The John McCain As a Freshmen Writing Student?

Steve Krause, a former prof of mine at EMU, has an interesting commentary about John McCain using quotes out of context to bolster his claims about Obama as a shady terrorist. Here's an interesting excerpt from his post. I encourage you to read the whole post though:

Besides the obvious and rather desperate smear McCain is trying here, a tactic that seems especially ugly given that the world economy appears to be ending, what bothers me personally is the bad freshman writing mistake that McCain is making here. I’ve seen plenty of students who take this tactic, cherry-picking quotes in order to make a point no matter what the evidence they are quoting really says. In other words, if McCain was a first year composition student and he handed in a paper about how Obama is a terrorist with this claim about Ayers, I’d probably circle that line “Obama lied about him just being my neighbor” and write something like “What is the full context of this quote, John? Do you really think that was the intent of your source? Is this the full story? It sounds like you’re twisting the words here.”

The Worst Writing Contest

A large historical debate in writing studies (tho I'm not sure how much rhet/comp scholars continue to debate this in our recent disciplinary scholarship) is the idea about teaching grammar--or any type of writing--in context. Basically most research and scholarship in writing studies calls for the need to teach students to write for real audiences and real purposes (read Because Writing Matters, published by the National Writing Project in 2003), and that grammar should be taught within the contexts of students' own writing or real writing situations.

I stumbled upon this article about the worst writing contest. Participants were asked to submit a horrible opening sentence to novels. Some of these sentences were submitted:

"'Toads of glory, slugs of joy,' sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words."

"Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater -- love touches you, and marks you forever."

I guess this article could serve as real life example for the importance of not only writing good opening sentences (whatever good means), but also, the significance that grammar plays in people's judgments when we write. I'm not going to take the time and point out the errors--not quite sure if the previous examples are more reflected by issues of stylistic choice than issues of 'error' (if you're that nerdy you can do that yourself), but I will say that using this example of how confusing syntax (and I think it IS confusing) may limit readers' understanding and influence their judgments of a piece. I think using 'real' examples is much better than scribbling 'awk' in the margin.

PC