Comments | chieur: On (teaching) writing well.

chieur

On (teaching) writing well.

Jan 23, 2010 23:28

Not long ago, parenth_blog blogged about a talk given by William Zinsser called "Writing English as a Second Language." This post started out as a comment on that blog post, but it is mostly about the article. It got a little overheated, and a little overlong, and isn't about what Sam said, so I decided to post it here, instead. It turns out that teaching ( Read more... )

Comments 9

imminently January 24 2010, 07:22:59 UTC

Scott, I want to second your emotion on all counts. Zinsser's speech suffers on many levels, most of which you've outlined, but I'll add a couple more ( ... )

in_parentheses January 25 2010, 20:01:17 UTC

Two things:

1. I understood "Humanity" to mean "tell your story on a human scale; help your readers understand the humans involved." As such, it's an instruction for some kinds of writing more than others, but I still think it's valuable.

2. I teach a lot of international high school students, particularly from Asia. Zinsser's comments spoke directly to the issues I see in their writing. Their sentences (and paragraphs) are long, often passive voice, and designed to sound impressive rather than to convey clear meaning. The American idea of constructing a step-by-step logical argument in a paper is literally foreign to them.

From talking to people who move more fluently between cultures, my understanding is that this is good writing in Chinese or Korean. Zinsser's speech struck me as potentially helpful in teaching that it is not good writing in English.

imminently January 25 2010, 20:57:51 UTC

I thought his diagnosis of the problem was excellent, but his prescription to solve it iffy at best.

chieur January 26 2010, 04:34:41 UTC

Eric, a question I'm embarrassed I don't know the answer to offhand. Did you just take your BA and run to the newspapers, or did you go to J-School?

Thread 7

matthios January 26 2010, 23:09:27 UTC

I rarely read LJ anymore, but this post made me very glad I still check every so often. I'm teaching a writing seminar this term and have felt obscene amounts of apprehension about it. I'm not afraid of "teaching", which is what my ex-advisor seems to think, but worried about feeling (and being) dishonest. I'd always been told I was an awful writer until I finally threw out everything I'd learned in school about "good writing" and just did my own damn thing. Occasionally, older faculty bristle at the results. What is this? You're engaging in "discourse!" in plain, animated, and passionate English? I certainly don't shy away from complex sentences, latinate vocabulary, or passive voice constructions. I do, however, uniformly reject/avoid/detest obfuscation especially in academic writing. I suppose it is a worthwhile trick to pull out when forced into a publish-or-perish environment can be used to cover weak scholarship ( ... )

chieur January 27 2010, 17:35:17 UTC

If you're at all interested in discussing teaching writing further, I have some really very good materials and insights from the writing program at U of C. The biggest thing is: concrete writing tools. For example, I started ever quarter with a concept called "theme." That is, one of the things you're doing when you're writing is managing several different themes, bringing them together, and making an argument about they fit together (or don't), about their relationship (or nonrelation ( ... )