writing

Claire Evans interviews author Ursula K. LeGuin. It's mostly about LeGuin's outspoken opposition to the Google copyright grab:

Universe: What do you want to happen to your books after you die?

UKL: I want them to be available, I want cheap paper editions of them, I want them to be continuously downloaded in forty different languages, I want them to be read, I want them to be argued about, I want people to cry over them, I want unreadable dissertations written about them, I want people to get angry with them, I want people to love them.

I suppose I have a few readers who don't know that the "K" is for Kroeber, Ursula LeGuin being one of the most accomplished offspring of a famous anthropologist, whose books carry the imprint of that pedigree.

It's that time of year again, when students all over the country are facing their first writing assignment. I always encourage a bloggy style -- concise, journalistic, and thesis-driven.

Well, I don't even manage that ideal myself a lot of the time, but here's some useful writing advice from Copyblogger. First, "Do long blog posts scare away readers?". Well, they don't scare away mine, but I can always use suggestions for how to punch things up (or, like overleavened dough, down).

So I highly recommend the follow-up, "How to write with a knife". One piece of advice I like:

2. Cut the first paragraph

...Try cutting the first paragraph or two from your post and see what happens. You may find a much more powerful opening.

That technique would work wonders for more than half the student papers I grade. I always underline the thesis statement (or at least the best facsimile of one I can find) and an awful lot of the time, it's there at the beginning or end of the second paragraph.

There are six more recommendations at the link, and I can see my students in every one of them. (Not to mention myself).

Since I've already contributed to bellyaching about student writing assignments, it's only fair to point to a Wired article that says students are getting better:

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame....

Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Maybe Twitter will help with composing 140-character thesis statements?

College classes are starting around the country, but writing assignments haven't been submitted yet. Time to brace yourself -- Stanley Fish blogs about what college writing courses are teaching:

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I teach several "writing across the curriculum" -type courses. The horror stories are a little overblown -- I'd say at least a fourth of my students start out able to write a thesis statement. Hey, that's something!

Ann Althouse links to Kurt Vonnegut's "How to write with style,", which deserves to be linked.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.