Teaching Writing In Writing Course

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 365
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he aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Merrell Shoe (Qtd. in Danner)

What would Fish say about whether we should be advocates for the party of "the reality-based community" against the party that would replace it with their own fatal fantasies I really have no idea how Fish might respond to my questions, and I would be open to being persuaded by his response. But his failure to consider such questions at any length is surely "a hole in his reasoning ...
... here." An even more gaping hole is left by his failure to say anything about how the very kind of academic deliberation on political and moral issues that he prescribes and practices here, or the kind of questions that I raise in response, could be centrally incorporated into the liberal arts curriculum, individual courses, and pedagogical practice—particularly in English. All his support of studying analytic skills, "coherent and persuasive" argument, and "the canons of argument and evidence" leaves us rhetoric scholars nodding, yes, yes, of course. And yet, the sum of Fish's attention to the teaching of rhetoric, and particularly argumentative writing, as the academic discipline in which his prescription for academicizing political argument might best be embodied, or to the long history of the academic study of political rhetoric and possible ways of returning it to a central place in the humanities as one means of reversing the universally-lamented decline of political literacy in America, amounts to —zero. I find this failure to champion a revival of the critical study of political rhetoric especially disappointing for someone with Fish's influence as a theorist, administrator, and public intellectual.

Worse yet, Fish's only direct discussion of writing instruction comes in a disastrous ten-page sub-chapter titled "A Radical Proposition: Teaching Writing in Writing Courses," which his editor should have deep-sixed. It is based on a course Fish taught at, which he introduced by telling students,'"We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas yours, mine, or anyone else's. Merrell Sandal We don't have an anthology of readings.