NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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| Quote (stevestory @ June 11 2014,11:57) | | Quote (timothya @ June 11 2014,08:24) | Denyse O'Leary explains her understanding of language: | Quote | The current pretense is that “science” can teach people to write better.
"The literary scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas have identified the stance that our best essayists and writers implicitly adopt, and that is a combination of vision and conversation. When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation."
Rubbish. As a writing teacher of some years of experience, I would say that we can’t “teach” people to be good writers, for the same reasons as we can’t “teach” good character. We can be guardian angels and discourage harmful habits, of course, but the actual sources of good writing are not illuminated by the sorts of fatuous claims made by Darwinians. You can’t write what you can’t live. |
Pardon me, but how do people learn to use a common language (well or poorly) if they can't be taught its rules? Perhaps Denyse should consider the possibility that a language is actually defined by its rules (rules that she says that she is unable to teach).
Or if the rules of "good writing" can't be codified (a strange notion to hold in the face of several centuries of dictionaries and style guides), perhaps her notion of "language" is deficient. |
Of course, she's a pretty shitty writer.
"You can't write what you can't live?" The fucks that even mean? |
That Asimov built robots, that Heinlein travelled throughout space (often promiscuously), that Arthur Clarke indulged in magic, etc.
Despite being immersed in it, the woman is incapable of distinguishing fiction from field reports.
Someone should lock her and Gary in a room together for a 'televised discussion of grammar, syntax, and semantics, with examples' and broadcast the result on the surrealist channel.
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