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
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