Thoughts on Organization :: Writing Education Essays

Thoughts on Organization "We learned about thesis and antithesis and five paragraphs and the whole bit, and learned to do it faster and faster. We repeated it in just the same way you throw basketballs at hoops over and over until you're good at it....All this indicated that I was a 'good writer' and I and teachers both probably believed I really was, and strictly because of this motor skill they'd trained me in." Dave wrote that in an e-mail discussion about theme writing. It made me wonder what the actual guidelines were for the so-called "Official Style," and what, if anything, was wrong with its formula. After all, this is what Universities demanded of us on a quarterly basis. If the scholars and the academe found it to be the standard, what could be wrong with it? I had done it, been good at it. I could turn out one of the "official" papers in a two hour time frame and get an "A". Big deal. Didn't that make me a good writer? What else is there? So I read Strunk and White's version of The Elements of Sty le to find out exactly what I had been doing while fulfilling assignment after assignment. Not that the subject matter was all that entertaining, but couldn't they have spruced up their writing with a little creativity, a little humor? I was so bored, I had a hard time wanting to pick the book up once it had fallen from my bored hands. Ah Ha! I do believe I had inadvertently stumbled upon the result of "Official Style" writing. It stifled the creative, humorous, and personal tendencies that I, and most creatively-intended people, personally look for in a piece of work we would like to tag as interesting. My thoughts then wandered to what the non-official style would set for writing guidelines. Would it be a writing revolution? Would it swim circles around Strunk or would it merely allow more flexibility while still holding Strunk's words as truth? Would I find out that what I had previously written and considered a brilliant paper was actually a regurgatation of someone else's work. And worst of all, would it be as boring as Strunk? Naturally I knew I would find my answer on MCMorg's homepage and bookshelf. So I dug around a little in Aristotle, Finnegan's Wake , Nevin Liab, and our previous reading assignments.