I share your annoyance with these questions. They seem so narrow-minded.

Anyhow, I can't wait to see the Printculture gang chime in on these questions. I'm also compelled to chime in on the intellectual property ones myself. But I'll reserve judgment until I read next week's posts.

By the way, I love this idea of the 'themed' week...=)

My eight years of fulltime college and first twelve years of teaching occurred, thank god, when English departments considered the best preparation for the teaching of writing to be the reading of the greatest literature ever written in or translated into English — poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction — and as much of it as possible, so I read Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot, Rossetti, Yeats; Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov; Dickens, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Ellison, Woolf; Plato, Descartes, Bacon, Newman, Carlyle, Marx, Russell, Orwell; and more. In retrospect, there were terrible omissions — the writing of women and nonwhite writers especially — but even given these huge holes in my literary education I would not trade it for the education in “writing” some recent graduates have described for me in which they read article after article of academic prose on how to teach writing and little of the literature by those I listed above.

Yes, Spenser, Rossetti and Cardinal Newman are excellent preparation for the teaching of writing, much better than any “academic” prose which directly addresses the question of how to teach writing.

Mr. Skank, I'm very much afraid you are going to give skanks a bad name.

And Plato, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky, Professor Shirazi? You'll not learn of what English is capable in the academic prose directly addressing the question of how to teach writing. But I'm curious, Professor Shirazi, and would appreciate your telling me what in your opinion is the singlemost important instruction in how to write. Is it not to read, read, read one good book after another? Pause in your study of academic prose, Professor Shirazi, and delight in this poem by Christina Rossetti? What can it hurt?

Uphill

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

Now if this is not a classic example of why the internets are bad for dialogue, I don't know what is. Unless SS was being unusually coy, Mister Skank (don't call me Mister Skank! That's my father's name), I actually think he was agreeing with you.

That said, two thoughts on articles on how to teach writing: first, almost everyone getting a PhD in literature hates those things. So it's not a critique of the literature PhD to say so.

That said, though it may be true that the “best preparation for the teaching of writing” is reading great literature, but only in the Mr. Miyagi/Stand and Deliver world does that happen today. The fact that mainstream theories of writing pedagogy have changed does not make them de facto wrong.

It's also not clear that the best way to, say, learn to build houses is to look at great houses. It may be more useful by learning how to hammer a nail. E.g.

I think a serious argument about teaching writing also has to consider the kinds of students being reached, and the media ecology in which they live. Otherwise, Mister Skank, the whole thing feels to me like old people complaining that young people don't eat home-cooked meals anymore.

Thank you, E. Hayot, your remarks are helpful. Indeed, I read the comment of Professor Shirazi as ironic. Still, I'd like to know what a composition expert says is the first and or most important step in writing well. Neither do I agree that hammering a nail (or mastering punctuation) should come before observing good houses (or reading good literature). Otherwise, E. Hayot, it feels to me like young people complaining that Shakespeare and Yeats didn't just say what they meant in plain English.

Oooh, nice reversal: lovely. :)

I've had those complainers, too. I find myself hard pressed to defend the kind of teaching of writing put forward in those articles, because I think it's ridiculous.

I suppose the trick is this, however: you're in the classroom, trying to teach students how to write literary criticism, not poetry. This means teaching them how to organize ideas into paragraphs, how to marshall evidence, how to cite and how to make your citations do something for you. You can learn this from Shakespeare — or at least you can learn some of it from Shakespeare — but since even understanding what Shakespeare was saying (in plain English, as you say) is so hard for them, it's not the best place to start.

When my students start writing well, I make them look at explicitly stylistic examples and think about how to make their academic prose more poetic or more novelistic. For that, poetry and novels are useful (so are, often, the Best American Essays collections, which every year have one or two things that are just amazingly good).

Let me parse it this way: have them read Rossetti, Spenser, or Shakespeare (or Pound or Joyce or Woolf) to understand what language can do. But to teach them how to write academic prose (which is, after all, a genre with its own rules), they actually need to read academic prose.

Maybe another twist on the house analogy: the problem isn't that they're learning to build houses, but that they're learning to interpret them according to the rules of the discipline. You can get something out of knowing how to build one yourself, but in the long run — at least today — not that much.

(As for punctuation, of course you're right--I was thinking of nail-hammering as a set of more advanced skills, like using rhythm to create metatextual effects; learning, that is, how to write something that “sound” like a beginning or an ending, knowing (as some of my students do) how a sentence must sound before you know what it will say. After all, that strategy worked for Chuck D. The Public Enemy frontman, not Charles Dickens, though for all I know it worked for him too.)

I thought you meant Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I paused to read that poem twice; it's truly awful. As for Dostoevsky, he's a notoriously poor stylist and hardly a model for anyone. Plato never wrote an essay in his life and never wrote two pages in a row that made any sense.

What you seem to have learned from the oh-so-glorious past is to write “you'll not learn” instead of “you won't learn” and to say “read, read, read” instead of read. And when you say “My eight years of fulltime college and first twelve years of teaching,” it sounds like it took you twice as long as the average undergrad to complete your bachelor's degree.

Yeats wrote pretty plain by the standards of his time, though not plain enough for Orwell who later accused him of archaism. Yeats did say there was no school for singing but studying its monuments — kind of a mixed metaphor, imho — but first of all he is talking about poetry, not prose, and second, commentary is part of study.

I'm actually not a professor and never claimed to be an expert in composition, but since you do ask, I would say the “singlemost” important instruction in how to write is cut the bullshit.

I'm one of the guys who will say mean things about Mallon next week, so I'll save most of my venom for then, but let's not go overboard, shall we? Not all classics and their authors have earned their way up, but some certainly have. Plato makes all sorts of sense, except when he doesn't want to, and Dostoevsky manages to throw himself against some deep questions while writing genuine page turners.

Truth be told, though, I wouldn't ask my students to write like either of them; they already have enough difficulty attempting the possible.

(By the way, I don't really have a dog in this fight; just trying to minimize collateral damage.)

S. Shirazi, calm yourself.

I start my student writers with Wiesel's “Night,” the Gia-fu Feng and Jane English translation of Lao Tsu's “Tao Te Ching,” and then Kosinski's “The Painted Bird.” I also have had recent success — meaning students actually read what I ask without my having to resort to carrot and stick — with Augusten Burroughs' “Running with Scissors.” My students are all too eager to “cut the bullshit,” but need a tutorial to learn to distinguish the bullshit from the art. Russell's “What Is an Agnostic?” or “Why I Am Not a Christian” or even the longer “Religion and Science” address issues still important to students and offer clear and cogent examples of logic and reason. It's hard to name academic literary criticism that has endured, but Harold Goddard on Shakespeare is still the most helpful I've encountered. After they've read a good book, I tell students that the first and most important step in good writing is to tell the truth.

Perhaps I've jumped the gun but I assure you I'm quite calm. My point was only that Plato and Dostoevsky are not suitable models of style. Russell and Orwell are.

I'm pleased that Mr. Skank and I have found common ground even on our first principles. In fact, his most recent comment is exactly the kind of direct prose on how to teach writing which I imagine would be useful.

I apologize for my earlier peremptory tone.

I notice with some pleasure that the Google ad for this story has now changed to offer writing help.

And I repeat S Shirazi's observation from earlier: Mister Skank, you're going to have your skank license revoked if you keep up this apparent reasonableness.

As one might say if this were a radio talk-show, “Long time listener, first-time caller.” Involved as I am right now in questions of humanism (and esp. posthumanism), some of these questions do seem a bit outdated. While I agree with the premise of questions 9 & 10 (Americans should learn more languages, and judging from the freshman I teach, there are many young students who aren't the writers they should be), the rest of Mr. Mallon's questions begin from questionable assumptions. In reference to question 1: I just don't know who Mr. Mallon is reading. Most of the literary criticism I read is interesting, thought-provoking, and well-written.

Question 2 is simply mistaken. Many hold the impression that the humanities in mired in political faddishness and jargon; this is the usual response from people who either disagree with the politics of a critic's method, don't realize that politics is unavoidable (even attempting to avoid politics is political), or simply don't want to take the time or effort to learn new “jargon.” Every field has its jargon.

Question 6 is probably the most baffling: how does more communication make us less human? What does he mean by “human” in the first place?

Question 7 could easily be reversed: Are Iraqi citizens prepared to admit that American imperialism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?

Since I'm the resident “composition expert” (itself a problematic term), I suppose I should weigh in. In fact, I would have weighed in sooner, but I was at the annual convention of those who work in what's known as the field of rhetoric and composition. The disdain toward those who teach writing and who write about the teaching of writing, especially from those trained in English literature, is nothing new. And I'll have more to say about that and many of the issues raised here when I tackle Mallon's questions in my post this week.

But let me just say here that it never ceases to amaze me how easily the term “writing” is thrown around as if everyone knew exactly what that meant. What are we talking about when we talk about writing and about writing “well”? Are we talking primarily about style and grammar? Are we talking about teaching students how to write literature? academic arguments? essays in the belle lettres tradition? And if we are talking about style, can considerations of style be separated from the substance of what students are writing about? It's unclear whether Mister Skank wants students to write in iambic pentameter or whether he wants students to write flawless, fluid prose about their deep admiration of Shakespeare's genius. Whether “learning how to hammer a nail” is analogous to learning how to use a comma or learning how to have an idea, that skill alone is not sufficient to help students learn how to build a house. And what's the house we're asking students to build?

The assumed model of learning in these comments is imitation, but it's unclear what students are supposed to be imitating or toward what end. Somehow, students will learn “how to write well” by reading and appreciating the classics, but the writing itself remains abstracted from the particularities of any specific writing situation, assignment, audience, purpose, genre, conventions, discipline, and so on. Learning how to build a house has a concreteness that “learning to write well” does not, because assuming that students have some minimum template of what a “house” is (four walls and a roof) is less problematic than assuming that students have an idea (or more precisely, have the same idea as you, the instructor) of what building a good piece of writing is.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading, and I think reading widely and deeply is the best way to get inside a language, to be literate in a deep sense. But when students come into our classrooms without a lifetime of joyful, careful, attentive, appreciative reading under their belts, the teaching strategy of simply reading more leaves much to be desired. It's like spending an entire course on bread making having students taste the breads of the world. Yeah, students will learn a lot about bread, but is it a surprise when they don't know how to bake their own by the end?

You know what else helps students write besides reading? Having students write, and actually talking to students about their writing. Radical, huh? So, the other thing that never ceases to amaze me is how often discussions about teaching writing leave out the student writing altogether. Well, actually, that doesn't really amaze me. Let's not kid ourselves about why we like to think that reading is the best way to teach writing. It's a helluva lot easier than reading a lot of student writing, giving lots of useful feedback, helping them revise, designing clear assignments, having clear expectations and grading standards, using those standards to grade consistently, and so on--all the unvalued labor of teaching that the insitution doesn't reward, but likes to pay lip service to. Why deal with all the burnt, underdone, rock hard, inedible loaves of bread baked by novices when that'll only reflect poorly on you and strain your own resources? Better to let them study the loaves of the masters, and ensure time for you to bake your own modest loaf in the privacy of your own well-equipped kitchen, which, after all, you've worked really hard for.

The culture and material conditions of the university pit teaching and research against each other, when, ideally, they should be mutually supportive. And it may seem that I've strayed quite a distance from the question of teaching students how to write, but from my admittedly biased position, frustrations about student writing are really about the need for more satisfactory answers to the perennial questions about the function of the university, and about knowledge and its utility.

S.L. Kim: “I think reading widely and deeply is the best way to get inside a language, to be literate in a deep sense.”

This was my point.

By making it, I did not mean to imply that students should not write or that they do not benefit from the marks and comments of careful, informed readers of what they write. This is the role of the teacher.

But: “I think reading widely and deeply is the best way to get inside a language, to be literate in a deep sense.”

Amen.

My stories of teaching writing are at misterskank.mindsay.com If you scroll to the bottom of the screen you'll find a link to my blog archive and the titles of my stories and poems. The shortest stories are “Need” and “History,” the longest “Waste” and “Insanity.”