Well I found Richard Lanham's book very difficult to read, so for the most part I did not like it. But I don't hate the book because it did provide useful teaching skills that I plan to use when I teach. Some parts were entertaining and some were boring. I think the part that was boring was the parts that I could not understant. I found it interesting that he was bias against text books because most teachers teach throughout the text books. I would have to agree on his view on how students are taught to write well formatted papers then writing what they believe in and expressing their ideas and thoughts. If teachers don't show students that they can express their ideas in writing then student will only know how to write formatted paper. Lanhams seems like a very intellegent man, but was his argument valid?
I believe future students will find this book useful because they can see his perspective in writing and compare his thoughts to others. Also, students can learn new information they did not know that Lanham's discusses in his book. I don't think this book was that awful, but if we analyzed the texted more into detail I would have got a better understanding.
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I don't think that this would be a good text for students to write in the future. I think that they could read certain parts of it maybe, like one or two chapters, but I think that it's sort of a waste to read the entire book.
ReplyDeleteI'm graduating college in a month and i'm also and English major. I feel like that if I, a seemingly intellectual person, can't understand Lanham's ideas, and more specifically, his writing style..that others won't either. I think that if we broke down the chapters into smaller parts, it might have been a little easier to understand.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the book got boring in the parts that we couldn't understand. I find that interesting because he's teaching about writing style, and obviously the parts that got boring in his book help to show that we should avoid doing the same in our own writing.
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