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