Danielle Koupf
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Lex Runciman, 1991

10/30/2014

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Another pleasure, a recurring one though its frequency is unpredictable, lies in finding some accurate phrasing. This phrasing need not be particularly felicitous or pleasing to others; what makes it a source of pleasure is its accuracy. It fits, no, it accurately embodies some thought (however small) which had up until that moment not been verbalized. When it appears on screen or on the page, it clicks into place with a rightness which seems, even if only momentarily, unassailable. So eventually sentences begin to pile up, and sheer quantity becomes a source of private hopefulness, an indication that something is getting made; something is beginning to assume a separate physical presence.

Lex Runciman, "Fun?" College English 53.2 (Feb. 1991), p. 161
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Mina P. Shaughnessy, 1977

10/23/2014

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To revise a sentence a writer must have a way, a place, a strategy for breaking into it, but beginning writers tend to experience their sentences as unmanageable streams of words which, once set in motion, cannot be turned back. Thus injunctions to revise or reword or even proofread passages often produce merely neater copies of the same sentences, not because the student is recalcitrant but because he does not "see" the parts within his sentences that need re-working. He sees no seams nor joints nor points of intersection--only irrevocable wholes.

[. . . ]

As an extension of speech, writing does, of course, draw heavily upon a writer's competencies as a speaker--his grammatical intuitions, his vocabulary, his strategies for making and ordering statements, etc., but it also demands new competencies, namely the skills of the encoding process (handwriting, spelling, punctuation) and the skill of objectifying a statement, of looking at it, changing it by additions, subtractions, substitutions, or inversions, taking the time to get as close a fit as possible between what he means and what he says on paper.

Errors and Expectations, 1977, p. 78-79
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