherness. -34
Given the genius-worship that runs through our culture, academics are often admired for speaking above other people's heads, but knowing this fact somehow doesn't save me from embarrassment when I fumble painfully to explain what I do to nonacademic relatives and friends. -35
Students must not only read texts, but find things to say about them, and no text tells you what to say about it. -39
In my educational writing, I am best known for the argument that the wisest response we can make to the philosophical and social conflicts that have disrupted education is to "teach the conflicts' themselves, to bring controversy to the center of the academic curriculum. -41
. . . the ultimate motivation of my argument for teaching the conflicts is the need to clarify academic culture, not just to resolve spats among academics or cultural factions. -41
We take for granted, for example, that reflecting in a self-conscious way about experience--"intellectualizing"-- is something our students naturally see the point of and way to learn to do better. -43
The idea that, below their apparent surface, texts harbor deep meanings that cry out for interpretation, analysis, and debate is one of those assumptions that seems so normal once we are socialized into academia that we forget how counterintuitive it can be. -45
If what authors intend does not seem a genuine problem, then making a problem of unintended psychological or social meanings in texts seems all the more patently a waste of time. -47
Why would any sane person go out of his or her way to say things that are "arguable"? Just as common sense suggests that it is foolish to invent problems that did not previously exist, it also suggests that the point of writing and speaking is to make statements that nobody is likely to dispute. -50
[Discussing what unites different fields]
Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument. This argument literacy, the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated. - 33-34
In giving priority to ideas and arguments, however, I don't minimize the importance of qualities that can't be reduced to pure rationality--emotional intelligence, moral character, visual and aesthetic sensitivity, and creativity in storytelling and personal narrative. What I do claim is that training in these qualities will be incomplete if students are unable to translate them into persuasive public discourse. -34
Nor does privileging argumentation in the curriculum necessarily represent the ethnocentric or racist bias that some make it out to be. On the contrary, since effective argument starts with attentive listening, training in argument is central to multicultural understanding and respect for otherness. -34
Given the genius-worship that runs through our culture, academics are often admired for speaking above other people's heads, but knowing this fact somehow doesn't save me from embarrassment when I fumble painfully to explain what I do to nonacademic relatives and friends. -35
Students must not only read texts, but find things to say about them, and no text tells you what to say about it. -39
In my educational writing, I am best known for the argument that the wisest response we can make to the philosophical and social conflicts that have disrupted education is to "teach the conflicts' themselves, to bring controversy to the center of the academic curriculum. -41
. . . the ultimate motivation of my argument for teaching the conflicts is the need to clarify academic culture, not just to resolve spats among academics or cultural factions. -41
We take for granted, for example, that reflecting in a self-conscious way about experience--"intellectualizing"-- is something our students naturally see the point of and way to learn to do better. -43
The idea that, below their apparent surface, texts harbor deep meanings that cry out for interpretation, analysis, and debate is one of those assumptions that seems so normal once we are socialized into academia that we forget how counterintuitive it can be. -45
If what authors intend does not seem a genuine problem, then making a problem of unintended psychological or social meanings in texts seems all the more patently a waste of time. -47
Why would any sane person go out of his or her way to say things that are "arguable"? Just as common sense suggests that it is foolish to invent problems that did not previously exist, it also suggests that the point of writing and speaking is to make statements that nobody is likely to dispute. -50
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Writing Center Journal Vol 30 Nu 1
[From "The Polarities of Context in the Writing Center Conference" by Joseph Janangelo, WCJ 8.2 (1988) 31-6]
Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses-- where they are with a piece of writing and where our experience tells us they need to be in order to succeed in the academic community. -16
[From "Introduction to 'Multicultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center" by Nancy Maloney grimm]
Although we have plenty of multicultural readers to use in classrooms, as a field we have yet to develop practices, principles, and genres that encourage student writers to represent bicultural experiences, to articulate their cultural backgrounds in ways that attain academic validation and to connect literacy with meaningful personal aspirations. -37
There is clearly a persistent reappearing thread of change-agent aspiration in writing center scholarship, an aspiration that becomes less idealistic and more realistic when we start changing the things we can, such as the linguistic, cultural, racial, social, and disciplinary diversity of our undergraduate staff. As other introductions in this anniversary issue indicate, much of what we can accomplish in writing centers has to do with how we construe the contexts in which we work. -38
[From Multi-cultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center, WCJ 12.1 (1991): 11-33
Our version of critical reflection in tutor-training programs focuses on conscious explorations of language within a society stratified by race and cultural background and the implications of this social context for education. -41
As Knoblauch and Brannon point out it is important for teacher--and similarly tutors--to develop a conscious philosophical basis for their work because "nothing short of that consciousness will make instruction sensible and deliberate, the result of knowledge, not folklore, and of design, not just custom or accident. -45
[New writer]
In my own writing classes, I had studied the ways that educational, cultural, and social hierarchies inhibited students' use of writing for liberation (most students seemed to see writing as a means of coercion), enforced a formalist agenda of correctness over the force of meaning, and functioned to exclude non-mainstream students instead of empower them. -52
[Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers
This notion of multiliteracies has to do in part with new text forms and new means of communication associated with the information age and knowledge economies of the globalized markets and societies of late capitalism. -88
My guess is that writing centers will more and more define themselves as multiliteracy centers. Many are already doing so--tutoring oral presentations, adding online tutorials, offering workshops in evaluating web sources, being more conscious of document design. -89
[Queering the Writing Center by Harry Denney, WCJ 25.2 (2005): 39-62]
Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills--builging and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). -95
Producing better writers, to extend Stephen North's aphorism, involves understanding the manufacture and dynamics of identity, a process that involves on-going self-discovery and reconciliation with collective identities and discourse communities. -96
Learning to code-switch between "standard" discourse practices and community-based ones does not necessarily translate into practical empowerment: speaking a white, middle-class, academic vernacular enables outsiders to gain access to that discourse community, but such code-switchers do not eliminate the ubiquitous presence of racism, sexism, and nationalism and their marginalizing effects. -102
As students learn to construct essays with an attention to audience that forces them away from safe confines of the personal and the local, their ways of knowing confront a complex interplay of the dominant, the oppositional, the subversive, and the self. -103
Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses-- where they are with a piece of writing and where our experience tells us they need to be in order to succeed in the academic community. -16
[From "Introduction to 'Multicultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center" by Nancy Maloney grimm]
Although we have plenty of multicultural readers to use in classrooms, as a field we have yet to develop practices, principles, and genres that encourage student writers to represent bicultural experiences, to articulate their cultural backgrounds in ways that attain academic validation and to connect literacy with meaningful personal aspirations. -37
There is clearly a persistent reappearing thread of change-agent aspiration in writing center scholarship, an aspiration that becomes less idealistic and more realistic when we start changing the things we can, such as the linguistic, cultural, racial, social, and disciplinary diversity of our undergraduate staff. As other introductions in this anniversary issue indicate, much of what we can accomplish in writing centers has to do with how we construe the contexts in which we work. -38
[From Multi-cultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center, WCJ 12.1 (1991): 11-33
Our version of critical reflection in tutor-training programs focuses on conscious explorations of language within a society stratified by race and cultural background and the implications of this social context for education. -41
As Knoblauch and Brannon point out it is important for teacher--and similarly tutors--to develop a conscious philosophical basis for their work because "nothing short of that consciousness will make instruction sensible and deliberate, the result of knowledge, not folklore, and of design, not just custom or accident. -45
[New writer]
In my own writing classes, I had studied the ways that educational, cultural, and social hierarchies inhibited students' use of writing for liberation (most students seemed to see writing as a means of coercion), enforced a formalist agenda of correctness over the force of meaning, and functioned to exclude non-mainstream students instead of empower them. -52
[Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers
This notion of multiliteracies has to do in part with new text forms and new means of communication associated with the information age and knowledge economies of the globalized markets and societies of late capitalism. -88
My guess is that writing centers will more and more define themselves as multiliteracy centers. Many are already doing so--tutoring oral presentations, adding online tutorials, offering workshops in evaluating web sources, being more conscious of document design. -89
[Queering the Writing Center by Harry Denney, WCJ 25.2 (2005): 39-62]
Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills--builging and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). -95
Producing better writers, to extend Stephen North's aphorism, involves understanding the manufacture and dynamics of identity, a process that involves on-going self-discovery and reconciliation with collective identities and discourse communities. -96
Learning to code-switch between "standard" discourse practices and community-based ones does not necessarily translate into practical empowerment: speaking a white, middle-class, academic vernacular enables outsiders to gain access to that discourse community, but such code-switchers do not eliminate the ubiquitous presence of racism, sexism, and nationalism and their marginalizing effects. -102
As students learn to construct essays with an attention to audience that forces them away from safe confines of the personal and the local, their ways of knowing confront a complex interplay of the dominant, the oppositional, the subversive, and the self. -103
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Skills Students Might Want to Know
- How to use a comma, semicolon, colon
- How to write a good description
- How to write a good story
- How to write a good hook/attention getter
- How to write transitions
- How to take notes on short stories, novels, essays and textbooks
- How to write memos, resumes, cover letters
- How to analyze a narrative in terms of language use
- How to analyze a narrative in terms of story structure
- How to analyze a narrative in terms of class relations, gender relations, historical forces, and individual intentions.
- How to analyze a book about ideas
- How to write persuasive arguments
- How to decode unfamiliar words
- How to increase your vocabulary.
- How to do believable/top-notch research
- How to write a variety of sentences
- How to write more interesting sentences.
- How to generate ideas.
- How to spot tricky language in contracts, advertisements.
- How to write an interesting thesis
- How to write a supportable thesis
- How to summarize stories, novels, movies, arguments.
- How to determine/talk about a writer's style.
- How to determine/talk about a writer's intention.
- How to read academic journals.
- how to expand on short ideas
- how to write song lyrics
- how to write about visuals
- how to improve grammar
- how to remember things better
- how to reduce wordiness
- avoiding cliches
- How to write a good description
- How to write a good story
- How to write a good hook/attention getter
- How to write transitions
- How to take notes on short stories, novels, essays and textbooks
- How to write memos, resumes, cover letters
- How to analyze a narrative in terms of language use
- How to analyze a narrative in terms of story structure
- How to analyze a narrative in terms of class relations, gender relations, historical forces, and individual intentions.
- How to analyze a book about ideas
- How to write persuasive arguments
- How to decode unfamiliar words
- How to increase your vocabulary.
- How to do believable/top-notch research
- How to write a variety of sentences
- How to write more interesting sentences.
- How to generate ideas.
- How to spot tricky language in contracts, advertisements.
- How to write an interesting thesis
- How to write a supportable thesis
- How to summarize stories, novels, movies, arguments.
- How to determine/talk about a writer's style.
- How to determine/talk about a writer's intention.
- How to read academic journals.
- how to expand on short ideas
- how to write song lyrics
- how to write about visuals
- how to improve grammar
- how to remember things better
- how to reduce wordiness
- avoiding cliches
Imitate Then Innovate
The sincerest form of flattery
-authenticity vs bonding/rapport
-one size fits all in a multi sized world
-shaped by our culture, but we need to adapt to our context
-conversational style
-conversational topics
-mirroring
-style and manner of dress
our communication is assessed by student response, no tutor intention
-emphasizing true similarities is a form of authentic bonding.
-authenticity vs bonding/rapport
-one size fits all in a multi sized world
-shaped by our culture, but we need to adapt to our context
-conversational style
-conversational topics
-mirroring
-style and manner of dress
our communication is assessed by student response, no tutor intention
-emphasizing true similarities is a form of authentic bonding.
Educational Visuals and Demonstrations
1. Rose colored glasses- We all see the world through lenses. We can't tell the exact type of lens till we clean it or change it.
2. Horse with blinders- We can never see everything. We can, however, take off our blinders and widen our frame of vision.
3. Eye doctor- The large device with the flipping lenses... Can you see it better or worse with this lens? How about with this lens?
4. Ladder of Abstraction- A ladder with visuals placed along the side that go from concrete to abstract. Climb too high, and you can't breathe. Stay on the ground, and you can never get anywhere.
5. Glass of water- 1/2 full, 1/2 empty. This example is about descriptions and freedom. How do you feel about a 1/2 full glass? How do you feel about a 1/2 empty one? Can you choose to look at things either way?
6.
2. Horse with blinders- We can never see everything. We can, however, take off our blinders and widen our frame of vision.
3. Eye doctor- The large device with the flipping lenses... Can you see it better or worse with this lens? How about with this lens?
4. Ladder of Abstraction- A ladder with visuals placed along the side that go from concrete to abstract. Climb too high, and you can't breathe. Stay on the ground, and you can never get anywhere.
5. Glass of water- 1/2 full, 1/2 empty. This example is about descriptions and freedom. How do you feel about a 1/2 full glass? How do you feel about a 1/2 empty one? Can you choose to look at things either way?
6.
Defending Access
by Mike Rose
These are notes I took while reading
Key Ideas
Deficit Theories- Basic Writers were lacking something
Initiation Theories- Basic Writers are Trying to Join a New Community and Learn a New Discourse
-African American literacy in the past was explicitly political. The fact that it was illegal proves it.
-Basic Writing should be seen as acts that negotiate the situations that students of color face in majority dominated institutions.
-He is arguing in favor of pluralistic standards, standards which empower, rather than gatekeep.
-He talks about students from oppositional cultures, those that define themselves as against majority culture. (I personally think religious students are from oppositional cultures.)
-"clash of cultural styles" as a possible cause of poor performance
- The clash of cultural styles theory in an educational context suggests that "misunderstandings" among well-meaning teachers and students cause poor performance in schools.
-It is hard to explain why some minority cultures thrive academically under this theory.
-It seems that the way cultures view school has a big impact, perhaps more than features of linguistic use.
These are notes I took while reading
Key Ideas
Deficit Theories- Basic Writers were lacking something
Initiation Theories- Basic Writers are Trying to Join a New Community and Learn a New Discourse
-African American literacy in the past was explicitly political. The fact that it was illegal proves it.
-Basic Writing should be seen as acts that negotiate the situations that students of color face in majority dominated institutions.
-He is arguing in favor of pluralistic standards, standards which empower, rather than gatekeep.
-He talks about students from oppositional cultures, those that define themselves as against majority culture. (I personally think religious students are from oppositional cultures.)
-"clash of cultural styles" as a possible cause of poor performance
- The clash of cultural styles theory in an educational context suggests that "misunderstandings" among well-meaning teachers and students cause poor performance in schools.
-It is hard to explain why some minority cultures thrive academically under this theory.
-It seems that the way cultures view school has a big impact, perhaps more than features of linguistic use.
A Letter to Maggie, by James Slevin
From Teaching Composition: Background Readings
This is a letter to a new teacher who is worried.
What's the difference between having a point and making a point?- abstract
Slevin ultimately comes to suggest that the essential material of a good writing course belongs to the category of "evidence"---what counts as evidence, what does the evidence mean, what points can it support?-abstract
What matters in college writing, more than any writing they have done before and perhaps more than any writing or speaking they will do later, what matters is evidence. -60
Politicians, pundits, advertisers have in common a studied commitment to assertion, often at the level of the sound bite. Neither evidence nor competing assertions make any difference, except as part of a staged drama. -60
I wish my students could distinguish between having a point (or having a thesis) and making a point (or a thesis). (It is curious that the phrase, "making a thesis," is not idiomatic, and yet it is the heart of academic work.) We all have points but don't often make them. -61
Precisely because academic culture is never like that--we are never omniscient, our work is almost never a matter of life and death, our conclusions never entirely conclusive, never closing on exactly the right answer that will effectively eliminate the need for any further work in our fields--because of all that, we found Columbo a weekly delight. -62
We talk a great deal about examining the assumptions behind a thesis, looking at the bias of the author we are reading or the work we are composing. That is an important thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily clarify what is at stake in undertaking this critique. The point is not simply to identify bias but to explain what that particular bias does with the evidence at hand--how it misinterprets or inadequately explains the evidence, occasionally even distorting it. -63
I should rephrase that and say that the heart of academic writing is the process of supporting, testing, and complicating theses, not just having them. -64
This is a letter to a new teacher who is worried.
What's the difference between having a point and making a point?- abstract
Slevin ultimately comes to suggest that the essential material of a good writing course belongs to the category of "evidence"---what counts as evidence, what does the evidence mean, what points can it support?-abstract
What matters in college writing, more than any writing they have done before and perhaps more than any writing or speaking they will do later, what matters is evidence. -60
Politicians, pundits, advertisers have in common a studied commitment to assertion, often at the level of the sound bite. Neither evidence nor competing assertions make any difference, except as part of a staged drama. -60
I wish my students could distinguish between having a point (or having a thesis) and making a point (or a thesis). (It is curious that the phrase, "making a thesis," is not idiomatic, and yet it is the heart of academic work.) We all have points but don't often make them. -61
Precisely because academic culture is never like that--we are never omniscient, our work is almost never a matter of life and death, our conclusions never entirely conclusive, never closing on exactly the right answer that will effectively eliminate the need for any further work in our fields--because of all that, we found Columbo a weekly delight. -62
We talk a great deal about examining the assumptions behind a thesis, looking at the bias of the author we are reading or the work we are composing. That is an important thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily clarify what is at stake in undertaking this critique. The point is not simply to identify bias but to explain what that particular bias does with the evidence at hand--how it misinterprets or inadequately explains the evidence, occasionally even distorting it. -63
I should rephrase that and say that the heart of academic writing is the process of supporting, testing, and complicating theses, not just having them. -64
The Making of Meaning, Ann Berthoff
This is a selection from a longer work.
From Teaching Composition: Background Readings, 3rd Ed, Bedford/St Martins
Thus writing is not like cooking a particular dish; writing may resemble, at one stage or another, some phase of say, making a cream sauce, but it is not sequential or "linear"; it is not measurement, followed by amalgamation and transformation. An analogy for writing that is based on culinary experience would have to include ways of calculating the guests' preferences, as well as ways of determining what's on the shelf--the cook's and the grocer's--and what's in the purse. -293
Our job is to design sequences of assignments that let our students discover what language can do, what they can do with language. Kenneth Koch got poetry out of his youngsters because he gave them syntactic structures to play with; Sylvia Aston-Warner's "key vocabulary" became what she called "the captions of the dynamic life itself"; Paulo Freire's "generative words" provided the means by which the peasants in his literacy classes--"culture circles"--could name the world. -295
Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times. -295
We know reality not directly but by means of the meanings we make. (The role of critical thinking is, of course, to review and revise those meanings.) What we know, we know in some form--perceptual or conceptual. --295
The ability to speak is innate, but language can only be realized in a social context. Dialogue, that is to say, is essential to the making of meaning and thus learning to write. -297
From Teaching Composition: Background Readings, 3rd Ed, Bedford/St Martins
Thus writing is not like cooking a particular dish; writing may resemble, at one stage or another, some phase of say, making a cream sauce, but it is not sequential or "linear"; it is not measurement, followed by amalgamation and transformation. An analogy for writing that is based on culinary experience would have to include ways of calculating the guests' preferences, as well as ways of determining what's on the shelf--the cook's and the grocer's--and what's in the purse. -293
Our job is to design sequences of assignments that let our students discover what language can do, what they can do with language. Kenneth Koch got poetry out of his youngsters because he gave them syntactic structures to play with; Sylvia Aston-Warner's "key vocabulary" became what she called "the captions of the dynamic life itself"; Paulo Freire's "generative words" provided the means by which the peasants in his literacy classes--"culture circles"--could name the world. -295
Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times. -295
We know reality not directly but by means of the meanings we make. (The role of critical thinking is, of course, to review and revise those meanings.) What we know, we know in some form--perceptual or conceptual. --295
The ability to speak is innate, but language can only be realized in a social context. Dialogue, that is to say, is essential to the making of meaning and thus learning to write. -297
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