Writing about writing—by the Write Source staff

Stepping It Up

This blog entry is in response to a June 6, 2008, article at The Atlantic.com entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” In the article, the author, Professor X, shares his thoughts and feelings about his latest teaching assignments.

As Professor X puts it, he is employed at a college of last resort. Some might find that turn of phrase amusing, and that he teaches in the basement at such a college—well, ha! ha!, it can’t get any worse than that, can it? (Actually, he teaches night classes at two colleges.) Maybe it’s the mood I’m in, but I don’t appreciate the cleverness, nor do I appreciate the tone of the article.
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Remembering English: One Student’s Voyage through K-12, and Beyond

Over the past weeks, the Write Source editorial staff has been reading and discussing excerpts from several classic books about teaching writing, including so far Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, Ken Macrorie’s Writing to Be Read, Donald Murray’s Learning by Teaching, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, James Moffett and Betty Jane Wagner’s Student-Centered Language Arts, Nancie Atwell’s second edition of In the Middle, and Donald Graves‘ Writing: Teaching and Children at Work. Our conversations have been rich, with each of us bringing to the table different insights into the texts. These are lively discussions by professional writers fascinated with the subject of how best to teach the craft they love.
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Google’s Mother Was a 2,000-Pound Mainframe

You may have read my other post about Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” but you probably have no idea how much that article frightened me. Carr wrote
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Writing and the Global Village

Alvin and Heidi Toffler—authors of such bestsellers as Future Shock, The Third Wave, and (my favorite) Creating a New Civilization—posit that human civilization has gone through several distinct stages, each culturally earthshaking. Humans started as hunter-gatherers, then settled as farmers, eventually underwent industrialization, and are now experiencing an information revolution. The Toffler’s premise is that each of those stages created a world of turmoil for its inhabitants, and that those who adapted most quickly to each new paradigm flourished, while those who held too tightly to the old system waned.

Note also that each of those revolutions has swept the world more quickly than the previous: The agricultural revolution has taken a few thousand years to spread, the industrial only a few hundred, and the computer age only decades. As a result, part of our modern turmoil is that some corners of the globe are coping with more than one of those revolutions at once!
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Feeling Somewhat Texty

In the Washington Post, Linton Weeks offers an entertaining account of the latest linguistic controversy: Whether text messaging is killing the sentence. Weeks quotes James Billington, a Librarian of Congress who fears that textspeak and abbreviated syntax are destroying the English language:

This assault on the lowly—and mighty—sentence… is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.

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