Why Teach Style? A Review-Essay

Abstract

ion, and particularly the ability to move further up and down it within one paper.8 When students are going through a period of such cognitive growth, striving for a new range in their ability to form abstractions, their writing sometimes comes to be extremely clumsy, almost indeed terminally opaque, as in the following extract from a second-year Sociology essay: Certainly in Canadian society, conflict has done a lot to promote the many measures by ethnic groups to preserve their individual cultures. So far, in keeping with Canada's conservative nature, the results of group conflict have been encouraging and beneficial to society, taking the form of compromise and agreement through legal and governmental organizations. The possibilities for serious ethnic protest movements in Canada, are at present, very slim. Many barriers, including geographical position, language and religion to a consensus over all ethnic groups are obviously present, and almost inherent in Canadian society, but Canada has remained unified, at least in fact. Finding the absence of consensus in a society very unusual, Mildred Schwartz after doing a survey of Canadian society was forced to agree with McClosky when he wrote [at this point there is a 10-line quotation). As a further postulation, Schwartz suggests that the satisfaction of material needs and the provision of political stability provide alternatives to a high level of consensus in society. Perhaps Canadian society is only indicative of world trends today that due to diverse characteristics of society and the increased accessability of knowledge provided by the mass media, as well as actual attempts by many people to discover their own individual 'thing,' consensus has become something which very rarely characterizes any society; individual determinism has become a very important factor in societies today. Of course this student's writing would be better if she applied Williams' editThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:01:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms