Nancy Coppola

This is a throwdown to the critics of Stanley Fish. Fish argues that college composition courses should teach writing and only writing, focusing exclusively on grammar, style, clarity, and argument. His critics, who also bemoan the prevailing poor writing skills of college students, say that teaching grammar without content leads to boring classes. Without movies, books, or contemporary culture to write about, students write vapid essays – like, what I did on my summer vacation. This is a fascinating exchange — one you should read — where Fish persuasively argues for “drilling students in the forms that enable meaning; and these are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought.”

However, it was the “vapid essays about summer vacations” that irked me as I returned to NJ and to NJIT. I left behind narrow country roads for the dusty grooved pavement of Route 280 East, still under construction since I last traveled it three months ago. I traded hummingbirds and Monarch butterflies in my gardens for butterflies in my stomach that always typify the first day of school for me. While not a Luddite summer, it was certainly a summer without many of the most common technological and worldly intrusions – no television, no traffic, no NY Times delivery.

I already miss the early morning sun on my back as I stand at the end of the dock with Kodi, our yellow lab, watching the clear river water for fish. But these summer memories instill me with a renewed sense of creativity. I look forward to the challenge that new students, new courses, and a new semester always bring.

I hope that your summer vacation has inspired you as well.

I have always been fascinated by housekeeping descriptions of famous writers — the places in which they write, the tools they use, what they eat and drink while writing. Raymond Carver, for example, talked about writing his short stories in a Laundromat while watching twisted skeins of laundry roll around inside a washing machine. And, thanks to a pointer from Tom Johnson’s blog,  I have just read  that that Gay Talese writes his reporting notes in the field on cut-up cardboard shirt boards from the dry cleaners.

You may know Gay Talese as a literary nonfiction author who chronicled  the inside story of  a Mafia family in Honor Thy Father . As an undergraduate journalism student, I remember him as a role model for The New Journalism, a movement in the mid 70’s identified by articles that were meticulously researched and with such vivid detail that readers were convinced they were reading fiction instead of journalism. Here is Talese in an interview “The Art of Nonfiction 2,”  Summer Issue of the Paris Review

as he describes his writing practice – “I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.”

In place of talent, he claims he has intense curiosity and takes his craft very seriously, interviewing, studying, taking notes. Sounds like characteristics of a good technical communicator to me.