more Engl 101 stuff

stuff for English 101

Woman: without her, man is nothing.
Woman, without her man, is nothing.

what feels natural, what feels artificial about writing

Something to think about when I have more time:

What about talking in class about “what’s natural” and “what’s artificial” about writing?

Natural:

We speak already, we think already

Artificial:

We don’t speak naturally only on one topic (we ramble, our minds are fertile with ideas, so one thing reminds us of another)

We don’t speak in coherent order, necessarily. We get ideas the order we get them. We have to go back and artifically impose an order, depending on our audience.

Might help students 1) understand writing in general, and 2) understand why some things come more easily to them and others not.

It’s the canon of invention that gives rhetoric its substance

It is, however, the canon of invention that gives rhetoric its substance; without it, rhetoric merely arranges, clothes, and dispatches the arguments and observations other disciplines have discovered. Without invention, rhetoric is not an epistemic activity, and as such it can never hold anything but a secondary place in the English department (to say nothing of the academy at large).

George L. Pullman,  “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Composition, Invention, and Literature,” JAC 14.2 (Winter 1994)

Yes, yes, yes. Invention is the juiciest, funnest, deepest part of writing and teaching to write.

Peter Elbow: “believe everything, particularly what seems strange or unpleasant”

The doubting muscle’s sensitivity to dissonance is not so trustworthy till you work out the rules of logic, transform assertions logically into as many forms as possible, extricate the self, doubt particularly those assertions that seem reasonable, and get opposing propositions to fight each other. Similarly, the believing muscle’s ability to project isn’t so trustworthy till you build its use into an orderly game and follow the rules: never argue; believe everything, particularly what seems strange or unpleasant; try to put yourself into the skin of people with other perceptions; make metaphorical transformations of assertions to help you enter into them. Most important of all, you must get other people to do it with you, and do it for a long time.

– Peter Elbow, from “Believing and Doubting as Dialectics” (Writing Without Teachers, pp. 169-170)

I am a little bit in awe of how simply-stated but true to reality these sentences are. I especially like the parts about the need to practice believing “what seems strange or unpleasant” and making “metaphorical transformations of assertions to help you enter them.” It’s almost as if I could take these sentences and expand them into steps for my students to follow while researching or thinking about something.

“Majoring in the humanities and social sciences puts a damper on religiosity”

Saw this in the New York Times last Sunday.

Losing My Religion, November 1, 2009

MAJORING in the humanities and social sciences puts a damper on religiosity. Thank (or blame) postmodernism, the staple of humanities classes, with its notions of relative truth (opposed to religion’s absolute truth) and questioning authority. “These are arguments that students find persuasive,” says Miles Kimball, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. He and three colleagues analyzed data on the religious attitudes and observance of some 26,000 students across the country over six years.

How important do students think religion is in their lives? For scale, Miles Kimball says, if the difference between the religiosity of people living in the Bible Belt and those in the rest of the country equals 100, then the effect of majoring in a particular subject would be:

-47 Social science
-28 Humanities
-24 Physical science/math
-14 Engineering
-13 Biology
0 No college
+2 Business
+10 Other
+16 Vocational
+23 Education

Not surprising, though I didn’t realize majoring in social science made SUCH a difference (as opposed to humanities). Yep, if you take a postmodern perspective, you’re more likely to focus on social structures as ways of improving the world than on the divine or the spirit.

Also — no matter how many times I read it, I don’t get the thing about “if the difference between the religiosity of people living in the Bible Belt and those in the rest of the country equals 100, then the effect of majoring in a particular subject would be.”  It would seem that would mean that majoring in social science makes a person 47 points closer (i.e., further away from “100″) to the non-Bible Belt population. Anyway, doens’t matter — the scale works without that scale.

photographs as writing prompts

Also saw this in the last Sunday’s New York Times: “What Do You See?” Seems could be a good writing assignment, a promising way of getting more interesting essays and avoiding plagiarized / re-hashed topics.

What does a swimming tiger suggest about public policy, or a pricked finger say about your goals? The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University is showing applicants two dozen conceptual photos, and giving them the option of basing an essay on one of them.

The following photo album was created by the Center for Creative Leadership, a nonprofit group that produces visual tools to prompt conversations at leadership training seminars. Wagner is putting the concept to unusual use as an admissions tool. “It allows us to get a deeper sense of the applicant’s passion for/commitment to an issue, and unlocks the depth of interest in a way that is not always achievable in a standard admissions essay,” says Tracey Gardner, Wagner’s chief of staff.

Another benefit: no more essays rehashed from other applications. About 970 applicants for this fall’s class, more than half, wrote on an image.

Here’s the slideshow, showing a sampling of the images and examples of what students chose to write about.

how to rush to judgment

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is condemnation before investigation.
– Edmund Spenser

He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame to him.
–Proverbs 18:13

get at library

Get at library:

Sullivan, Dale. “Beyond Discourse Communities: Orthodoxies and the Rhetoric of Sectarianism.” Rhetoric Review 18 (1991): 148-164.

PN 171.4

Cancel that — found a pdf online :)

reading and writing is all

From “For English Majors.” I love this.

If you’re majoring in English, you’re learning a lot about how to read.  Not just words on the page (you knocked that down in elementary school, no?).  You’re learning how to read for sense and meaning.  You’re learning how not to be thrown by long sentences or unfamiliar vocabulary.  You’re learning to follow an idea from the top of the chapter to its end.  You’re reading for style and to know what it adds to sense.  You’re reading between the lines because you know there’s something to be found there.

We’re living in complicated times, and I can’t help but think they’re going to get more complicated and more difficult before some light shines in the distance.  Getting some idea what it all means depends, in part, on learning from people who have some idea (not “pundits,” by the way).  The ability to read, really read, undaunted by complexity, turn of phrase or length of thought, puts you in a position of making some sense of convoluted, technical and controversial ideas and events.

Add to your list of advantages:  Clarity and reasoning (about complicated subjects), logic, expression and patience (with long passages).  You don’t suppose we’d have any reason in work and in life to call on those abilities right about now, do you?