Re: No, Yes, and But for Formulaic Writing

[Muriel Harris <harrism@omni.cc.purdue.edu>]

> 
> My point with all this rambling about music, poems, and essays is that we
> need always to be careful of setting things up as an either/or polarity. 
> We don't need to say 5-paragraph themes are good or bad. 

> Jeanne Simpson

OK, I'm trying to catch up quickly on this discussion (after some
great vacation time on the road), so you all may have hashed this out
to the point of exhaustion. But Jeanne's point about no single right
answer meshes with discussions in our tutor training classes when we
talk about different writing styles. There's always someone who says
she has to start with an outline, and just as certainly as corn
grows here in Indiana, there's someone on the couch next to her
who wonders what planet she dropped off of. That person has to walk
around for awhile talking to himself. Someone else sits at the
computer and does brain dumps, and someone else has to write the first
sentence first. And there are others who write and write and write,
and then another person admits to needing more structure than that. In
short, the point for them to realize is that if we in writing centers
respect differences and try to individualize, we can't assume how the
other person writes effectively. Some people need structure,and some
are hindered by it, and many of us need it now and then. Shouldn't
students be helped to see what the possibilities are, and shouldn't
they then make intelligent choices?

I think what we're objecting to is the teacher who sees this as
either/or and issues commandments about how it MUST be done, thereby
denying the writer the opportunity to see what works for her.

Mickey


-- 
Mickey Harris
harrism@omni.cc.purdue.edu