In very broad categories, these are idealized versions of the statements I want students to make (and this got totally away from me, but it seemed productive, so I kept going):
Foundations
-We are all born writers, born with every ability it takes to write well and to continue learning to write better.
-Writing is a forming practice, an inventive art that cannot be reduced to formula or recipe but that is always subject to judgment.
-Because writing is a practice, it must be practiced regularly to be learned.
-Because forming inventive arts are inherently difficult, writing also requires motivation.
-Writing always enters an ongoing social conversation of some kind, one that has its own conventions and ways.
-Writing offers the distinct advantage that any particular performance of it can be revised, rethought, and refined over a potentially infinite amount of time by a potentially infinite number of collaborators before that performance goes out for judgment.
Audiences
-Because it requires motivation, effective writing arises best out of some desire to affect the thinking of another human reader--or if not out of the much more difficult ability to write as if one wanted to do so, using extrinsic motivation.
-Readers approach a writing with some existing motivation to read, so an effective work of writing must respond to that motivation in ways that sustain or increase it; and doing so requires understanding readers and readers' contexst for reading.
-Social conventions can be modeled in sample works, but because every such work has a unique context, the goal must be to understand how the model works in its context, not simply to copy the model.
-In most "social conversations" at which composition aims, we strive to lead readers from familiar ideas through a reasoning process that ends up attempting to settle something that most readers thought was unsettled or unsettle something that we thought was settled.
-Readers follow such reasoning best if it is staged in logical series of apprehendable chunks.
-Readers follow such reasoning best if it is presented so that the parts obviously belong together and obviously follow one from the other, but the more that is managed by thinking and arrangement rather than by overt signals, the better.
-Readers follow such reasoning best and most willingly if the sentence style strikes a good balance between familiar ease and stimulating freshness.
-Writing at its most effective joins ongoing conversations in ways that win writers more prominent places in the conversations, join more prominent conversations, and change those coversations in ways desired by the writers; and those conversations ultimately become human history and destiny.
Reflections
-The main hardship of a writing class is that each instance must start all over from the ground, and so in some sense it never gets any easier.
-The main benefit of a writing class is that over time we become able to do increasingly difficult things with writing.
-The main lesson of a writing class is that we can generally produce better writing in the end than we thought we could in the beginning.
-By the end, each work of writing generates its own context, and the richest such contexts can be extraordinarily enjoyable experiences--that end.
-Whether for better or worse, every such context for a particular writing must be left behind--and grieved, according to its character--so that we can start the next one from its own ground.
Forms
-At every level of text, writing that has more shape will succeed over writing that has less.
-The most successful shapes will be uniquely suited to their content and context.
-In most writing for which composition prepares us, shapes move us from the simple and familar to the complex and new.
-In most contexts, "genres" arise that offer formats useful for ordinary purposes; and we should learn them and use them for those even while understanding their functions and limits.
-In most contexts, a paragraph is a mental "handful" of information that hangs together in a way that readers can summarize and "apprehend" before going on; the more advanced and up-for-challenge the readers, the bigger their "hands."
Sentences
-In most contexts, a sentence centers on a main action taken by a main "character," on which we can elaborate, usually after the main event; by default, once that event and its elaborations end, a sentence should also end; and when in doubt, we should err on the side of assuming that a sentence has ended (and yes, I'm being intentionally funny about that; har har).
-Most elaborations that come before the central event should locate us briefly in time, place, or idea.
-Most elaborations that come within the central event should concisely "redescribe" the main character to add the most vital information about that character--but only if there is no other good place to put that information.
-The best reason to change that order is if one of the elaborations presents more familiar information that helps set up the less familiar main event.
-The other good reason to change that order is to position the thing about which you need to elaborate at the end of the opening portion of the sentence, so that the elaborations closely follow it.
-The most effective elaborations concisely redescribe whatever comes right before them, using new terms and information to expand the reader's understanding of what has come before.
-The other good elaborations show some kinds of causal or logical connection between the first event and some other event.
-Coordination is the easiest elaboration for writers to use, and thus writers must constantly challenge ourselves to ask, first, whether it is the best form of elaboration for our readers, and, second, whether we have connected the parts so clearly that readers cannot miss the nature of the connection.
-Whenever a word refers back to some other word in any way, the nature of the reference must be utterly clear to even a careless reader; consistency of form between the two words goes a long way toward making that connection.
-Punctuation marks all have meanings, and it is better to try to learn their meanings than to try to learn all their "rules"--particularly in that published and professional writing constantly displays that we pay people to write despite their sometimes flagrant violation of punctuation rules. The period ends an event; the semicolon is a soft period; the colon is an equals sign; the dash is a wild card; the parenthesis is the back of an open hand on one side of the mouth; ellipsis means something has been left out that the reader does not need; a comma is an "oh, wait, let's add this/oh, by the way, I just added that"; a question mark says "I don't (or want to pretend that I don't) know, you tell me"; the exclamation point is a clear sign that somebody is trying to get out cheap instead of finishing the job, which is okay if the reader really can finish the job, but then why bother starting it?
-Humans have not yet mastered time travel; be alert to the temptation to shift to past, present and future based on your immediate needs and desires despite where you originally started. But the mind is a time machine; be alert to your power to shift your own and your reader's focus deliberately to any chosen place on the timeline of experience, so long as you let us follow what you are doing.
Words
- ack, I can't even get started on words. Way past time to get to other things.
