As you know, I teach writing, which includes Freshman Composition and Technical Writing, and for many years I wrote for a living as a newspaper and broadcast journalist.
I ran across this pretty damning quote from web guru Clay Shirky in an interview he did for Barnes and Noble's website earlier this year:
Shirky recalls: "What I wrote at Yale was for an audience of a single person, my professor, and … it was intended to convince him that I knew what I was talking about so he would give me a good grade, rather than being intended to communicate something to him that would convince him to change his mind, or trying to give him a framework for thinking about something.
"In a way, writing a college paper in its current structure is almost custom-designed to crush in the student the idea of writing as a communicative act, because it feels like a long, highly structured interoffice memo rather than an address to the world.
"…[I]n my ordinary classes, my experience of writing was that it wasn’t a communicative act to people I didn’t know."
I really, really don't want my students to leave the class feeling that way. This quote was a reminder to me to re-examine the relevance of everything I do in the classroom.
7 comments:
I think this is excellent and true for many.
I tried to teach students to structure their writing and/or argument well, regardless of what they chose to talk about. And found that worked pretty well.
They could argue that the narrator of Invisible Man was an alien, as long as they had clean writing and good evidence.
Kyle: Clean writing and good evidence -- that's it in a nutshell, isn't it?
Yep!! Thanks for the reminder.
Lee Anne
Thanks, Lee Anne. A sobering thought for writing teachers everywhere.
Not particular to this post, but know you'd enjoy: Death of Real News.
Good ole Murdoch is offering thefirst newspaper obtained solely in an electronic medium format
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