Blog #1

Blog #1
After reading Kitchen Tables and rented rooms: The extra curriculum of composition by Anne Ruggles Gere I came to the conclusion that her main argument is not in what one writes, but how one gets to the process of writing. I believe that this piece for the most part is directed towards educators and towards people that make any efforts in teaching “how to write”. I can tell that she is directing this piece towards educators because she repeatedly talks about “how well” we are teaching students how to write. Which brings me to a quote from Eubanks and Schaeffer’s article; “First, the writing style of composition research risks being called bullshit because it often has the timbre of abstruse literary criticism or of social science. Second, Composition has taken up disciplinary writing as an important area of study and thus implicitly endorses it. It probably does not help that writing studies has often focused its attention on the rhetoric of science; that simply enlarges the number of suspect academic texts. Third, one major consequence of studying disciplinary writing has been the abandonment of the abstract ideal once called “good writing” ( Eubanks and Schaeffer 374) After reading this passage it makes sense why academic writing can be skewed to a more research based composition; thus losing “good writing”. This reminds me of what the Gere article was saying about how academic writing isn’t formulated to create a situation where literary criticism does not exist. Under my impression both articles are stating that “correct” writing is almost impossible to accomplish, yet “bad” writing is easily judged and accomplished because it is the way “we’ve” taught it. After reviewing another classmate’s response I noticed that their quote was a perfect representation of what both of these articles were trying to explain. “IF academic writing is bullshit, then bullshit is what we teach” (Eubanks and Schaeffer 374) this to me is can be a translation to the entire overview of both articles; that our education system and what educators are teaching is what supplements the teaching of “bullshit” and what makes it acceptable in our society as writers. Eubanks and Schaeffer’s article refers to literacy in the sense of why literacy is the way it is, and why “we” have let it become a complete line of “bullshit lingo.”