I’ve read about a quarter of Ken Macrorie’s Uptaught, and I like some of the sentiments he expresses. For example, he gives an example of how a textbook might start:
If you are a student qho desires assistance in order to write effectively and fluently, then this textbook is written for you. (7)
Macrorie describes this:
That language has no tongue in it. No ear behind it. And no sense of audience. The student instantly perceives that the expression “who desires assistance in order to write effectively and fluently” is walking on stilts. And so he learns the style. Must be what the professor wants. And the grade-school and high-school teacher are among the students of the professor in graduate school. They go back to their pupils with a clear idea of what is needed to prepare youngsters for the higher education. (7)
The academic tongue tought in Freshman Composition encourages students to write the “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you told ’em” essay (8). A student of his offers him the term Engfish, “a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors’ and administrators’ communications to each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are almost never ‘attached to things,’ as Emerson said they should be” (18).
At this point, I was totally with Macrorie. Out with the Engfish! Out with the jargon! Out with the crappy academic prose that bores the piss out of everyone and offers no surprises. I don’t want to be told what I’m going to be told in an essay, thank you Mr. Academic.
In his next section, “Discipline,” however, Macrories loses me. This is not because he offers bad student writing as models. In fact, Macrorie writes of a student’s published work, “Never before had my students written anything alive and honest enough to be dangerous. I was going to have to reat them as potent” (27). This was exciting to read, but was followed by personal narrative that didn’t write against anything, that didn’t show criticism, that didn’t show as much analysis as I think is necessary. I enjoyed reading many of the student narratives Macrorie offers, but don’t believe they are appropriate for Freshman Composition (if we are going to have the course). A creative nonfiction class, perhaps. A high school course, perhaps. But, like Bartholomae, I want my students learning criticism, and I want students writing dangerous texts that are dangerous because they challenge authority and structures, not because, as is the case with Macrorie’s student, she breaks patient confidentiality.
Macrorie, Ken. Uptaught. New York: Hayden, 1970.
