Those writing teachers...

Referring to a past post, Primary and secondary education can be so misleading, there's more that I want to add to it.  And this time it's a word from my fabulously genius professor of my History of Rhetoric class.

This is what she says about teachers teaching us senseless writing:

Advice on Writing

By Trish Roberts-Miller

Much advice on writing that you've been given is lore—that is, it is passed down from teacher to students (who go on to become teachers repeating the same lore) without being checked against reality. When people started doing real research on how people actually write, they found that effective writers break a lot of the rules that lore hands down. This discrepancy between the advice that teachers give and the practices that actually work puts students in several binds.

First, teachers sometimes require students to do things that are actively harmful to the effectiveness of a paper (e.g., requiring that the introduction end with a thesis—most teachers are perfectly satisfied with a thesis question or hypo-thesis). Second, teachers often mis-describe their own standards. So, for example, teachers say that correctness is tremendously important to them, but study after study shows that quality of argument is actually much more important than grammatical correctness (what happens is that readers don't notice errors in well-argued texts).

My advice on writing is grounded in what practices actually work for writers, so it may contradict much of what you have been told, but my point is that much of what you have been told is not very helpful. While the following is written with our paper assignments in mind, my hope is that it will be helpful in lots of writing situations you face. The short version is: when it comes to writing, be flexible in your writing processes, start early, make sure you understand your rhetorical situation, and set reasonable expectations...

Click here to read her entire post.