This is your EMWP Summer Institute Book Group blog. You are asked to post at least once a week before and during the Institute. Your group leader will post additional assignments and topics. Check back often. If you have any questions or concerns contact your leader, Bill - ypsilantibill@gmail.com .
Please create new posts rather than just comments since the comments don't readily appear.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Prompt #2
Choose a quote that inspired or irritated or bewildered you, share it, and explain what it means to you.
Leave it to Elbow to utter sacrilege; that writing can be an impediment to thinking. He quotes Sheridan Blau on this (a former Writing Project director). "We must not become so numbed by our educational propaganda about how writing is an instrument for the improvement of thinking (although it is) to forget the irony of the fact that the act of writing is itself one of the principal obstacles to focused, sustained, and insightful thinking for many writers, novice and experienced alike" (163) This reverses the theoretical claim that writing rescues thought from its vagueness. Blau claims instead that writing creates interference in the thought process. We can certainly recognize this in our teaching when students protest, "I know what I want to say, but I can't write it." Thought is fluid and intuitive; writing is segmented and deliberate. Anyone have this experience?
Leave it to Elbow to utter sacrilege; that writing can be an impediment to thinking. He quotes Sheridan Blau on this (a former Writing Project director). "We must not become so numbed by our educational propaganda about how writing is an instrument for the improvement of thinking (although it is) to forget the irony of the fact that the act of writing is itself one of the principal obstacles to focused, sustained, and insightful thinking for many writers, novice and experienced alike" (163)
ReplyDeleteThis reverses the theoretical claim that writing rescues thought from its vagueness. Blau claims instead that writing creates interference in the thought process. We can certainly recognize this in our teaching when students protest, "I know what I want to say, but I can't write it." Thought is fluid and intuitive; writing is segmented and deliberate. Anyone have this experience?