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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1986)
I I) Mr. FrankHfl’s Secret Michael Robertson, director of Princeton ’» remedial-writing course, finds that imitating good writers "can be a valuable step on the path of developing one’s own prose style." Robertson provides students with a list of established 20th<eniury writers who have produced “particularly distinctive prose"—from George Bernard Shaw to Woody Allen. He asks the students to choose passages they like, then to follow the example of Benja min Franklin, who described, in his “Autobiography. " how he taught himself to write. Excerpts ft bout this time I met with n an odd Volume of the Spec tator... I thought the Writing excellent, and wiah'd if poeai bie to imitate it With that View, I took eotne of the Pa pen, and making short HinU of the Sentiment In each Sen tence, laid them by a' few Days, and then without look ing at the Book, try’d to com pleat the Paper* attain, by expressing each hinted Senti ment at length and as fully as it had been express'd before, in any suitable Words, that should come to hand. Then I compar'd my Spectator with the Original, discover’d some of . my Faults and corrected them . . By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discover'd many faulta and amended them; but I sometime*) had the Pleasure of Fancying that in certain Particulars of small Import, I had been lucky enough to im 11 I! ,1 prove the Method or the Lan guage and this encourag’d me to think I might poaeibly in time come to be a tolerable English Writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. inrar~ l'llllMUltllllllLtul shrug is telling: it means he will do it my way, because I’m the teacher, and do it somebody else’s way next semester He will abide by the last rule he is given, doing whatever is necessary to get over and get out. I fear that too few students understand why English teachers seem intent on con* fusing them. It is because writing is ulti mately such a personal thing The only way to get it right is to do it, and the only rule that matters is that their writing should work It must communicate their meaning Another problem, which goes beyond writing, is thut too many students seem unwilling to think Some may have pass able writing form with little content. Oth ers may have compelling ideas and fresh p> rceptions, but no idea how to impose any order on their thoughts. Both weaknesses d< rive from an almost willful failure to submit to the mental discipline necessary f'i good writing. In the latter case, students Tn to believe that a good idea is enough. I doesn't occur to them that a good writer, 1 se a successful pizza maker, must deliver is product; if a reader doesn’t get the idea, I remains hungry. Fona evar contant: Empty prose is quite a a fferent matter. Some students have do doped that way because their teachers, iuch like diving judges, awarded points lor >rm. It didn’t ulwuys matter if they said "iything. Tragically, some students have >me to believe that they don't have any hing to say, so they often don’t bother try ing to think of unything. Such modesty does not extend to other endeavors. Even the most reluctant writ ers, the ones who must be begged for insight and elaboration, are perfectly confident of their competence in other areas of study und frank in their desire for success. But they have been allowed to believe that writ ing is at best marginal to that success, that architects, engineers, veterinarians, attor Students seem never to have been exposed to writing as an art form rather than a science. They look for answers, instead of guidance neys und businessmen have little need for written communication. Agradeonachem istry exam matters to them in a way that writing aclear introduction never will For that reason, as 1 now understand, one of the great frustrations of writing instruc tors is the academic segregation of funda mental skills like the one we teach. "Writ ing across the curriculum” has become a rallying cry of many educators, but stu dents, in practice, rarely get the point. It seems clear that most of my students’ writ ing breakthroughs occur during the final weeks of the semester. I would like to be lieve that this is because my instructional wisdom has finally taken root and borne fruit. In fact, that last-minute flowering owes much to the schizoid priorities we force upon students. After the last round of major midterm exams, they may feel free, at last, to concentrate on writing. Their semester clocks tell them it's time to get down and lock up these nuisance credits before they shift into all-nighter gear for the really major stuff. I have also learned, however, to take my breakthroughs whenever I get them. It may mean threatening an engineer with the prospect of repeating the writing course every semester or delaying his rise into the hierarchy of Dow Chemical until he can craft a coherent paragraph. That’s all right, because when it happens, it’s like hearing a child speak his first sentence. Unfortunately the college student, unlike the child, doesn’t always appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment; he just wants to know if he will pass. Unfinished business: That reaction is under standable. Young people, after all, don’t write except in school. When they are fin ished with school, therefore, they believe they will be finished with writing. The job of a writing teacher is to convince them that writing is thinking. Of course, they may not believe that, either, but that’s my problem. Teaching writing, like teaching most things in our educational system, is a process of preparing people to do things they are certain they will never have to do again. We keep at it because we know bet ter, and because sometimes it works. n