Grammar is not your Mom's mom.

It's funny. We read this Hartwell piece last semester in ENG470, and it wasn't exactly easy to keep track of. Grammar 1, grammar 4, grammar 3b sub theta, I actually found myself wishing for a Venn Diagram. Argh! (and yes, I know that 'argh' good grammar not is.} But now that I'm revisiting it, it was for more enjoyable as well as grabbable. and really, it just reinforced what i was convinced of the first time. Diagramming sentence and knowing about gerunds may be fun and even useful, but it doesn't contribute to making you a good writer. Writing does. Reading does. Caring about what you are writing about does. Heck, if you want to write a long explication of participles, dangling and not (you wierdo!), then the writing will improve your writing.
I like the pseudomagical metaphors used in the grammarians and non-grammarians, or incantation users and alchemists, but I believe I have a similar yet better metaphor for what the so called "alchemical" method is doing. Alchemy was more pseudoscience and each alchemist hid his secrets from the others, but I think of Hartwell more like I think of the way my roommate cooks. He (my roommate) reads about cooking. He watches other people cook. He tries all sorts of different foods and tries to figure out what's in them. But when he actually makes dinner, he never follows a codified recipe. 9 times out of ten, it's mmmmmmmmdelicious. Sometimes it's a dismal failure. But it gets better every time.

King of the Brittons, or Why I Loved that Man

I gotta tell ya, I loved Britton. The concept of a continuum between transactional and poetic discourses with expressive discourse a shady fluid center is beautiful. Just these three little (humongous) categories cover what we do in all our communications. The description of poetic discourse really nails the dichotomy: “And poetic discourse is the form that most fully meets the demands associated with the role of the spectator, demands that are met, we suggested, by MAKING SOMETHING with language rather than doing something with it.” (VV 158) With expressive capability and purpose as the wellspring from which both transactional and poetic discourse are birthed, Britton makes the assertion that expressive writing is a way in which we both wish for a state affairs and advertise or relationship to that state of affairs.

This isn't dead, cold, dessicated production of literary study objects. It's the making of worlds! Everyone needs to find their place in the world, continually. With this need as a motivator, writing becomes one of the best ways to make the world and me fit. All the other uses to which writing can be put will come about when they are desired as the best method to getting what we want, whether that is the aesthetic chills brought on by powerful fiction or a clearly explained set of instruction for bomb defusing.

One last thing about Britton's example of Clare. The little chart on page 167 about story length, age and T-unit length is powerful evidence for the influence of reading on writing, not just in subject matter or “feel,” but in level of sophistication as well. It's good to see it confirmed in someone else, I was starting to worry that I was the only one prone to “write snooty” after reading a bunch of theory.

Whose world is it anyway?

One of my co-workers sometimes leaves his satellite radio at work, and when he does I get to listen to CNN or BBC news in the morning. I felt like having propaganda blatantly thrown at me this morning, so I clicked over to CNN and this is what I heard:

“Well, Alison, coming up we have the story of how a Cincinnati school has fired its entire teaching staff and principals, as well as trashing its curriculum.”

Of course, my interest was peaked (piqued? I'm never sure on this on). Predictably, this abrupt and total sidelining of an educational center was due to the lack of funding they were receiving after repeatedly not raising the students evaluative test scores a la “No Child Left Behind.” Instead, it seems, every child was getting left behind the 8-ball. The drastic revamping is certain to give the stable learning environment that will grant confidence to underperforming students. Please forgive me, my ability to write sarcastically is still in its infancy.

“That's disturbing, yes indeed,” I can hear you saying at your screen, “But what in Dante's Frozen Hell does it have to do with the readings?” I'll tell you now. In his discussion of the four camps in composition related pedagogical theories, James A. Berlin points out that “We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it.” (268) Coupled with the current prolific dominance of the Current-Traditional camp and its technical/scientific emphasis on procedure and quantification you can see that the failure in my CNN example may be with the standards and the reward/punishment method of their enforcement. Perhaps the problem lies in the theory that motivates No Child Left behind and the (tacitly wrong-headed) definitions of successful learning it creates.

What impressed me most about Kinneavy's “Basic Aims of Discourse” was its scope in such a short piece. While the idea of an exhaustive survey is laughable, this was comprehensive. Meaning that his use of the charts made the huge listing of names and descriptors comprehensible to me. Call me a follower, but I loved the 'built from existing speech' classification by Bertrand Russel. Oftentimes I found the more detailed version to seem overly detailed. It just seemed that bothering to subdivide the category of Reference (Russell's Informative) into Informative, Scientific and Exploratory didn't really add anything. (132)

Help me my Fellows

So this blog is ostensibly for responses to the reading in my Compositional Theory Grad course.However, I want to make "normal" or "personal" blog as well. Do you all want to wade through my other offal as you review my posts for class? or should I set up a second blog for unclass things?

The High Holy Forker