Re: No, Yes, and But for Formulaic Writing

[Katherine Fischer <kfischer@keller.clarke.edu>]

They grow corn there, Mickey?
;-)
Watching it shoot up in Iowa,
Katie

On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Muriel Harris wrote:

> 
> > 
> > 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
> 
>