Ken Macrorie: A Review Essay

Abstract

Engfish. Freewriting. Fabulous realities. I-Search. The Third Way. These are Ken Macrorie's legacy to students and teachers of composition. Like all words, they have a history. They generate debate, testing and revising our assumptions about teaching. Sometimes people also misuse them, quoting them out of context and changing their meanings. Yet, the publication of Searching Writing: A Contextbook (Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1980), his sixth and most recent book, invites us to examine his meanings, his definitions, and to reflect on the kind of teaching Macrorie encourages. Ken Macrorie has spent some forty years trying to understand the power of the language. Although his first book, The Perceptive Writer, Reader, and Speaker (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), appeared just as the 1960s began changing people's views of American education, Macrorie's love for language and respect for those who use it well predate the 1960s by more than twenty years. To regard Macrorie's 60s English as an anachronism, too intense and too personal for today's practically minded, job-oriented students, is to misunderstand his work and its importance. We can learn much from a man whose writings reveal forty years' experience as a perceptive student, a vulnerable teacher, and a truthteller. Macrorie, born in 1918 in Moline, Illinois, tells us in his books that his mother was a librarian and his father, who loved to recite Shakespeare, worked for a farm-implement company. Macrorie grew up with parents who, although they had not attended college, liked books. For editing his high-school yearbook and earning the second-highest grades of any boy in his class, he received a two-year scholarship to attend Oberlin College. There he almost lost the scholarship when his grades slipped to a C+ average. He endured awesome one-hour voices lecturing from platforms two feet high, and he moved through the streets and buildings of Oberlin largely unperceiving, stunned by foreignness (A Vulnerable Teacher [Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1974], p. 2). Although he tried to be a