Monday, June 16, 2008
Last blog--Day 9
Please write a brief argument describing what grade you honestly believe you deserve for English 120. Be sure to tell why you believe you deserve this grade.
Blog 7
For today's blog, please read the following and then share your thoughts on Lanzbaum's position.
On Writing
by Leon Lanzbaum
All writing is a form of prayer.
-- John Keats
Graduate school: "We must write for our audience," says my rhetoric-and-writing professor. "We do not write for ourselves," he says. On this point, he is adamant, a rock. And on this same point, an ineffable tumult stirs within me as I sense most writers in academe submit to this professor's prescription, a prescription I'm not ready to swallow. As a student of the self-satisfied writers--Faulkner, Didion, White etc.--I learned the writer comes first. Not that writers shouldn't visualize their readers, but when purpose yields to audience, words lose their innocence. The writer holds back, does not give his or her all, or even worse, gives too much, and that's dishonest writing.
So what do we do as academic writers? Should we write for ourselves or write for an audience? I'll admit, I played the game. During my rhetoric-and-writing stint, I gave my professor what he wanted. I wrote for him! And my essays were the most antiseptic, fallow pieces I have ever written. But such is the nature of academic writing. It marks scholarly territory, territory devoid of the first person singular, territory that, for the most part, forces the writer to kill, or at least, hide his or her identity.
As someone who cares about writing, I loathe the writing of most rhetoric-and-writing departments. I abhore passive sentences and colorless verbs and narcoleptic nouns. I'm allergic to textbook writing and the convoluted, meandering language of lawyers and literary theorists. Writing is communication, the inside of one person speaking to another person. Writing is not a contest in whose word is bigger! I say that if we satisfy ourselves, an audience will find us. Read the words of Henry David Thoreau or Ernest Hemingway or Sandra Cisneros and you'll find writers who write for themselves yet still speak to the world.
But let’s face it, whether you're in English 101 or you write for a national magazine, you do write for some sort of audience--maybe your editor, maybe your readers, maybe your rhetoric-and-writing professor.
The Key: Respect the man or woman at the upper end of the keyboard, you!
Don't lose who you are. Lose yourself and you lose a unique voice, a voice that will never pass this way again.
So let's see what you can do to keep your unique voice, to write for yourself, yet still write for an audience.
On Writing
by Leon Lanzbaum
All writing is a form of prayer.
-- John Keats
Graduate school: "We must write for our audience," says my rhetoric-and-writing professor. "We do not write for ourselves," he says. On this point, he is adamant, a rock. And on this same point, an ineffable tumult stirs within me as I sense most writers in academe submit to this professor's prescription, a prescription I'm not ready to swallow. As a student of the self-satisfied writers--Faulkner, Didion, White etc.--I learned the writer comes first. Not that writers shouldn't visualize their readers, but when purpose yields to audience, words lose their innocence. The writer holds back, does not give his or her all, or even worse, gives too much, and that's dishonest writing.
So what do we do as academic writers? Should we write for ourselves or write for an audience? I'll admit, I played the game. During my rhetoric-and-writing stint, I gave my professor what he wanted. I wrote for him! And my essays were the most antiseptic, fallow pieces I have ever written. But such is the nature of academic writing. It marks scholarly territory, territory devoid of the first person singular, territory that, for the most part, forces the writer to kill, or at least, hide his or her identity.
As someone who cares about writing, I loathe the writing of most rhetoric-and-writing departments. I abhore passive sentences and colorless verbs and narcoleptic nouns. I'm allergic to textbook writing and the convoluted, meandering language of lawyers and literary theorists. Writing is communication, the inside of one person speaking to another person. Writing is not a contest in whose word is bigger! I say that if we satisfy ourselves, an audience will find us. Read the words of Henry David Thoreau or Ernest Hemingway or Sandra Cisneros and you'll find writers who write for themselves yet still speak to the world.
But let’s face it, whether you're in English 101 or you write for a national magazine, you do write for some sort of audience--maybe your editor, maybe your readers, maybe your rhetoric-and-writing professor.
The Key: Respect the man or woman at the upper end of the keyboard, you!
Don't lose who you are. Lose yourself and you lose a unique voice, a voice that will never pass this way again.
So let's see what you can do to keep your unique voice, to write for yourself, yet still write for an audience.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Blog 6
Please teach the class five new vocabulary words that you think may enrich us in some compelling new ways. Include here the words and the definitions and, if you wish, some sample sentences using these words.
Day 4 blog
Please argue for or against one of the following topics (or place yourself somewhere in between, in Rogerian style)in a roughly one-page (if it were double-spaced) essay:
nationalized health care
the death penalty
legalizing marijuana
a required license and requisite classes for all new parents
quotas on allowable gas/oil consumption for each citizen in the United States
laptops included in tution for all ECPI students
Barak Obama for president
John McCain for president
Hillary Clinton for Vice-President
the decline of American power
nationalized education through college and beyond
nationalized health care
the death penalty
legalizing marijuana
a required license and requisite classes for all new parents
quotas on allowable gas/oil consumption for each citizen in the United States
laptops included in tution for all ECPI students
Barak Obama for president
John McCain for president
Hillary Clinton for Vice-President
the decline of American power
nationalized education through college and beyond
Monday, June 2, 2008
Blog 3
Do you agree or not with Mary Sherry's central point in "In Praise of the 'F' Word" (p. 497-99 of our text). Please explain in a sophisticated and nuanced manner.
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