What is good writing

what is good writing ? What Is Good Writing? Geoffrey J Huck 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huck, Geoffrey J., 1944– author What is good writing? / Geoffery J Huck p.  cm Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978–0–19–021295–7 (hardcover : alk paper) Fluency (Language learning) Rhetoric—Study and teaching Speech acts—Study and teaching Language and languages—Study and teaching Writing— Psychological aspects Cognitive grammar Psycholinguistics I Title P53.4115.H83 2015 808—dc23 2014041343 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Y N Contents Preface ix Abbreviations xvii Prologue part one | conceptual introduction Historical Background A Cognitive Approach to Good Writing 25 part two | fluency Constructional Fluency 47 Pragmatic Fluency 79 Narrative Fluency 102 Graphemic Fluency 125 part three | form and content Figurative Language 133 Surprise, Repetition, and Complexity 141 Verbal Art and Craft 157 Conclusion 166 vii viii   Contents Epilogue 168 notes 171 bibliography 185 index 201 Preface although trained in theoretical linguistics, I found myself a number of years ago teaching in and coordinating a professional writing program in a large public university As a neophyte writing program administrator, I was intrigued to discover that the teachers and scholars in the program hadn’t collectively settled on an answer to the question that serves as the title of this book Indeed, they seemed surprised that the question should even be asked, the prevailing attitude being that it’s natural for people to differ about what the “good” in good writing refers to, since it’s inevitably a matter of taste And at any rate, they felt an educator’s professional concern should be more about improving whatever skills students brought to class rather than worrying about something so abstract There were personal opinions, of course—some quite strongly held—and I was treated to lively discussions about types of pedagogy that might be more or less useful in the writing classroom I read articles in College English, WPA Journal, and College Composition and Communication (CCC) as an outsider, but with interest Composition scholars are certainly not the only people in the world interested in writing Teachers at all levels and in all disciplines inevitably are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the quality of writing of their students Educational administrators in public and private institutions, journalists, businesspeople, politicians—in sum, you and me and everyone else—all have a stake in writing to one degree or another because so much information in the world is communicated through it But those who have studied the process of writing in most detail fall generally into two different camps Composition scholars, along with rhetoricians and literary scholars, make up one of those camps The other camp consists of those who want to look at writing primarily through the lens of science ix 196   Bibliography Schild, Ulrike, Brigitte Roder, and Claudia K Friedrich 2011 “Learning to Read Shapes: The Activation of Neural Lexical Representations in the Speech Recognition Pathway.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 1, no 2: 163–74 Schmidt, Richard W 1990 “The Role of Consciousness in Second Language Learning.” Applied Linguistics 11, no 2: 129–58 Schutze, Carson 1996 The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology Chicago: University of Chicago Press Scott, Sophie, and Ingrid Johnsrude 2003 “The Neuroanatomical and Functional Organization of Speech Perception.” Trends in Neurosciences 26, no 2: 100–106 Searle, 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Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, by Tom Wolfe New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux ———— 2000 Hooking Up New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux Wong, Min Ney, Bruce Murdoch, and Brooke-Mai Whelan 2010 “Language Disorders Subsequent to Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI): Evidence from Four Cases.” Aphasiology 24, no 10: 1155–69 Woolf, Virginia 1925 Mrs Dalloway New York: Harcourt, Brace & World ———— 1927 To the Lighthouse London: Hogarth Press Ylvisaker, Mark 2006 “Self-Coaching: A Context-Sensitive, Person Centered Approach to Social Communication after Traumatic Brain Injury.” Brain Impairment 7, no 3: 246–58 Zunshine, Lisa 2006 Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel Columbus: Ohio State University Press Index Italicized page numbers refer to a table or figure AAVE (African American Vernacular English), 22 ABCDE exercise, 100–101, 114 ABC Linear form, 115–18 accommodation, 84, 111–14, 180n5 and literary complexity, 155–56 Aciman, André, 82 Ackerman, J., 166 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 22–23, 144 AES (automated essay scoring), 77–78, 180n74 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 22 agnosia, acquired auditory, 41 agrammatic aphasia, 100–101 algorithmic model (of cognition), 38–39 alignment, faulty, 61 alliteration, 149, 163–64 American College Testing program, 10 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 37, 43 Anderson, Richard C., 70–71 Angell, Roger, aphasias, 40–41, 100–101 201 apologies, 98 Aristotle, art, verbal, 157–65 aspect, grammatical, 163 assessment, writing, 9, 26–27, 174n10 Assumption of Total Significance (ATS), 158 audience, x, 15, 36, 65–66, 124, 168 and intentionality, 161 and literary complexity, 156 and Maxim of Quantity, 85–86 and Maxim of Relation, 90–91 and narrative strategies, 114 and relevance, 97–98 Austen, Jane, 72, 150–51 authorial intention, 181n12 See also intentionality autobiographies, 89 automated essay scoring (AES), 77–78, 180n74 Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen, 98 bbc.co.uk, 71 Beattie, Ann, 116–17 “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self ” (Walker), 84 202   Index “Beer Can” (Updike), 119, 142 belles-lettres, 164 Bellow, Saul, 83 bias, 29, 88 “Big Two-Hearted River” (Hemingway), 106 biographies, 88–89 Bitzer, Lloyd F., 35 Bjork, Robert A., 72 Blake, William, 158 Bloom, Harold, 175n32 Bloom, Paul, 76 bodily experience, xiv brain physiology, 179n63 brain plasticity, 40 Briller, Vladimir, 173n9 Broca’s area, 40–41 Brodkey, Harold, 69 Brown, Dan, 143, 165, 183n4 Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 63 canon, literary, Capote, Truman, Cara, Francesco, 94–95 Carson, Rachel, 68–69 Carver, Raymond, 84–85 Castel, Alan D., 72 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 144–45 categories, basic-level, 67 categories, subordinate-level, 178n32 categorization, theories of, 96 category recognition, 95 “Cat in the Rain” (Hemingway), 104 CCC (College Composition and Communication), xvii CCS (Critical/Cultural Studies), xvii, 14, 19 CG (Construction Grammar), xvii, 48, 177n16, 177n18, 179n64, 182n3 Chabon, Michael, 142 Chafe, Wallace, 103, 106–07 Chametzky, Robert, 177n8 Chandler, Jean, 75 Chaplin, Charlie, 108–09 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 22 Chekhov’s gun, 146 chiasms, 159–60, 163 choices in narrative strategy, 122–24 Chomsky, Noam, 51, 56, 63, 73, 177n9 clarity, 111 classics, literary, 7–8 Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Thomas & Turner), xiv Clemens, Samuel See Twain, Mark cognitive approach to writing, 19, 38–42 cognitive blends, 182n19 cognitive effort, 92, 95–96 cognitive neuropsychology, 40 Cognitive Principle (of Relevance), 91, 146, 161 cognitive science, x, xi, xiii, 38, 48, 91, 157 approaches to writing, xi, 19, 38–42 and literary complexity, 152 and taxonomical hierarchies, 66 cognitive stands, xiv Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 70, 169, 184n1 Coley, John D., 95 College Entrance Exam Board, 10 Collins Cobuild Dictionary, 180n72 Colomb, Gregory, xiv Coltheart, Max, 176n37 combination, constructional, 162 common ground, 105–09, 111, 124 and literary complexity, 153–55 and surprise, 141, 146 Communicative Principle (of Relevance), 91–92, 94–95, 139, 146, 161 community, discourse, 33, 166 competence, xii, xiii, 51–56 pragmatic, 99 complexity, 55 cognitive, 127 constructional, 155 literary, 133, 151–56 pragmatic, 111, 155 compositionist strategy, 25 composition studies, x, 14–15, 30, 181n2 and motivation, 33 composition teachers and scholars, 90 compression, literary, 84 Conflict, 178n30 connectionist model (of cognition), 38–40 Conrad, Joseph, 19 consciousness, introverted and extroverted, 103 consciousness-raising, 99–100 constructional complexity, 63, 155 Constructional Conflation, 56–58, 60, 77, 111, 113, 177n18 Constructional Conflict, 58–62, 76–77, 113 and figurative language, 139 and Overlap, 64 Index   203 construction function, 101 Construction Grammar (CG), xvii, 48–51, 94, 177n16, 177n18, 179n64, 182n3 purpose, 62 Constructionist theory of language, 19, 164, 178n25 constructions, linguistic, 158 context, 52, 76, 93, 97, 124 contextual effect, 92 and figurative language, 134, 139 and interpreting constructions, 78 and literary complexity, 155 and surprise, 142 contradictions, internal, 118 conventions, pragmatic, 98 conventions of grammar, xiv, 15, 17, 51, 54–55 Cooperative Principle, 79–80, 111 correction, 74–75 Coulson, Seana, xiv Cowley, Malcolm, craft, verbal, 2, 157–65 creative writing, teaching of, xi, 166 Crisp, Aimée, 95 Critical/Cultural Studies (CCS), xvii, 14, 19 critical thinking, 16 critics, literary, 180n11 cue validity, 67 CWPA (Council of Writing Program Administrators), xvii, 11 Daiute, Colette, 63–64, 76 dangling modifiers, 53 DaVinci Code, The (Brown), 142–43, 183n4 definite article ‘the’, 82–83, 105–07, 180n5 Dennett, Daniel, 56 Derrida, Jacques, 171n4 Development Hypothesis, 127 DeVoto, Bernard, dialects, 20–24, 34 Dickens, Charles, 70 dictionaries, 37, 65, 125, 180n72 direct tests of writing, 11 Discourse, Consciousness, and Time (Chafe), 103 Discourse Analysis, 103–05, 113, 181n3–82n3 discourse community, 33, 166 discourse processing, 181n33 disfluency, xiv, 36, 172n10 ditransitive pattern, 48–49 Dobrin, Sidney, 174n16 Doctorow, E.L., 30 Doerr, Harriet, 73 double dissociation, 40 doubling, 162 Douglas, Jacinta, 99–100 Dunbar, S., 173n9 dysfluency, 31, 172n10 dysgraphia, 41 dyslexia, 40–41 dyspraxia, speech, 41 Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Truss), 126 Ede, Lisa, 97 Educational Testing Service, 10, 31 Eich, Teal S., 72 Elbow, Peter, 30 electronic environments, 17 Elements of Style (Strunk & White) See Strunk and White (Elements of Style) Eliot, T.S., 73 Elley, Warwick, 70 Elliott, Norbert, 173n9 embedding, intentional, 152, 155 “Emperor of Ice Cream” (Stevens), 135–38 English complexity of, 63 Contemporary Standard Publisher’s, 127, 129 Early Modern, 127 English Patient, The (Ondaatje), 110 “entrenchment and preemption”, 179n68 error, performance, 51, 56 errors of punctuation, 129 ethnographic studies, xi executive function, 76, 99–100 problems with, 101 experimental pragmatics, 94–97 Expressivism, 14, 19, 33, 91 Fabb, Nigel, 127 factuality, 88 “Farewell to Arms, A” (Hemingway), 147 Fauconnier, Gilles, xiv Faulkner, William, 169 Feeney, Aiden, 95 Fillmore, Charles, xiv finger errors, 129 Fitzgerald, F Scott, 117 Flower, Linda, xiii, 166 204   Index fluency, xii, xiii, 15, 16–18, 24, 25 and art vs craft, 164 and cognitive models, 41 constructional, 79 in defining good writing, 29–30 and figurative language, 133, 139 narrative, 109 and patterns, 37–38 pragmatic, 79, 93, 97 and professional writers, 34–37 in speaking and writing, 75–77 in spelling and punctuation, 125–29 testing for, 42–43 fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), 40 “Fog” (Sandberg), 138–40, 158, 161 “Fog Cat Fog” (Ross), 157 formalists, Russian, 157 Fowler, H.W., frames, 105–09 “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing”, 14–15, 17 Frank, Anne, 72 Freeman, Margaret, xiii Frey, James, 89 Friedman, Bruce Jay, 142 Fulkerson, Richard, x, xi, xiii, 14, 174n11 Garner, Brian A., xi Garside, Roger, 71 “Gazebo” (Carver), 84 Gee, James Paul, xiii, 180n1 genres, 88 Girotta, Vittorio, 94–95 Givón, Talmy, 106 Goldberg, Adele E., 71–73, 75 Goldsmith, John, 182n9 Gould, Stephen Jay, 117 grading to the instruction, 11, 26, 28, 30, 78, 173n9, 174n9 Graham, Steve, 27–29, 78 grammar and grammars, 34, 47 representation of, x teaching of, 176n1–77n1 theories of, 48 Universal Grammar Hypothesis, 73 graphical strategy (in punctuation), 129 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 117 Grice, H.P., 79–80, 87, 89–91 and Relevance Theory, 93 habits of mind, 14 Hall, Nigel, 129 Hall, Robert A., Jr., 136–37 Halliday, M.A.K., 171n9 Hamaner, Ben, 180n74 Hamlet, 141 Handbook for Writers (Simon & Schuster), 53 hard-wiring hypothesis, 73–75 Hart, Betty, 69 Hartwell, Patrick, 177n1 Hawkins, Eric, 177n1 Hawthorne effects, 27 Hayes, John R., xiv Heath, Edward M., 35 Heffer, Simon, 53 Hemingway, Ernest, 19, 104–06, 147 hierarchies, taxonomical, 66 histories, 88–89 homonymic errors, 129 Hoover, H.D., 173n9 Horace (Roman poet), 8, 53, 173n4 Hunston, Susan, 177n1 Hurston, Zora Neale, 68–69 hypallage, 136 hypothetico-deductive method, 52 illocutionary force, 180n1 imaging data, 176n37 Immigrant, The (movie), 108 implications, weak, 137–39 “In a Double Life” (Aciman), 82 indirect tests See multiple-choice testing individual differences and good writing, 151 inferences, 136, 162 logical, 81–82 strong or weak, 135 information, old and new, 107–08, 113 information processing, 107, 176n37 information structure, 32 innateness issue, 179n63 Input Problem, 69–75 instruction, writing, x, 14, 30, 175n9, 176n1 intensity, 164 intentionality, 152, 161, 172n2, 181n12, 183n11 Intentional Stance, 56 Iowa Writers’ Workshop, irony, 87 Island Constraints, 61, 178n25 Index   205 Jacobson, Roman, 157 James, Henry, 113, 156 James, William, 171n4 Jay, Timothy, 96 Johnson, Mark, xiv, 134 Johnson, Samuel, 133 Johnstone, Barbara, 182n3 Jones, Casey, 174n9 Jonson, Ben, 8, 168 Jonsson, Anders, 28 Joshi, Kamal, 173n9 journals and journalists, 88–89 Joyce, James, 19, 143, 174n24 Kantz, M.J., 166 Kasper, Gabriele, 98 Keats, John, 72, 162, 164 Kellogg, Ronald T., 31 Kerouac, Jack, Koretz, Daniel, 1–2, 10, 173n9 Kornell, Nate, 72 Krashen, Stephen D., xiv Kremers, Marshall, 173n5 L2 learning See language acquisition, secondLakoff, George, xiv, 134 Lancaster-Leeds Treebank, 71 Lane, Anthony, 115 language figurative, 133, 141 literal, 133–34 literary, 127 ordinary, 127 poetic, 113 theories of, 176n1 language acquisition, 48 first-, 96 second-, 75, 98–99 “Last American Hero, The” (Wolfe), 148 “Las Vegas (What?) ” (Wolfe), 19, 147 late-bloomers, 73 lazy writing, 66, 69 learning strategies, unsupervised, 179n64 “Leaving the Yellow House” (Bellow), 83 Leech, Geoffrey, 71 Levi, Judith N., 86 Lexical Confusion, 65–66, 111, 113 Lexical Underperformance, 66–69, 113 Lexile AES, 180n74 Liberman, Mark, 71 linguistic presuppositions, 83–84 linguistics, x, 61 cognitive, 171n9 computational, 77 corpus, 36 neuro-, 181n33 Prague School, 157 linguistic strategy (in punctuation), 129 linguistic theory, 48 linguists cognitive, 134 descriptive, 52 and grammar, 48 structural, Lish, Gordon, 84 literacy, 16–20 localization, 39 locutionary force, 180n1 logic, 118 Longfellow, Henry W., 150 Longinus (Greek rhetorician), 133 Look Homeward, Angel (Wolfe), Lunsford, Andrea, 97 Lynch, Edward, 172n1 Lynch, Jack, Mahan-Taylor, Rebecca, 98 Mailer, Norman, 115 Man in Full, A (Wolfe), Manner, Maxim of, 80, 89–90, 93, 99–100 Matthew Effect, 70, 72 McCawley, James D., 52 McCormick, K., 166 McKool, Sharon S., 72 meaning, 61 Meaning and Relevance (Sperber and Wilson), 91 Megale, Donald M., 35 meiosis, 87 memory, short-term, 64, 76–77 memory, working, 64 metaphor, 87, 97, 118–19 in figurative language, 133–34 and hypallage, 137 and inference, 135 and mental processes, 139 metonymy, 97 Michigan Educational Assessment Program Rubric, 13, 17, 26, 43 Mill, John Stuart, 73 Million Little Pieces, A (Frey), 89 206   Index Milton, John, 184n1 Mimeticism, 14 mind, theory of, 19 mind reading, 152, 154–55 Modern English Usage (Fowler), Modistae, 171n9 modular theory of language, 39–40 Morgan, Jerry, 52 Morrison, Toni, 84–85, 115 Moss, Pamela, 174n10 motivation, 32–34, 43, 98, 166 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), 113, 152–54 multiple-choice testing, 10, 173n8 Myers, Dee Dee, 16–17, 175n28 “Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The” (Chabon), 142 Nagy, William E., 70–71 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 115 narrative, 102, 104 planning, 181n2 written, 109 Nation, I.S.P., 71 National Commission on Writing, xi National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), xvii, 14 National Writing Project (NWP), 14 native speakers, xiii, 34, 43, 52 and Constructional Complexity, 63 and Constructional Conflation, 56 native writers, xiii, 31 negative feedback, 74–75 neural networks, 38, 41 neurolinguistics, 181n33 neuroscientists, 40 New Criticism, Newman, Samuel Phillips, 8, 173n5 New Yorker, 119 New York Times, 53 NI (new information), 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 133–34 Niiler, Luke, 174n9 nonfiction, creative, 88 Nunberg, Geoffrey, 126, 128, 174n18 NWP (National Writing Project), xvii, 14 Oakley, Todd, xiv, 122 obscurity, 113 Occam’s Razor, 55 O’Connor, Flannery, O’Hara, John, 52 OI (old information), 107 “Once More to the Lake” (White), 120, 121, 145 Ondaatje, Michael, 110–11, 139 opinion essays, 89 Orwell, George, 9, 148 Overlap, 63–64, 178n30 Oxford Collocations Dictionary, 180n72 Paradise Lost (Milton), 184n1 parallelism, infinitival, 164 pattern recognition, 95, 146, 150 patterns construction, 48, 71–72, 160–61 and fluency, 37–38 Peck, W.C., 166 pedagogy, ix, 19, 174n16 and complexity of English, 63 composition, x and graphemic fluency, 125 rules-based, 65 Pellum, Geoffrey, 142–43 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Narrative Scoring Guideline, 12, 26, 43 performance, 51–56, 177n9 Perin, Dolores, 27–28 perlocutionary force, 180n1 personal essay, 33 Persuasion (Austen), 150 Pinker, Steven, xv PIR (professional intuitive rating), 35–36 poetic language, 109 poetic license, 111 poetry, 127 “Politics and the English Language” (Orwell), Pope, Alexander, 73 Popperian idealists, x postmodernism, xii, 7, 133–34, 171n4 “Potter’s Field” (White), 149 Power of Reading: Insights from the Research (Krashen), xiv Practical System of Rhetoric, A (Newman), pragmatic difficulties, 100 pragmatic function, 101 pragmatics, 98 Prague School of Linguistics, 157 predication, faulty, 61 predictability vs uncertainty, 183n13 prescriptive rubrics, 17 Index   207 prescriptivists, 9, 15, 51, 53, 93, 173n4, 174n19 pomposity of, 174n18 Princess Bride (movie), 80–81, 152 processes, writing, 16 process models, 27–28 prodigies, 72 professional development, 28 psychologists, 9, 134 Pullum, Geoffrey, 174n18 punctuation, 125–29 purpose constructions, 62 Quality, Maxim of, 79, 87–89, 93 Quantity, Maxim of, 79–87, 90, 93, 99–100 raters, 182n1 rating, professional intuitive (PIR), 35 Ratio studiorum, 172n1 readers, novice, 151 reading, xiii, xiv, xv and motivation, 169 and vocabulary, 76 reading, avid, 30–31, 43, 70–71, 122, 166 behaviors correlated with, 72 Reading to Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process (Flower et al.), 166 register, 20–24 Relation, Maxim of, 80, 90–91, 99–100 relativist critique, 171n4 relevance, 123, 143, 162 and art vs craft, 164 and literary complexity, 156 Relevance, Cognitive Principle of, 91, 146, 161 Relevance, Communicative Principle of, 135, 137, 139, 146–47, 161 Relevance Theory, 19, 56, 91–94, 96, 139, 182n3 and art vs craft, 162 and audience, 97–98 and the Cooperative Principle, 111 and figurative language, 134 and intentionality, 161 and literary complexity, 156 and logic, 118 and narrative fluency, 102 and prediction, 177n8 and repetition, 141 and surprise, 146 reliability, 18, 25–29, 173n9, 174n9, 174n10 interrater, 2, 6–7, 172n2, 172n3, 172n4 repetition, 104, 146–51, 163 Research in the Teaching of English, xi rhetorical axiology, 174n11 rhetorical knowledge, 15, 16 rhetorical strategies, 155 rhetoricians, 9, 91 Rhetoricism, 14 rhythm, 147 Rich, Adrienne, 162, 164–65 Ricoeur, Paul, 134 Rimbaud, Arthur, 73 Risley, Todd R., 69 Romantics, 133 Rosch, Eleanor, 66–67 Rose, Debra J., 35 Ross, John R., 61, 157–62, 171n4 rubrics, 7–8, 26, 28, 173n9 analytic, 29 and fluency, 35–36 and scoring, 78 for testing fluency, 43 rules, 51–52, 55, 173n7 failure of, 61–62 and fluency, 69 of punctuation, 128 of spelling, 125–29 of thumb, 174n19 Russian Formalists, 157 Safire, William, xi Salinger, J.D., 144–45 Sandberg, Carl, 73, 138–40, 158, 161 Sandmel, Karin, 27 scenes, 105–09 science, ix vs art, xi philosophy of, 51–52 positivist view of, x science, cognitive See cognitive science scoring, essay, Sedaris, David, 73 Seitz, James, 134, 137, 139 self-coaching, 100 Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Pinker), xv Shakespeare, William, 145, 173n7 Shankland, Rebecca K., 33 Sharmis, Mark D., 180n74 Shawn, William, 174n24 208   Index “Shooting an Elephant” (Orwell), 148 sign language, 40 Smiley, Jane, 70 Smith, Sara W., 108–09 Sonata form: ABA, 119–20, 146, 159 “Song of Hiawatha” (Longfellow), 150 Sound of Music (movie), 115 speakers, native, 31 specialization, 39 speculation, 87 speech behavior, 21 speech input, 69 spelling, 125 Sperber, Dan, 91–95, 97, 134 on Communicative Principle, 162 on “Fog”, 138–40 on hypallage, 136–37 on inference, 135 on irony, 140 on relevance, 143, 161 Spiral form: ABCABC, 120–22 standards, community, 173n9 statisticians, Stein, Gertrude, 19, 174n24 Stein, V., 166 Stevens, Wallace, 135–39 Stoics, 171n9 Stones for Iberra (Doerr), 73 storytelling, 102 “Strangers” (Morrison), 84, 115 strategies, narrative, 114–22 Strategy Instruction, 28–29 Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write And Why It Matters (Heffer), 53 structural alignment, 61 structure, 61, 104 Strunk, William, 8, 19 Strunk and White (Elements of Style), 4–5, 53, 55, 89–90, 111, 173n7 on punctuation, 127–28 Stubbs, Michael, 104–05 style, 52 effectiveness of, 37 manuals, 129 measuring, 10 writing, xiv Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Williams), 111 stylistics, 171n9 superfluency, 20, 164 surprise, 104, 141–46 and repetition, 147, 150 Svingby, Gunilla, 28 Swift, Jonathan, 8, 173n4 symbolic model (of cognition), 38–39 TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), xvii, 99, 101 teaching to the test, 11, 26, 28, 30, 174n9 Tender Buttons (Stein), 19 tense, grammatical, 163 test developers, tests, standardized, 10 Thomas, Francis-Noel, xiv Thomas of Erfurt, threeing, 162–64 Time Magazine, 183n4 Tobin, Lad, 33 TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), 31 TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), 31 Tomasello, Michael, 32–34, 73–74, 179n67, 181n26 and Communicative Principle (of Relevance), 97 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 111, 113, 155 Troia, Gary A., 33 Truss, Lynn, xi, 126 truthfulness, 88 Turner, Mark, xiv Twain, Mark, 22, 144–45 twoing, 162, 164 Ulysses (Joyce), 19, 143 uncertainty vs predictability, 183n13 Universal Grammar Hypothesis, 73 Updike, John, 2, 19, 52, 119–20 and art vs craft, 164–65 “Beer Can”, 119, 142 usage panels, 43 validity, 6–7, 18, 25–29, 78, 168, 173n9, 174n9 value, theories of, x van Geyzel, Leonard C., 137 verbs, marked, 164 voice, grammatical, 163 voice, writing, 14 Index   209 Wade, Shari L., 100–101, 115 Walaszewska, Ewa, 96 Walker, Alice, 84 Wallace, David F., 174n18 “Weekend” (Beattie), 116 Weinreich, Max, 22 Wernicke’s area, 40–41 White, E.B., 8, 19, 120, 122, 145–46, 149 and repetition, 150–51 on Tom Wolfe, 174n24 Why We Read Fiction (Zunshine), 152 Williams, Joseph M., xiv, 111 Wilson, Deirdre, 91–93, 97, 134, 177n8 on Communicative Principle, 162 on “Fog”, 138–40 on hypallage, 136–37 on inference, 135 on irony, 140 on relevance, 143, 161 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 12 Wodehouse, P.G., 136 Wolbers, Kimberly A., 33 Wolfe, Thomas, Wolfe, Tom, 2, 19, 147–48, 164–65, 174n24 Woolf, Virginia, 111, 113 and literary complexity, 152–56 words and word families, 71 WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, 16, 17, 35 writers, aspiring, 102, 111, 166, 168–69 and narrative strategies, 114, 122 and punctuation, 128 writers, difficult, 151 writers, fluent, 156 writers, native, xiii, 31 writers, professional, 34–37 writing cognitive approaches to, xi, 19, 38–42 creative, 102–03, 129 defining good, 29–31, 151, 168, 172n9 theories of, 14 writing centers and programs, ix, 166, 173n9 writing culture, 33 writing instructors See instruction, writing Writing Program Administrators, Council of (CWPA), xvii, 10–11 writing systems, 126 Zunshine, Lisa, 152–54 [...]... linguistics, or composition studies is either assumed or required My simple answer to the question What is good writing? ” is that it is the writing typically produced by a writer who is recognized as a good writer by other good writers That definition of good writing, of course, will pull no weight unless powered by considerably more precision The terms good writing and good writers” come with broader... of Writing Program Administrators National Council of Teachers of English National Writing Project Professional Intuitive Rating Traumatic Brain Injury what is good writing ? Prologue obviously, those of us who have a professional interest in writing need to be clear about what we mean when we say a piece of writing is good But even among people whose business it is to identify good writing there is. .. This has left contemporary theorists little to talk about with students who are simply looking for concrete advice about how to become good writers 8  What is Good Writing? It is true that, alongside the classics, classically oriented writing instructors have always had an arsenal of epigrams about the practice of good writing to fire off in their classes, as if these might possibly clarify what good. .. term “fluency” in place of good writing, although by fluency I do more or less mean good writing and vice versa While the concept of fluency in writing does have a history in composition studies, my definition is meant to be operational.5 That is, it is entirely possible (if rarely done) to canvas fluent writers to determine their judgments of the writing of others To make this easy, I simply assume... argument is obviously a paramount criterion for acceptance.4 If educators at every level can’t decide what good writing is, what does that say about their efforts to instill good writing practices in their students? Looking at the problem from a different perspective, consider the popular conclusion of many a teacher of creative writing that writing cannot be taught.”5 Flannery O’Connor, a certifiably good. .. well-known professional authors What counts as good writing in the context of a high school assignment on citizenship and of a New Yorker short story will not be the same But within any genre, no matter how widely or narrowly defined, there are certain to be differences of opinion among readers about what rises to the level of good. ” Does this mean that what makes for good writing is merely a creature of... the writing business who are willing to say that it is The evidence notwithstanding, those of us who teach and write are compelled, not only by what we see but also by what seems to amount to an article of faith, to believe that there really is such a thing as good writing, that it exists independently of personal taste, and that it is provably different from bad writing But if we are going to insist... compositionist discussions As a linguist and cognitive scientist, I consider it essential to discuss those features strictly within the context of a coherent theory of language The most important reason for taking a cognitive science approach in studying writing is that one can hope to provide empirically based answers to the kind of issues that Fulkerson raises Because the definition of good writing. .. 1, I will briefly discuss previous approaches to good writing that have brought us to our current position Composition studies teachers and scholars, who undoubtedly know this history well, may safely skip this chapter After this historical overview, I will introduce in chapter 2 an empirical perspective, the cognitive approach, which appeals to the operational definition of good writing that I mentioned... funds Indeed, decision-makers in government and our large writing interest groups appear woefully ignorant of the discoveries of scientists who routinely research the cognitive foundations of language This is not to say that there is anything like a single “cognitive science perspective” about writing Cognitive science is a large and heterogeneous field enlivened by all the usual disagreements and