Faigley has an old school way of thinking in terms of responding to people's writings. He talks of the 1931 Commission of English and their report, Examining the Examination of English. This nine member board talked about what makes a well written English entrance exam.
They passed a certain student because "...pupils should have the opportunity to 'execise and reveal their powers"(401). And according to the Commision, this can be done through metaphor. Along with this, Faigley quotes Roger Garrison by saying that, "Good writing is inevitably honest writing. Every writer, beginner or not, needs what Hemingway called a built-in crap detector'. All of us, like it or not, are daily immersed in tides of phony, posturing, pretentious, tired, imprecise, slovenly language which both suffocate and corrupt the mind"(223). There seems to be some insight here, but a little hypercritical as well. In order to try knew things, people probably have to write in different styles to find their own honest style. By trying to sound academic, I suppose it comes across as phony, but to achieve this, people need to at least emulate what their surroundings.
Harris claims that in order to get students to write well, is to get them off the idea that teachers should judge a final product. Rather teachers should "...turn the student loose to become self-regulating editor who can effectively spot the need to reorganize, revise and correct"(83). He also claims that peer evaluation is important within the prewriting stage to help find the writers stance on their issue. Through various stages of the writing process, there should be a discussion and anaylsis of what works in a pupils paper, why it works, and what could be changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment