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Teaching Writing
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I don't know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at le
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― Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
― Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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I sometimes tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen.
And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects, and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he
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