The Great American Writing Block

By Thomas C. Wheeler

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670348392
• ISBN13: 9780670348398
• Release Date: August 1979
• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 20.0" x 20.0" x 20.0"

Customer Reviews

EMPOWERING

I am disappointed to find this book out-of-print. The following are excerpts from the first chapter, The Writing Crisis: "The writing and reading crises are too widespread among people of varying backgrounds to put the blame on television alone or primarily." "...wherever they begin to write steadily and seriously, Americans encounter a subtle psychological barrier in the name still used for the practice of reading and writing - English. Our language is indisputably American - distinctive not in its grammar, when correct, but in its idiom and brisk pace. The student, young or old, faces a forbidding title for the tongue he is to write." "If American literature were more consistently read in our schools, it might exercise some authority over student writing. But English is not only the nametag for composition courses; English literature is still the specialty of most teachers in colleges and high schools. Though American literature has come more into favor in the classroom, it is still a body of work most students never meet." "Teaching American might bring better results than teaching English; and the least our professors should do is to call the language American English, as some already do, or call it the American language. Teaching writing - because writing is inevitably self-expression - is always touchy, because the student's ego is at stake and is easily offended. How terrible, then, to ignore his national history by giving him an English bath." "The language of the street will never write an essay, but the ear of the good writer is tuned by it. Students of writing, however, are usually drowned in vocabulary lists. They are not thought to have an ear or a language of their own. They think they must use big words, and their writing becomes, predictably, tedious and impersonal." "In telling students to forget their natural speech, teachers ask them to forget everything, for their voices contain far more than slang. Under that academic prohibition, speech can never rise through the mind. In the speaking voice lies the miracle, the beginning of writing. Even the illiterate, when they talk of something they care about, perform feats of grammar and thought - by the sentence, by the paragraph." "Self-expression, in spite of our difficulty with the written word, still proves as fundamentally American as cutting down cherry trees." -all excerpts from the first chapter, The Writing Crisis, from The Great American Writing Block by Thomas C. Wheeler