The articles assigned, You Can’t Teach Writing by Elizabeth Wardle, and Looking For Trouble: Finding Your Way Into a Writing Assignment by Catherine Savani, oppose each other. Wardle talks about how there’s no way to teach someone how to write even if you’ve had years of practice. She believes this notion is impossible because everyone expects something different out of writing. You can learn how to write one way in a specific class but when you get to another one you’ll just have to follow those new expectations. Grammar, punctuation, and formatting are all the basics we learn but they’re man-made anyway and if you go to another country, their rules would be different. I agree with all of this to a certain extent. Her way of ‘not’ teaching someone how to write is to just learn the audience you’re writing for, what they like, their expectations, etc. But isn’t that still a way of teaching someone how to write? By telling us to learn how other people would like our writing, and to conform to their expectations, is still telling us what to do with our writing. I get her point but it kind of becomes a paradox. I do like how she thinks there’s no such thing as good or bad writing because it is subjective at the end of the day just like every other medium.
Savini thinks that the key to writing an essay is to figure out the problem. That everything in life requires integrative thinking which was summed up by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (a quote from her article that I really liked). I don’t have much to say on this but it gave me a lot to think about like, “Is this true? Has every essay I’ve written really looked for a problem?” She walks you through how to do this in four simple steps. One, noticing what the prompt is asking you to do. Two, articulating a problem and all the details you’ve found. Three, bringing fruitful questions, and four, identifying what is at stake in regard to said problem. I don’t know if I’d use her approach all the time, it seems confining, but it’s definitely one of those things that I take what applies to me personally and leave what doesn’t.
Truthfully, I can see where both women are coming from. My opinion? You CAN teach someone the foundations of writing, the writing that holds are language together and allows us to communicate through written word. BUT, there’s no such thing as good or bad writing, there are easier ways to write an essay, like looking for the problem, and writing is subjective depending on what’s for. Another great resource for this topic would be https://the-active-voice.com/2012/07/25/theres-no-such-thing-as-good-writing/.
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