The result is what we see around us: senior corporate managers who make decisions affecting millions of people on the basis of short-term balance sheets, artists ignorant of history, historians ignorant of science, scientists unable to distinguish between the arts and the humanities.
Michael Holzman
What really could Vitanza mean when he writes that the university is not a safe place for students to learn to write?
Victor J. Vitanza
Composition's spin-off concern with [personal expression] and self-discovery are what really did rhetoric in—and what still compete with rhetoric every time.
Christine Farris
'We' have yet to write 'writing'! 'We' may never write 'writing,' but 'we' must start letting writing write. Such a writing cannot, should not, take place, and will not, unless under the most radical, still unthinkable, conditions
. . . take place . . . in the university (or the schools). It is simply not safe for students to write 'in' or 'at' the university. Any university. What is taught at the university is not-writing.
Victor J. Vitanza
Certainly the humanist cult of self-expression that dominated turn-of-the-century composition pedagogy, with its insistence on the personal essay, can be called an art of display with some justice.
Sharon Crowley
Writing, however, is not ||||||||||||||||| (barcodes) nor is it //////////// (slashing of value). Only writers spawned by institutions write in this manner! Rhetoric||||||||||||||||||||| . . . //////////////Composition.
Victor J. Vitanza
Because this view perpetuated by such columnists [Will, Sowell] suggests that communication is fixed rather than fluid, the columnists provide themselves and their sympathetic audiences many occasions to lament the uselessness of current practices in writing instruction.
Bill Bolin
. . . 'rhetoric' in the lower division came to refer to everything about writing—argumentation, modes of exposition, style and usage—taught not by specialists but by the new (and still existing) 'composition underclass' (Connors 55) of instructors.
Christine Farris
There are three different uses of the word 'write' in the preceding sentence. A 'writing program' is an institutional structure: a group of employees, with a budget, space and the rest, created for a set of institutional purposes. One of those purposes of the La Jolla writing program was to train freshmen to write well enough so that their writing skills were not an obstacle to their further education.
Michael Holzman
(quoting Knoblauch) ". . . [rhetorical theory] can help to place writing in a context of human values—self-expression, learning, reaching out to other people, preserving knowledge, conducting business, making laws, playing, creating works of art—the psychological, ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of language use that make it so encompassing a human enterprise" (27).
Christine Farris
. . . my deeper concern here is not the disappearance of rhetoric that some of our colleagues have discussed; rhetoric is in fact booming and rightly so across many disciplines. Rather, my concern is the erasure of composition by many English departments—or the hiding of composition in the famous basements.
Kathleen Welch
Looking about us today, it seems that the study of writing can best be understood in the context of the system of schooling in this country and as such presents the opportunity for understanding that system and its results.
Michael Holzman
Copyright ©
Enculturation 2003
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