The Edge

Response — Expressivism (September 9)

I love, I love, I LOVE the Welch essay and the two essays by Elbow this week!  What do I love?  The way each goes against the established wisdom of the field. 

Of course we should always write for an audience.  (But who among us hasn’t been tongue-tied around a particular person or group of people?)

Of course we revise because we hate what we’ve written.  (How many people who have been published actually buy into this?)

Of course we should strive for thoughts that resolve contradiction and present thoughts with absolute clarity.  (Unless you’re trying to discover the structure of the atom.  Then, it’s illuminating if, like Rutherford, you discover that the result of an experiment is like firing a cannonball at a sheet of tissue paper, and watching it bounce off.)

These three essays do real counter-ideological work, exposing the constructed and far-from-”natural” nature of a few longstanding misconceptions in the teaching (and doing) of writing.

(Should we have read these guys during the week on Critical Pedagogy?  Hmm…)