Subject: Re: Cecelia's 26 sense (was: Peter Elbow)
From: William Hochman (wh14@is9.nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 21:29:02 EST
Actually, Peter Elbow is one of our finest thinkers when it comes to
learning to write and was schooled in Oxford. Matt, do you know about his
_College English_ piece on Academic Discourse?
In an age where there is spellchekcing I can't get too serious about
spelling as a writing skill. I care about the conventions of language and
the skills of writing, but I think that there is more to writing. As
George Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language," "The great
enemy of clear language is insincerity."
People who talk about grammar as writing usually want to do so and I
listen...but I believe that English is a language where error is
innevtitable. BTW, as a college writing tutor I spend lots of my
writing/teaching energy explaining grammar and punctuation in order to
get writers to think more about carefully expressing the meaning of their
ideas.
As Matt suggests, attending to surface properties of one's prose is a good
step in the composing process, but not the central one, will
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