But while I disagreed with a few things, I was struck by her idea for the commonplace book. In designing the assignment we are turning in tomorrow, I had thought of something similar: students were to take a chunk of well written text, copy it for a few sentences, then begin to write on their own. The goal was to have them get into the crafted sentences of professionals and then take over with their own voice. I scraped it since it seemed difficult to justify and poorly planned out. But here, Micciche has a very similar idea in her commonplace book. I love that students have to hand write these sentences down and that they also have to reflect on them. Students are active readers and writers in this activity. I think it can also encourage the students to include writing in their own fields and begin to understand how to construct a proper sentence for a lab report or marketing plan—or whatever it is that non-humanities folks do.
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* Here’s a clunker:
“The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the thankless effort to discipline the viewer).”
That’s courtesy of Fredric Jameson in his 1992 Signatures of the Visible. It actually won the “First Prize in the Worlds Worst Writing Contest” in 1997. Despite this claptrap, Jameson can actually be a good writer. It is a shame he “wrote” the monster you see above.
Exactly the example that I was thinking of and the commonplace book is a great idea. My assignment asks students to ape another writer's style, too. I recently read the essay that your commonplace quote comes from and I really liked it. Though I wonder if you adapt David Foster Wallace's style well? It seems like he would be very uncertain about a phrasing like "be a good writer" and I don't remember if he uses ironic quotation marks very much or not. :)
ReplyDeleteI would go further. I think some theorists have used poor writing and grammar to obscure their point... purposely. I think they've used jargon as a means of maintaining cultural capital. (did I just use jargon?). Admittedly though, some theorists I've encountered are actually saying something that is simply too complex to put in basic terms. It is hard to use lagnauge to talk about itself. Derrida, generally a terrible read and tedious--almost offesnively so-- is actually saying something. I stand by that. There was a philsopher Harry FRankfurt (Princeton) who wrote a book. I read it in one sitting because it rang pretty true. Its title: "On Bulls**t."
ReplyDeleteHe had another one called "On Truth" that is actually better though... hehe.