I'm somewhere in the middle.

When I started reading the second section of the Williams book, I thought he was going to give us some summaries of various approaches to teaching writing. I think I this assumption was only half true. Though he did give us the types of modern rhetoric, their key aspects and the history behind them, he also really seemed to push writing across the curriculum, didn’t he?

It is funny but I actually knew that Williams was going to mention Elbow somewhere within the upcoming pages. When I got to “Romantic Rhetoric” (58) and read the description Williams gave for romantic rhetoric, “reliance on the imagination, subjectivity, freedom of thought and expression, idealization of the individual, a search for individual “truth,” and rejection of rules,” (59) I thought, “oh man, that’s Elbow.” He really is kind of a rule breaker isn’t he? Funny enough, Elbow was quoted two pages later and multiple times thereafter.

I found all of the Elbow readings interesting but always felt there was something missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I think Williams kind of brought it together for me. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with romantic rhetoric. He thinks that in some cases it can be helpful, especially for a struggling writer, but there needs to be something more. I would take it one step further and say that all students could benefit from romantic rhetoric or Elbow’s way of “writing without teachers” but I don’t think it is enough either. Williams says, “…they have a professional obligation at least to try to meet society’s demands for writing instruction” (67). Though we need to be expressive and learn to let our words flow, we also need to learn how to write within the boundaries of our professions so we do have to learn to at times, be outlined and organized with our writing. I’m not totally sure yet what Julie’s tactic is here. She obviously gave us two writers with completely different writing ideals. I’m hoping that this is to fuse the kind of extreme ideas of the authors into an even more effective way or writing and teaching. I guess we’ll see…

I am absolutely not saying that I am a complete Williams supporter. I was kind of taken aback by how suddenly he really showed his enthusiasm for writing across the curriculum. I do believe that the WAC model would work, particularly in high schools, if implemented throughout the country correctly. How is this ever going to happen? I also think that WAC needs to be implemented along with more open forms of writing like journaling or you are never going to be able to reach all children.

On page 68 Williams says, “Practicing self-expressive writing or journalistic writing would not be helpful if a person had to write a lab report-and vice versa.” I know we talked about this in class and there were mixed opinions on the helpfulness of regular journalistic writing when it comes to things such as labs. When we talked about this I decided that I did believe it would be helpful because it would be a sort of practice. If you practice letting “the juices flow” then all types of writing would somehow be easier. I guess I’m kind of reiterating what we already discussed but I think it all kind of ties in together…


This is getting kind of lengthy, but I am really just wondering about what the class thinks of his stating that “voice” has no place within academic writing. I had a kind of strong reaction about this one, but the more I thought about it, the more I kind of agreed (even though the statement bothered me). I’ll be looking forward to our discussion on Wednesday!