Shen, Fan. “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition.” From College Composition and Communication 40(4). 1989.

Requirements of English composition have been an “uphill battle to recapture “myself.”

“Learning the rules of English composition is, to a certain extent, learning the values of Anglo-American society.”

Rule # 1 in English composition: be yourself. Based on values such as individuality. But in China, “self” and “individualism” have negative connotations.

To write, s/he “knew that I had to be myself, which actually meant not to be my Chinese self.”

English composition and the writer’s interpretations of underlying value system. For one example, the topic sentence:

In English “logical system”: symbolic of the values of a busy people in an industrialized society, rushing to get things done. Get to the point.

In Chinese composition: embodies the values of a leisurely paced rural society. Peel the layers of the onion.

Chinese “pictorial logic” vs. Western “verbal logic.”

Can a teacher “design exercises sensitive to the ideological and logical differences” between cultures?

An incident of American businessman present his host with gift of cheddar cheese, not knowing that Chinese generally don’t like cheese. Composition teachers should not be afraid to give foreign students English “cheese,” but to make sure to hand it out slowly, sympathetically, and fully realizing that it tastes very peculiar in the mouths of those used to a very different cuisine.

Calkins, Lucy McCormick. “Making Meaning on the Page and in Our Lives.” From The Art of Teaching Writing. Heinemann, 1994.

Teaching as an art. “To teach well, we do not need more techniques and strategies as much as we need a vision of what is essential.”

One important facet of learning to write: the Ss’ ability to perceive themselves as authors. Also, deep involvement and seeing our words reach an audience.

Authorship starts with awareness: James Dickey defines a writer as “someone who is enormously taken by things anyone else would walk by.”

She writes, “We grow a piece of writing… by noticing, wondering, remembering, questioning, yearning.” As Anne Morrow Lindbergh says, “writing is more than living. It is being conscious of living.”

Writing not a process of recording details but of making significance with them.

Writing about life is “holding a rusty tin can in [your] hands and declaring it a treasure.”

Theodore Roethke: “If our lives don’t feel significant, sometimes it’s not our lives, but our response to our lives, which needs to be richer.”

Memories of times when she has “begun with something small, and seen significance emerge on my page.”

“Revision for me, then, is quite literally a time to see again.”

“When I wrote the first edition of this book, I saw writing as a process of choosing a topic, turning the topic into the best possible draft, sharing the draft with friends, then revisiting it… writing is not only a process of recording, it is also a process of developing a story or idea.”

Writing begins with noticing. “When writing begins with something that has not yet found its significance, it is more apt to become a process of growing meaning.”

Humans have a “deep need to represent our experience.”

John Cheever: “When I began to write, I found this was the best way to make sense out of my life.”