Re: if you only had 75 minutes

[Nick Carbone <nickc@english.umass.edu>]

I think we're after the same thing.  It's just that instead of teaching
the classical first, and often by looking at some representative text--the
great speech model--I ask students to bend their Elbows and write.  Then
they read classmate's text and can indentify when all those
things--comarison, narrative, analysis, and so on--are going on.  I guess,
to pick up your metaphor, it's showing them that they already have the
quivers.  My wish is that students can go on to write effectively in
whatever writing situation they find themselves, that they always find the
right voice, degree of self-presentation, argument, diction, sentence
style, and confidence to always be heard and read with care.  Since that's
an infinite number of possibilities, and since I've only got about 45
hours of classtime a semester, I always have to choose what to emphasize
or what to let students emphasize.  And this frustrates me most because
emphasis can so easily be mistaken for truth, a suggestion for a rule,
and advice for a guarantee.  


Nick Carbone, Writing Instructor
Marlboro College
Marlboro, VT 05344
nickc@marlboro.edu, but coming to you via nickc@english.umass.edu