Good Writers Research Articles

Unspeakable Writing: Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas

unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort E. M. Forster, Maurice Why Speak of Lorrain Today? It is difficult, even today, to speak of Jean Lorrain without embarrassment. Those aspects of his life and works that appeared scandalous to his contemporaries, such as his openness about his homosexuality, his ostentation of any and all kinds of perversity, and his notorious bad taste, may seem to invite rather than repel current critical interest. (1) Nevertheless, even for a position that has revalued artifice, sentimentality, and vice, Lorrain's writing may prove to be unpalatable: his clamorous antisemitism, his vociferousness as an anti-Dreyfusard, his insistent misogyny, his approval of colonialism, and his concomitant reveling in the worst forms of late nineteenth-century Orientalism are almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of a permanent revaluation of Lorrain as a good writer. Why write of Lorrain at all then? Some previous attempts to revive interest in his work sanitizes it by presenting it as quaint: so, Philippe Jullian's biography, Jean Lorrain Cu le satiricon 1900, admirable as it is, tends to make Lorrain seem ready for a nostalgic and neutralized mass consumption, rather like the art nouveau that Lorrain himself relished. Other influential discussions of Lorrain, such as Mario Praz's in The Romantic Agony, turn Lorrain into a practitioner of art brut, a pathological writer who can be classified and contained within an established counter-tradition. For Praz, Lorrain's oeuvre is to be savored as symptomatology, and the disease is the man: Praz contrasts Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with Lorrain's best-known novel to the advantage of the latter because it supposedly bears witness to a profoundly and painful state of mind (345). Praz denigrates the inopportune decorative images that flourish in Dorian Gray, and he cites them as evidence that Wilde was as gr eedy and capricious as an irresponsible child (344). An abrupt transition to Wilde's putative cultivation of scandal and his second trial (344) makes it clear that for Praz style signals an author's sexual orientation. Pathological where Wilde is decorative, troubled where Wilde is irresponsible, Lorrain appears as nothing less than the homophobe's homosexual. (2) It is exactly between the twin closets of decoration and pathology--the Scylla and Charybdis of aesthetic homophobia--that reception of Lorrain's work has been divided. That both ornamentation and deviance function as markers of an erratic desire is clear from Praz's discussion of Wilde and Lorrain, as if the one metonymically supposed the other, no matter how seemingly opposed their modalities. That both Wilde and Lorrain were not only homosexuals, but also homosexual writers is not quite as apparent from Praz, although his treatment of both writers relies on the unstated knowledge of their sexuality. Recent gay criticism and queer theory has reappropriated and triumphantly reclaimed Wilde. Eve Sedgwick, Ed Cohen, William Cohen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Kopelson, and especially Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield have all forced a reconsideration of Wilde. (3) But despite the frequent linkage of their names and their texts (Lorrain, for example, inspired Wilde's Salome (4)), Lorrain remains unexamined and largely unread, perhaps partly because of his disastrous political allegiances. (5) Lorrain moreover occupies an anomalous position in the history of gay literature: while his sexuality was a secret neither to his contemporaries nor to us, his prose writing, for all its excessiveness, never really comes out. Thus in a great deal of writing about his writing, Lorrain can be maintained as the signifier of a free-floating homosexuality to which, then, an inevitably phobic signified gets ascribed. A striking example of what Lorrain has come to signify can be found in Michel Leiris's 1946 autobiography, L'age d'homme. …

Editor's Notes

Editor's Notes Shortly before we went into production with this issue of Fourth Genre, the Chicago Tribune (September 2, 2001) ran a feature story by cultural critic Julia KeUer on a new Uterary movement tagged with what she described as the "agonizingly oxymoronic" label "creative nonfiction." The essay, she explains, is being swept up by a sea-change of innovations. Once the most conservative and buttoned-up of Uterary forms, the essay is suddenly striking out into unfamfliar territory, making new claims, questioning old assumptions, and hanging out with a different crowd. To contemporary readers the new essay strikes the kind ofpose thatWaltWhitman took in the frontispiece engraving to the inaugural 1855 edition ofLeaves of Grass: saucy, cocky, irreverent, feisty, and nonchalant. And, like Whitman's contemporaries , lots offolks today are distressed and uneasy, as weU as intrigued, by the genre shift that is reshaping the essay. We at Fourth Genre welcome the attention. We like to think that we are playing a smaU role in the current redistricting ofthe Uterary genres. Co-editor Michael Steinberg along with Editorial Board member Patricia Hampl andThomas Lynch (interviewed in this issue) are quoted in the Tribune story. As responsible participants in the conversation, we'd Uke to respond to a couple of assumptions that color KeUer's take on creative nonfiction. First, the new essay is marked, KeUer points out, by a radical change in the writer's posture, affect, and voice. The "stately grace" and dignity ofthe traditional essay has given way to the "wit and irony," the "preening and posturing" and breezy contrivances employed by practitioners of creative nonfiction. If the old essay was aU turtleneck and tweed, the new essay has what KeUer caUs a "lamp-shade-on-the-head look" that sacrifices "earnest reflection" and "patient rumination" in favor of"wisecrack" and "bon mot." Moreover, creative nonfiction, KeUer continues, is messing with veracity, the epistemologica! bulwark of the traditional essay. Citing Joseph Epstein's viFourth Genre comment that the conventional essay is anchored in "the hard gravel offact," KeUer notes that contemporary essayists seem to prefer "the soft marshes of what the creative nonfiction crowd calls 'invention,'" something that would have unnerved essayists of old. The new essay abandons the sacred confines of fact, she implies, for the profane back streets of identity, self-exploration and discovery, imagination, and emotional or aesthetic truth. At Fourth Genre we feel neither emboldened nor constrained by the claims KeUer makes about voice and veracity. Having pubUshed hundreds of pieces of creative nonfiction, we tend to locate the contemporary essay somewhere between the alternatives that drive KeUer's argument. The work we pubUsh is sometimes graceful and dignified, sometimes flip and playful— sometimes factual, sometimes truth-seeking. The best of these essays reside somewhere in the gray spaces. The contemporary essay looks to us more tentative and complex, stfll evolving, and, as such, hard to pin down and explain. We tend to view the fourth genre as exploring the ground between truth and imagination rather than defying the traditional boundaries offactuaUty One thing we know for certain: there's an entire landscape between hard gravel and soft marshes, and there are many good writers occupying that ground, using new techniques, redeploying traditional ones, making discoveries, and revisiting old places. We take our subtitle seriously: Explorations in Nonfiction. We believe that a literary form ought to live, as Diane Ackerman says of the natural world, "as variously as possible." Creative nonfiction, to our way of thinking, is far more populist than it is revolutionary. We'U take the Walt Whitman of "Democratic Vistas" as our standard bearer. ? The work we've assembled for the current issue carries on in the spirit of Explorations in Nonfiction. Some of it is memoiristic and personal. Other pieces are literary, critical, and expository. These essays engage a variety of subject matters, ranging from the portrait of a grandfather richly grained with baseball lore to a "discourse on love in the information age." Some of the writers strike cheerful poses, wearing their subjects loosely. Others, knowing they are headed into painful territory, are wary, cautious, severe. Despite the diversity ofsubjects, sensibilities, and styles, aU the writers in...

The structure of writing processes as revealed by secondary task demands

This study investigates how working memory capacity may account for why better writers are able to coordinate mutliple subprocesses more easily than poor writers. Writing, while distracted by secondary task demands, offers one way to explore the importance of working memory to the structure inherent in the writing subprocesses. For the study, the author chose experiments based on the finding that good writers manage the simultaneous demands of writing subprocesses better than poor writers(Levy & Ransdell, 1995, pp. 767–779). Students composed essays while distracted by concurrent loads on working memory. The author found that when relatively minor demands were made on working memory, i.e., unattended and attended background speech, these variables caused a decrease in fluency, but had no effect on quality. Attended, but not unattended, speech reliably reduced average sentence length. A concurrent task of remembering six digits reduced fluency by nearly 50% also reliably decreased quality and sentence length. Resources which are relatively stable in the face of dual-task demands were allocated for the regulation of writing quality, sentence length, pause duration and location. The author found that better writers write longer sentences, pause for shorter durations and at clause boundaries more often than poorer writers. Competing tasks first disrupt the timing of writing and only impact quality when larger secondary task demands in working memory are required.

COMMENT

In 1998 the book The wealth and poverty of nations was published, written by David Landes, a retired professor in economic history from Harvard. Within a few months more than 50.000 hardcover copies were sold of this best-selling book. In that book, with its 544 pages, Landes tries to answer the question why in some countries and regions the economies are performing well and why others remain backward. Differences in economic performance are subsequently explained by differences in culture and religion. With the West- Europeans and their descendants in the US, Canada and Australia yielding the best performance, his answer is that the capitalist values and Calvinist religion are the main explanatory factors.1 In fact these are the old stories of Adam Smith and Max Weber, but now told by a good writer. Recalling the theme of our session, say ‘Economics within the context of Cultures and Christianity’, I expected a paper which would re-examine (and criticize) the Landes story from a christian philosophical perspective.

Prewriting, Planning, and Professional Communication

strategy is the same one the now-famous Lynn reported when she was subject thirty years ago in Janet Emig's landmark The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. The only difference, of course, is that Lynn was talking about outlining. Lynn's confession provided evidence to generation of teachers that outlining was an ineffective writing strategy, but I would never make the same claim regarding prewriting, in general, as result of my students' stories. Instead, permit me to introduce highly successful writer whose work is relevant here because, unlike my students, he would never pretend to prewrite, for he spends mind boggling 80 percent of his writing time in prewriting activities alone. As result, this writer can most obviously show our students by example that prewriting can be far more than getting started activity to be captured (either falsely or not) on single sheet of paper. Equally important, this writer writes proposals, reports, and correspondence in his position as transportation engineer in corporate office, so his processes and products are relevant in this EJ issue that contains several articles on workplace literacy. So who is this writer? His name is Kenneth Nelson, and he is the subject in case study conducted by Jack Selzer during what many people still acknowledge to be a golden age of studies (Root xviii). Unlike Emig and most other straight composition researchers at the time, Selzer wanted to study an experienced writer working naturally in nonacademic setting, and his results are still relevant today. In Kenneth, English teachers find good writer who-hold onto your class lists-does little or no revision. This sounds like heresy until we see the strategies Kenneth uses when he prewrites:

Reading Their World: The Young Adult Novel in the Classroom (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Their World: The Young Adult Novel in the Classroom Sid S. Glassner (bio) Reading Their World: The Young Adult Novel in the Classroom. Second Edition. Edited by Virginia R. Monseau & Gary M. Salvner. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2000 As recently as 1999, the Conference of English Education (CEE) of the NCTE engaged in some charged discussions seeking a suitable definition of young adult literature. To this writing, agreement on a single definition has not yet been reached. Some committee conversations went so far as to question the efficacy of defining the literature at all and, as a result, members of the CEE committee have largely agreed to disagree about defining young adult literature. Committee members, however, did agree on one thing. And that was that a book could be written describing the difficulties they encountered while pursuing answers to their questions about young adult literature. So into this milieu of intellectual tumult and academic confusion about characterizing young adult literature comes the second edition of Reading Their World: The Young Adult Novel in the Classroom, which attempts to develop a somewhat coherent system of thought about a subject still waddling in the mud of polemic. Although this text contributes little to moving the discussion out of the literary quagmire, it does offer, in spots, a few worthy elements. It is because of these elements, expressed with conviction and commitment, that the reader is sustained. However, there is an irony in these elements as well, an irony that clearly denotes the need for much greater intellectual and pedagogical penetration of the subject. Of the thirteen essays, five manage to give the book a bit of substantive texture. The essays written by Ted Hippie, Leila Christenbury, John Noell Moore, Virginia R. Monseau (one of the two editors), and Gloria T. Pipkin all contain passages that nourish the spirit of inquiry, affirm a sense of possibility, and provoke one to think critically about current practices in the teaching of literature and professional development. Hipple, in his essay on themewrites, "Yet possibly what most makes literature literature, what moves it from words on a page that we read to that which we return to again and again, is theme, the underlying philosophy embodied in the work, the view of the human condition it offers" (1). With such a comment Hipple invites the reader to consider one of literature's finest moments. However, in an effort to couple themes with particular novels, Hipple has short-circuited the more substantive aspects of his essay. Consequently, much energy was sapped from the piece. Leila Christenbury's essay connecting young adult literature with the classics thrusts upon us a number of practical educational concerns that in themselves have become "classical" pedagogical issues. For example, when Christenbury writes: "familiarity and tradition may be the central criteria for the continued use of the classics in secondary curricula. And, while it is not the most laudable aspects of the profession, it is undeniably true that many overworked English teachers do not continue to read widely beyond their own university education and find in the classics to which they were exposed as students comfort and an intellectual ease" (16). She reaches into issues that without resolution insure the denial of genuine literacy. But once again, one of the missions of the text, to provide teachers with categories and lists of books, has taken precedence over matters of substance. John Noell Moore's voice in his essay, "Interpreting the Young Adult Novel," illuminates literature's inherent capacity to delight, to deepen, to inform, and to enchant the senses. Beautifully orchestrated, Moore takes us through multiple readings of one text, Spite Fences. Throughout the essay, Moore emphasizes the extent to which students are deprived valuable textual experiences when braces are put on their literary encounters. Doing what good writers do, Moore ends his essay with the beginning of another one. He does this by quoting Paulo Freire and asking us to focus in on what Parker Palmer ( The Courage to Teach1998) talks about as great things. "Teachers first learn how to teach," quotes Moore, "but they learn how to teach as they teach something that is relearned as...

Why School Administrators Should Be Model Writers

When administrators put their ideas into writing, they produce a public record that continues to exist well past the time of its creation, Mr. Lehr points out. Because of this durability, administrator's paper trail should compliment rather than haunt its creator. ANYONE who has spent time in the public schools has probably encountered more than one poorly written letter or confusing memorandum from a school administrator. Anyone who has had that experience can readily empathize with the complaints of parents who are unable to understand a principal's letter or with the frustration of teachers who struggle to interpret ambiguous memo. It is clearly reasonable to expect administrators to be competent in doing the everyday writing that is a major component of their professional lives, yet many continue to struggle on without understanding of the most basic principles of good writing. The Problem School administrators must be effective communicators within their schools and their communities. More than this, they must also be role models for good writing. When administrators write for internal or external audiences, their work will be viewed as exemplifying their schools' standards for student writing. As part of their professional training, many administrators will have gone through undergraduate and graduate programs that stressed the importance of good writing, but these programs do not usually provide sufficient training to turn good administrators into good writers. To become more effective writers, administrators need to understand that writing involves a process of reflection and that good writing depends on a clear sense of audience and purpose. Although they may have logged considerable time in their college courses and may have done a good deal of writing there, administrators often have little training in the kind of writing needed for their daily administrative work.1 Consequently, when they sit down to compose the memos and letters that constitute their daily writing chores, they may find themselves relying on what they learned in high school and college English courses. But this experience is not usually helpful in preparing them to compose concise and carefully structured communications that effectively tell the story of their schools and school programs.2 An administrator's writing may reveal much more than the writer intends. As James Wycoff notes, Writing abilities are as visible as a person's wardrobe.3 What is said is important, but how it is said is equally important.4 The various audiences to which administrator's writing is addressed will form impressions of the administrator and of the school that might have far-reaching consequences.5 A First Step Toward Becoming a Better Writer For school administrators, important first step toward effective writing is to treat writing as a reflective process: a practical method for sharpening and clarifying ideas. One serious problem that often underlies poor writing is that many writers believe that writing is only a means of summing up what is known or what has been learned. Instead, writing can and should be a reflective process that can expand learning and understanding through the discovery and scrutiny of meaning.6 When writing is treated solely as the delivery of the results of information gathering, the importance of using the process of writing to discover meaning is lost, and the writer forgoes the benefits of purposeful reflection. Pamela Zeiser argues that writing must be treated as a deliberative process that focuses on an actively thought-about idea. This, she argues, allows writing to serve as a natural, dynamic mode of learning.7 When treated as a reflective process, writing offers the considerable advantage of allowing the writer to generate expanding base of ideas. In developing a position on complex issues, using writing as a way of working through the complexity is particularly helpful. …

Fine motor deficiencies in children diagnosed as DCD based on poor grapho-motor ability

A sample of 125 children from grades 4 and 5 of two normal Dutch primary schools were investigated regarding the incidence of handwriting problems and other fine motor disabilities. Handwriting quality was assessed with the concise assessment method for children's handwriting (BHK) and the school questionnaire for teachers (SQT). Two groups of 12 children each were formed, one group of good writers and a group of poor writers selected from the lower performance range. The latter group was investigated in depth by assessing general and fine motor ability using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (M-ABC test) and the Motor Performance School Readiness Test (MSRT). We hypothesised that poor handwriting is part of a wider neuromotor condition characterised by faster and cruder movements, lack of inhibition of co-movements and poor co-ordination of fine motor skills. To test the theory kinematic measures of drawing movements were collected on the flower-trail-drawing item of the M-ABC test. Moreover, the experimental group of poor writers received physiotherapy during a three-month period and was tested for handwriting proficiency after therapy and again nine months later. The results revealed that 34% of the group of 125 children displayed handwriting problems. The analysis confirmed that serious handwriting problems are accompanied by fine motor deficits. We suggest that in these children an enhanced level of neuromotor noise is compensated for by enhanced phasic stiffness of the limb system. This results in higher movement velocity and fewer velocity peaks. In the children who received physiotherapy the quality of handwriting improved.

Alice Munro by Coral Ann Howells (review)

YES,31, 200 YES,31, 200 space and on Atwood's revisionsof the conventions of popular romance, pastoral, Gothic, and classical myth, so that Canadian 'home ground' begins to look like 'foreignterritory'aswildernessrecedes into the spacesof a vanishedpast. In her opening chapters Roth goes over familiar ground as she retraces the traditions of English Canadian literary history and critical responses to Atwood's earlywriting,and it is in the centralchapterson the laterwildernesswritingthat the strengthof this studylies. Roth worksretrospectively,startingfrom the short story collection Wilderness Tips(i991) as the crucial point of collapse where the forest landscape 'tips'or slipsfrom its statusas Canada's definingculturalmyth. Looking backto the autobiographicalfiction Cat'sEye(1988), she tracessignsof a movement away from the northern wilderness as the geographical place of the narrator's childhood to the urban environments of adolescence and adulthood, where wilderness becomes fragmented or metamorphosed into the spaces of memory or painting, and where Toronto itselfbecomes a haunted urbanwilderness.Back one stage furtherto TheHandmaid's Tale(1985), the natural environment has virtually disappearedin theAmericandystopiaof Gilead, itselfthe consequence of ecological catastrophe. As Roth shows convincingly, in this environment where flowers are most often 'dried,printed, painted or embroidered' (p. I6o), the only naturalsites left to be managed by the totalitarian regime are women's bodies, where the potentially fertile Handmaids are 'a national resource'. Oddly, Roth does not mention the wilderness spaces on the border between America and Canada that constitute dangerousterritoryfor would-be escapees like the narrator,nor does she specify the location of Nunavit in the HistoricalNotes at the end, which is clearlya reference to the newly constituted Native territoryof Nunavut in Arctic Canada and wherewildernessstillexists. Roth's consistentemphasison spatialconcepts and related theories of the representationof space-time through narrativesof memory and fantasy offer significant insights not only into Atwood's recycling of the wildernesstheme but also, and perhapsmore importantly,into her constructionsof female narratingsubjectswith theirdistinctivedouble vision. This is a persuasivestudywhich with its close textual and intertextualanalysesof a group of Atwood's fictions would be very useful for student readers. However, Roth's wildernessargument does not look as new as she claims. Unfortunately for her, between the time when her thesis was written and the publication of this monograph, several studies of the topic of wilderness have appeared (Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (London:Macmillan, 1996), and W. H. New, LandSliding: Imagining Space, Presence, andPower inCanadian Writing (Toronto:Universityof Toronto Press, I997)). UNIVERSITY OF READING CORAL ANN HOWELLS AliceMunro. By CORAL ANN HOWELLS. (Contemporary World Writers) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 1998. xv + I84 pp. [35 (paperbound ?9.99). Alice Munro is a writerwho is widely admired,yet therehas to date been relatively little critical discussion of her work. As James Wood puts it in a review quoted by Coral Ann Howells, 'Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore tojudge her goodness [... ] her reputationis likea good address'(p. 137). Howells's book sets out to remedy this situation, offering a lucid and accessible guide which draws out the major themes and emphases of Munro's short fiction. Howells drawsattention to Munro'spreoccupationwith 'the other sideof dailiness', that is, with those vivid anticipations and fears that run alongside our apparently space and on Atwood's revisionsof the conventions of popular romance, pastoral, Gothic, and classical myth, so that Canadian 'home ground' begins to look like 'foreignterritory'aswildernessrecedes into the spacesof a vanishedpast. In her opening chapters Roth goes over familiar ground as she retraces the traditions of English Canadian literary history and critical responses to Atwood's earlywriting,and it is in the centralchapterson the laterwildernesswritingthat the strengthof this studylies. Roth worksretrospectively,startingfrom the short story collection Wilderness Tips(i991) as the crucial point of collapse where the forest landscape 'tips'or slipsfrom its statusas Canada's definingculturalmyth. Looking backto the autobiographicalfiction Cat'sEye(1988), she tracessignsof a movement away from the northern wilderness as the geographical place of the narrator's childhood to the urban environments of adolescence and adulthood, where wilderness becomes fragmented or metamorphosed into the spaces of memory or painting, and where Toronto itselfbecomes a haunted urbanwilderness.Back one stage furtherto TheHandmaid's Tale(1985), the natural environment has virtually disappearedin theAmericandystopiaof...

Rough Drafts without Tears

In facing their writing assignments, students in my introductory philosophy courses confront two primary obstacles. First, they often don’t have a feel for what sort of paper they are expected to write. They easily mistake an extended expression of opinion, or a replaying of assigned texts, for a philosophical essay. Second, although their abilities vary widely, most of them are not (yet) good writers. They have difficulties in both structuring and conveying their thoughts in written form. That students have these problems is hardly surprising. Most students do not read even nominal philosophy outside of class, and those who do read “popular” philosophy may, as a result, have even less of an idea as to how to present a good piece of solid reasoning. And although we may—often justly—bemoan inattention to the development of writing skills prior to enrollment at the university, we can hardly expect those skills to be fully developed by students early in their undergraduate careers. The first problem is addressed, to some extent, by simply having students read good philosophical works by professional philosophers, as well as by helping them to develop the skills necessary to understand such readings. Nonetheless, the gap between what students are likely to read (even in an introductory course) and what they can reasonably expect to write can be so large that assigned readings may be less helpful than one might hope. A student who doesn’t know where to begin in writing a philosophical essay might be helped very little by reading, say, Descartes’ Meditations or J. L. Mackie on the problem of evil. The second problem is most commonly addressed by direct writing instruction. I have found it useful in my own introductory courses to

The Significance of the fu in the History of T’ang Poetry

T'ang Studies 18-19 (2000-01) The Significance of the fu in the History of T'ang Poetry PAUL W. KROLL UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO Simplistic faith in a sequence of generic fI golden ages" in Chinese literary history would have us believe that the fu M passed its peak with the fall of the Han dynasty. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, with that view for the most part accepted uncritically as dogma, one can almost hear the sighs of relief breathed by successive hosts of students learning the rudiments of Chinese literary history, upon reaching the safe harbor of the mature wu-yen shih 1i r=t ~ in the early third century-no more to struggle with the daunting length,:syntactic difficulties, lexical rarities, Corinthian profusion of synonyms that characterize the Hanfit, now we can turn our attention to something we respond to more comfortably as real "poetry," and something much less taxing as well. But to snub the medieval (Wei-ChinNan-pei-ch'ao and T'ang) fit is to consign ourselves not only to wilful ignorance of what was during that period a prevalent and still vital genre of verse; it also guarantees a one-eyed view of the shih itself. Cicero says that poets vocibus magus quam rebus inserviunt (flare more devoted to words than to topics"). The truth of this helps to explain the frequency with which poets everywhere have commented on their craft as less a matter of creation than of discovery . It is, as Michaelangelo and Borges have suggested (and others in similar metaphors), most akin to the sculptor's work of This is an expanded version of a paper read at the national meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, March 2001, Chicago. In a few places it includes some revised sentences from my "Seven Rhapsodies of Ts'ao Chih," Journal of the American Oriental Society 120.1 (2000): 1-12, and "Poetry of the T'ang Dynasty (shih and fu)," in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. V. Mair (New 87 Kroll: The Tang fu freeing from the stone the image already contained therein, as though it were merely waiting to be brought forth. Hence the sense of "fulfillment," in both senses-of "'possession," if you will-that a good writer is aware of experiencing upon working a composition to its close: the feeling that the right words were somehow hovering "'out there," patient to be found, or perhaps even calling one to uncover them, through one or more attempts at inventio-that is, both invention and discovery. This is what, in our post-classical if not post-modern world, the Muse is: not so much a divinity breathing her song into the poet but rather the guiding, inchoate voice of a certain formulation of language pressing one to uncover it. The Muse is thus the active, internal forceone might say the te 1J~-of a language. Here is the real meaning of what we call tradition. Tradition is the registry, the certified catalogue, of the various sanctioned transcriptions, each in its own particular calligraphy, of those formulations. Now, much of the classicalpoetic tradition of China, from the Han through the T'ang, is embodied in the fu. Our too usual neglect of this fact owes, I fear, a great deal to the anxious desire mentioned above, that of avoiding the seemingly difficult (we might as well be honest about this). It also owes something to the obvious-so obvious that we often forget it-ambiguity of the word shih, confusing a particular form of verse with the domain of "'poetry" in general: the confusion, for instance, that sees the Ch'iian T'ang shih ~~~ as containing the (putatively) complete collection of T'ang poetry, rather than a collection of T'ang shih, and indeed some tz'u ~~.Or which correspondingly interprets the Ch'iian T'ang wen ~m3t as containing just T'ang "prose" and therefore dismisses the fu included there-as well as mounds of inscriptional verse that are in fact the artistic raison d'etre of genres such as the ming jg, tsan ~, sung i~, pei ~, etc.-from the concern of poetry "specialists." One...

An analysis of writing knowledge in EFL composing: a case study of two effective and two less effective writers

The present study throws some light into an area that has been relatively untouched: it analyzes how differences in the beliefs or metacognitive knowledge (MK) held about writing relates to differences in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing skills. Data were collected from four undergraduate university Spanish students, two good writers and two poor writers, enrolled in EFL classes at the University of Barcelona. They were first required to take an English test and write an argumentative essay to assess their language and writing proficiency. Subsequently, they were interviewed and required to think aloud as they wrote another argumentative essay. This study revealed a number of areas in which the knowledge of the two pairs clearly differed. On the whole, these differences pointed to a more appropriate and comprehensive view of the writing process, which they were able to apply more flexibly. In contrast, the less successful writers' MK was limited and inadequate. Furthermore, the case studies also revealed the clear relationship that exists between the MK of the writers and the strategies they deployed, underscoring the major role played by MK in providing a rationale for the learners' approach to writing and researchers with a more thorough understanding of the learners' writing process.

Sharing Teaching Ideas: A Book of Creative Geometry

Writing is an important part of the curriculum at Indian Hills High School. Students are encouraged to become good and effective writers by “writing across the curriculum.” Teachers are encouraged to have students write in mathematics and science classes, as well as in English classes. Writing in journals and creative-writing assignments allow students to sort out ideas, reinforce their understanding of concepts, or discover weaknesses in their understanding of concepts.

Ten common qualities of uncommonly effective writers

If rarity impacts value, then good writers are worth their weight in gold. Their works are happily received by editors and enthusiastically read by audiences. Technical writers have a knee up on more mainstream writers; they come to the table with heads full of knowledge. Their task is not to conjure plots but to vend information in a concise, precise, and readable manner. And yet the fraternity of truly good technical writers is thin because too many scientists are unschooled in what it takes to be in the inner circle. Good technical writers realize that both editors and readers have rights and expectations. They live up to both. Although they write with individual styles and about different subjects, they share common qualities that make them uncommonly successful.

Computer‐Aided Writing in French as a Foreign Language: A Qualitative and Quantitative Look at the Process of Revision

Currently little documentation exists on the writing strategies and habits of foreign language (FL) writers. This study was designed to observe, as unobtrusively as possible, the revision strategies of 5 students of French enrolled in a 1‐semester intensive intermediate college French course. The participants completed a two‐part writing task with the aid of the software program Système‐D (Noblitt, Solá, & Pet, 1987, 1992). Of considerable interest is the program’s keystroke tracking device, which records the lexical, grammatical, and thematic information that students access while writing. Analysis of the compositions, computer records, videotapes of writing sessions, and student responses to postwriting questionnaires provide a detailed picture of how and when the students revised in real time—with minimal impact on the writing process itself. Results showed that both the self‐reported good writers and poor writers engaged in the process of revising and that, as expected, surface‐level changes far outnumbered the changes to content. These findings suggest that linguistic concerns and lack of explicit instruction on revision and computer strategies impede the reviewing and reworking of texts.

Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud by Daniel W. Doerksen

REVIEWS Daniel W. Doerksen. Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud. Lewisburg: Bucknell Uni­ versity Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997. 181. $33.50 (U.S.) cloth. This very readable book is the result ofmuch thoughtful study and reflection. Professor Doerksen describes it as principally “a work of historical scholarship” (9), his aim being to locate John Donne and George Herbert (and selected contemporaries) within the political and ecclesiastical context of the pre-civil war seventeenth century, especially during the reign ofJames I. Doerksen’s wish above all is to remind us of the Calvinist pre­ disposition ofthe Jacobean church and to demonstrate the gen­ erous comprehensiveness that included such irenic and moder­ ate figures as the “representative” Herbert and Donne. The “anti-Calvinists,” however, were to wreck this peaceful accom­ modation, with William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury after 1633, the unsympathetic agent (with Charles i) of destruction. Doerksen displays an older Church of England, with its roots in the moderate Elizabethan Settlement, in opposition to the narrow and hectoring conformity enjoined by Laud and his followers. The book iscarefully organized through a sequence of eleven short chapters that seem like independent essays. There is a survey of the Jacobean church, with its “moderate confor­ mity”; a depiction of Laudian reform; a particularly informa­ tive chapter on preaching at St. Martin-in-the-Fields during the “pre-Laudian English middle way”; a survey of Herbert’s life and institutional connections; an exposition of predestination, and of the doctrine of the church or ecclesiology; and a fasci­ nating consideration of Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), preacher at Gray’s Inn (1617-35), author of the popular Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1630), a moderate conforming puritan with whom Herbert had much in common. The theme that unites these chapters is “conformity”—sus­ taining, scriptural, and preaching-centred, on the one hand, and provoking, non-scriptural,and liturgically-centred, on the other. Doerksen uncovers what he believes has for too long been con­ cealed in studies of the period. We must recognize, he writes, “that there was a non-Laudian conformist option in the church 207 ESC 25, 1999 of Herbert’s time, that the majority of conformist bishops and other leading clergy of the Jacobean years ... were Calvinist in theology and moderate in their attitude toward liturgical vari­ ations” (70). While Herbert loved conformity, he did not, like the Laudians, let outward form dominate his experience. In his conclusion, Doerksen asks rhetorically why some readers of his book might wonder why he is so eager to distinguish Her­ bert—and to a lesser extent, Donne—from Laudianism. But why, Doerksen answers, should anyone have wished to identify Herbert with the Laudians? Having reached this final question, which has resided im­ plicitly throughout the book, most readers should know the obvious and easy response. Doerksen has, in my view, convinc­ ingly presented his case for a moderate kind of “conforming” churchmanship in the early years of the seventeenth century, a kind of conformity typically expressed by Herbert and many ofhis immediate contemporaries. Perhaps Doerksen’s apparent need, however, to set one kind of “good” and generous confor­ mity against another kind that is “bad” and rigid leads to some overly broad and sweeping generalizations. Doerksen must be well aware of the tangled and overlapping views of this period, and the difficulty offinding one’s way through such a thicket of conflicting doctrines and attitudes. But the brief discussion of Richard Hooker, for example, is lightly sketched, mostly for the sake of dismissing him along with Lancelot Andrewes, whom Doerksen sees as proto-Laudian. He writes that “Hooker and Andrewes were good people and good writers who accomplished much but, from Herbert’s point of view, became sidetracked from the most important matters into controversy over things that were ultimately secondary, even to them” (100). What Herbert may have thought about thesefigures issurely a matter of some speculation; but he is not likely to have con­ signed them or their monumentally important works so casually as Doerksen does to intellectual irrelevance. Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (1997), with im­ portant essays by Bouwsma, Neelands, Collinson, and...

A Single Good Mind: Collaboration, Cooperation, and the Writing Self

Professor Johnson's paper: a critical review of David Copperfield. Don't talk about what you liked, don't talk about how you felt reading it, don't talk about how it's like other novels you've read. Just don't talk: the honor code prohibits that. All of which means:figure out what my Ichabod Crane wants, read the text his way, write his paper, type it, submit. I don't talk to anyone, although potential discussants abound. Down the hall, there's Terri, who has already aced the course; Jeanne, not an English major, but a good writer; Karen, usually stoned but smart, always seeing things a little cock-eyed (maybe it's the drugs, maybe not). I like the novel. I want to talk about it-about how it's like Great Expectations in surprising ways, about how Dickens doesn't seem to like women much, about how these novels seem to end in a mighty convenient way. Still, I'm dutifully silent-except for asking Jeanne the date of Dickens's birth and the number of novels he wrote.

What Makes a Good Writer? Differences in Good and Poor Writers' Self-Regulation of Writing.

What makes someone a good writer? To begin to answer this question, we compared the discourse knowledge and self-regulation of good and poor writers, as well as the quality and length of their final texts. Forty-eight junior-college students were given 50 minutes to write a text comparing Montreal (where they went to school) to another city of their choice. Results showed that poor writers were no more linear than good writers, and no less actively self-regulated their writing. However, good writers waited longer before beginning to write, and wrote texts that were more specifically comparative than did poor writers. Good writers also introduced fewer errors into their texts, more accurately evaluated the structure of their text, and produced longer texts of better quality.

Argumentatieve Teksten Leren Schrijven en Lezen Door Observeren

Couzijn (Couzijn, 1995; Couzijn & Rijlaarsdam 1996) showed that learning to write and read argumentative texts is facilitated by observation tasks. Compared with executing the exercises themselves, observing others executing the tasks proved to be more beneficial in learning and transfer. In this article, we report on a detailed analysis of Couzijn's data, exploring the different learning activities in the observation task. An analysis of pupils' observation tasks showed differences in the mean percentage of process-oriented elaborations. Central to this article is the question: which features of instruction lead to process-oriented elaborations? Some features are discussed: different formulation of instructions and differences in the object of observation. It turns out that in observing readers, pupils elaborated more on the reading process than on the writing process when they were observing writers. Another finding was that good writers stimulated more process-oriented elaborations than weak writers.

Pitfalls to Avoid in Conducting and Describing Scholarly Research

Authors frequently criticize editors and referees because they think the negative evaluations of their book or journal manuscripts are inaccurate, biased, or insufficiently justified. Some reviews are problematic or even unfair, although negative evaluations typically stem from real failures that could be eliminated with more care at point in the research and writing process. obligations of manuscript editors and referees are frequently discussed, but what are some of the responsibilities of authors? What are some of the pitfalls they can avoid to improve their chances for publication? A few pitfalls that I, as referee, encourage authors to avoid are discussed in detail by Earl Babbie, Mary John Smith, James Startt and William Sloan, and Roger Wimmer and Joseph Dominick, among others. pitfalls include: Careless writing Manuscripts must be error-free, to the extent that human beings can make anything error-free. Typographical errors, spelling mistakes, and grammatical lapses can cause a referee to question a writer's competency. One wonders about more fundamental research elements (e.g., the accuracy of literature cited) when an author is careless. An error-free manuscript does not guarantee a positive recommendation, but it does establish credibility and it does not make a referee suspect (and search for) inaccuracy. Writing that is rambling, wordy, unfocused, or pretentious can lead, sometimes unfairly, to a recommendation for rejection. This kind of writing could drive a referee to substance abuse: The literature that this writer reviewed seemed to suggest most clearly that the myriad of variables that various authors tried to identify and to measure were not the primary variables that one should study if one is to reach meaningful and valid conclusions about the phenomenon under scrutiny. This is typical of the thousands of bad sentences I have read over the years. author should simply state, The literature suggests researchers have studied the wrong variables. Editors and referees also are less than impressed with manuscripts whose authors do not observe the appropriate style; few enjoy spending an afternoon repairing someone else's footnotes, for example. And many dislike, or are offended by, sexist language. Most book and journal editors, in fact, specify in their instructions to contributors that sexist language must be avoided. Some authors contend that eliminating sexist language produces poor writing (e.g., a non-sexist manuscript will contain too many of those awful he or she phrases). poor writer might indeed have a problem eliminating sexist language, but I have read many good writers who do not. One frequently is able to replace he or she with the, or to use a plural noun and pronoun, as in, The students brought their books, rather than, each student brought his book. Writers must avoid at all costs, Each student brought their book. writer's intent is admirable, but the language usage is stupendously awful. Unspecified assumptions Major assumptions must be specified in manuscripts because assumptions can have a profound impact on many aspects of the research process, including the ways in which variables are selected and defined; research questions and hypotheses are posed; coding sheets, interview schedules, or questionnaires are developed; participant observers are trained; archival data are used; and results are interpreted. A study may well produce misleading or inaccurate results if a researcher assumes, for instance, that newspaper publishers accurately perceive the extent to which social control is imposed in their newsrooms and that there is no need to solicit the views of editors and reporters. Publishers, in reality, may not know or wish to admit that social control is imposed in the newsroom. I had a bright graduate student many years ago who assumed media were biased against his country and that U. …