Re: Against Formulaic Writing

["Jeanne H. Simpson" <csjhs@ux1.cts.eiu.edu>]

Suppose that you were a Martian.  You came to earth in 1958 and visited an
auto showroom for a little while.

Quite possibly you would return to Mars and explain that earth vehicles
had to have large tailfins and acres of chrome in order to function.

That neither of these was a salient feature of an automobile might never
occur to you unless someone suggested otherwise.

I think that the 5-paragraph theme is a Martian automobile lesson, most of
the time, reflecting something called "real academic writing" (oh
Katie--doesn't it curdle your blood to think of teaching young 'uns how to
write that stuff, knowing how nearly unreadable and uninteresting much of
it is?) as understood by a person who was in the showroom for only a
little while and who never really test drove the car. The pseudo-rules and
facts about these exercises (and about paragraphs themselves, for that
matter) have been understood as salient, completely missing the point of
the exercise itself: it is an *exercise*, intended to focus on one or two
specific skills. 

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu

who just got back from a week's vacation and is enjoying a quiet afternoon
before the summer session gears back up.