Re: if you only had 75 minutes

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

I like Katie's reply to Will's post, and would say the same, 'cept she's
said it so well.  Though I'd add that Will's point is one I've read twice
recently in other contexts.  Janet Carey Eldred's "The Technology of
Voice" mentions how "Until very recently, I resisted personal writing,
always found it easier to write in academic style, always found it
somewhat easy to teach students--from first-year writers to nontraditional
graduate students--to write well for the academy" (__CCC_,48.3, p. 335).

And in the October 10 _Chronicle of Higher Ed._, Scott Russell Sanders
wrote "From Anonymous, Evasive Prose to Writing With Passion," a piece
about how he too had to learn to let himself, then his students, write
with, well, passion, from a point of view they cared about and in a voice
that could carry that point of view.

Ever get the chance to look at a student's journal entry on a topic and
then her paper?  Sometimes it's like two different people.  Students see
it too. You'll tell them that what's in the journal sounds so much better
and ask why they didn't say it that way in the paper.  The most common
anser I get is a variant of 'I didn't think I was allowed to or that I
should.'  Pretty much the same reasons Sanders and Eldred gave for taking
so long to write personal essays.  


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