Online Book Club: *The Mind of the Maker* Chapter 3

UPDATE:  Well, guess what I saw last night?  Alec Guiness in *The Horse's Mouth,* about a quirky artist. It's kind of a comedy, in that dark sophisticated 1950's/1960's way, with some definite madcap shenanigans (destruction of a beautiful apartment in the name of "art").  But what's applicable to this discussion is one point when the artist regards a mural he's just painted, for which he had all kinds of vision--the raising of Lazarus--and he says something like, "Well, that's not what I had in mind at all."  Where was the problem?  In the Idea, in the Energy, in the Power?

Here's a link to the movie on Amazon Instant Video:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A5IZHDC?ie=UTF8&ref=oce_digital

11-17-12
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I'm a little discouraged that my last week's post is pretty lonesome, that I'm just talking to myself. [Update: I realize I didn't leave my proper link to last week's post on Cindy R.'s last week's post!  That's fixed now. How embarrassing.]

But to get ahead of myself, Sayers would say I'm a blogger whether anyone's reading my blog or not, or even, praise God, whether I get my blog post written or not!  (See p. 42.)  In any case, I'll plug along. I sometimes feel I can hold on to an idea only long enough to make a quick comment before my I.Q. plunges again.  Maybe it's my age.  In any case, this is another installment in the ongoing project of Ordo-Amoris.  

Sayers tells us that God, complete unto Himself as the "well-spring" is not manifest without a creature to witness the Creation. Makes me think, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"  That circles back to the poet idea above, from p. 42.  God is Creator eternally, even before we had a Creation.

p. 35:  "Those who [in disputing about God strive to transcend the whole creation] are more mischievously and emptily vain than their fellows." (Augustine)

p. 36  Mathematicians and artists have a way of seeing things that allows them to get outside their environments far enough to be able to describe them (dimensions and things).

p. 39 Sayers says that a work is always consistent with its nature.  In the power, though, what do we do with the critical theory of our time--well, of the last century--that says the work exists unto itself, or only in the mind of the reader, never mind what the author intends?

She talks a lot about how the works exist in the mind of the writer as whole beings well before they begin to be made manifest in the Energy/Activity. But I have experienced having a germ of an idea and then seeing where it might be going as I develop it in writing. I've read of many novelists working that way, too. Would Sayers say they just didn't know everything that was already in their heads before they got it out?   She also says, though, on p. 40, that we must have the Energy/Activity in order to have the idea known to others AND OURSELVES. If it already exists in the mind, why must it have expression on paper in order to exist?  Or is the Energy manifest in our minds before the translation of words on paper?  I get the feeling she's pushing her analogy too far in both directions by changing "Energy" to "Activity" and thus making it more practical and concrete AND saying Power "proceeds from the Idea and the Energy together," very credal language. I feel like my daughter the day she set one foot into a canoe and left the other on the dock and soon fell in the water--the things are drifting apart.

p. 42   IS a poet still a poet if he has no way to express his poetry?  What makes a poet?

p. 43  I don't like the disdain of "men of science."  If they don't behave this way, if they're renaissance men, are they "really" poets, then and not scientists?  On p. 44, she sets forth the idea that science depends on progress, the idea that we're always building and improving, but that art recognizes single geniuses in every age, whose work cannot be progressed beyond or built upon but only added to by later geniuses.  But my husband Glenn did a great paper and talk on Benjamin Franklin a couple of years ago, making the case that he was one of those singular geniuses who had amazing expertise in multiple fields (statesmanship as well as science, for example). Some researcher whose name escapes me has shown how geniuses of different times stack up to one another by virtue of their prominence in their own time and our recognition of them in later time. So Galileo is one, and Newton, and some others.  But Benjamin Franklin is a rare genius who "has it all."  Would Sayers say he's risen above his being a scientist to become a poet, ultimately?

Here's the video of Glenn's talk. :-)  

I feel cranky in my response to Sayers, pressured to finish this chapter when I didn't feel like it, really.  Sorry about that! :-)

Online Book Club: *The Mind of the Maker* Chapter 2

Tardy, I sigh.  But I will post nonetheless and hope to get ahead of this week's game this afternoon. We will see.  This is an ongoing project of Ordo Amoris. Please join us!

In Chapter 2 of The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers explores "The Image of God" and helps us to see how our comfort with the idea of God as Father should extend to comfort with the idea of God as Creator, the ideal of how He does these things helping inform how we should do them.

The quote from Aquinas at the front of the chapter, saying that the things we compare God to are rooted more in Him than in the things, reminds me of Platonism, our search for the ideal beyond ourselves. When we experience something here that seems "just perfect," it is simply that our imaginations haven't taken us as far as they might, if the material world can still satisfy them, even briefly.  I watched a fascinating video clip the other day, linked on Facebook by Sarah Hempel Irani, a local sculptor.  It is below, and it explains how Greek sculpture progressed to the ideal human image and then beyond, to the level of impossibility. It's fascinating!

On p. 21 in my edition, she says, "The Jews, keenly alive to the perils of pictorial metaphor, forbade the representation . . . ", but isn't it God, rather, who forbade, keenly alive to the perils for man?

P. 24 she notes that in science and math only formulae can avoid analogies, and she does a beautiful job explaining the problem with the wave/particle way of describing light.

P. 25 -- God as Father doesn't beget as men do. This made me think deeply about the reality that men might think they are begetting when they make love to their wives, bed a slut or prostitute, or even rape a girl -- but God controls the issue!  The man may think he's creating, bending the future to his will, but God controls all of that ultimately. "who -- not of blood nor of a will of flesh, nor of a will of man but -- of God were begotten."  (Young's Literal Translation)

P. 27  "We extend [the concept of a creator God] to the concept of a maker who can make something out of nothing; we limit it to exclude the concept of employing material tools."  I love how Sayers helps me understand philosophical concepts.  Then on p. 28, "We spend our lives putting matter together in new patterns and so "creating" forms which were not there before."  Cooking does that!  Fusion cuisine -- it's all fusion!

Finally, on p. 31, she says that "It is now [after three centuries of analytic bias] very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian or the scientist the language of either. . . . [T]he human mind is once more beginning to move towards a synthesis of experience."  Hmmm.  Is that what all the "smells and bells" in emergent/emerging (I get them mixed up!) worship is all about?  Is that why we lament that we don't have any great Christian writers and artists just now--we're still working our way toward that synthesis?  Will or do the conservative synods, presbyteries, and other bodies of ruling theologians allow for or welcome artistic expression of theological truths?  How far can those be "embodied" to remain orthodox, how far can we take them in worship? We have used the poems/prayers from Puritans, *Valley of Vision,* in worship in years gone by -- does Wendell Berry qualify?  Your favorite writer?  HUGE questions here.

Wednesday in November

Here's a little 100-word piece I made NOT for Friday Fictioneers, but for a collection the first hostess of FF, Madison Woods, is putting together--100 stories of 100 words based on the photo below.  Obviously it refers to a November Wednesday another year, but still . . .

Entry for Madison Woods’s 100x100 Project

Submitted 10/26/2012

Link here:  http://www.madison-woods.com/Wordpress/index-of-stories/100-x-100-submissions/

Wednesday in November

Everything is late this morning.

In the chilly silence when I went out for the paper it wasn’t there. So dark—great banks of clouds  holding back the dawn.

Only later did I hear the thrum of tires, click of gears, and thump as the paperboy on his bike flung it into the yard. It won’t have the news we all stayed up late to hear this morning. And it’s still not decided. They’ll count and bluster and hold press conferences and file lawsuits.

But the clouds have lifted with the sun, and there it is at last. Another day.

100 words.

Online Book Club: *The Mind of the Maker*

My wise, witty, and wonderful friend Cindy Rollins at Ordo Amoris / Dominion Family is hosting a nice, slow read through Dorothy Sayers' classic The Mind of the Maker, which I just love having an excuse to read.  I sat down this evening with my satisfying Levenger note cards

and started in with the Preface, Introduction by Madeleine L'Engle, and Chapter 1: "The 'Laws' of Nature and Opinion."  I'm going to post here my own contributions to the discussion, but first I'm going to read my predecessors.  You can find all the links here.

Cindy R. asks if we like Sayers' style--yes, of course, it's delightful!  She makes me long for the life I haven't had, that scholarly life in trimmed-lawn quads traversed by busy people in academic gowns with stacks of books, part of what always made Mystery! such a fun show to watch.  I love her naughty little limerick that is only tangentially necessary to her discussion of the "law" of probability in genetics--it doesn't say the fourth baby in a Mendelian sequence will be male or female or mulatto but that with enough babies we'll get roughly that distribution.

I agree with Sayers that it is depressing, distressing, that too many conversations end with frustration, when I see that the other person just doesn't get it. Will this kind of misunderstanding increase as education diversifies into the public mass education on the one hand, full of bureaucratized recordkeeping, and individualized free education of all the amazing sorts we've sampled as homeschoolers and online educators and students over the years?  Then those outside of the mainstream will find that only the most talented of the mass-produced students out there will be able to hold a real discussion--it's a contrast from the olden days when a talented farmer's son (or daughter) would surprise everyone and hold court in the marketplace or force his way through law school or write great poetry quietly after the chores.

I love Sayers' idea that the creativity of man is a reflection of the Creator.

I also really enjoyed L'Engle's Introduction in my edition, but I won't spend time on that here.

The Chapter 1 distinction between historical fact, like Grimm's phonetic law, and natural law--a statement of physical fact--reminds me of a great xkcd cartoon I saw the other day:  "Electoral Precedent."  Other political hints come in her note about how our dumb laws are superceded by natural law when those dumb laws lead to war, pestilence, and famine.  The good intentions are well illustrated by our friend Debra Hilton's observation that mosquito nets so lovingly sent to Mozambique actually result in MORE malaria because the locals use them for really efficient fishing nets, casting all the little fish up on the beach to die and thus end their careers eating mosquitos. Natural law will out.

I wonder about applying this idea to our ideas of when our children should marry.  By natural law they ought to marry at about 15-18, I'm thinking, but our society has smothered natural law with expectations and half-measures of contraception. But natural law will out.

I love the commentary on Aristotle's dramatic unities--I've been fascinated with those since Mrs. Schwerdt's 12th grade AP English class introduced me to them. How satisfying that we prove the wisdom of Aristotle when we naturally respond well to drama that follows those "rules."

But we also strain against the yoke when we find God's laws inconvenient or limiting to our freedom, we think.  Sayers says we should not ask, "Is it pleasant?" but "Is it true?"  "Creeds are statements of fact."  I don't have to strain myself to believe that Jesus was come down from Heaven, born of a virgin--I merely affirm what my whole being resonates to in the truth of that statement--what glorious truth!

Rejoice With Me!

Our wedding, July 5, 1986

Three years ago October I lost my wedding ring.  Mid-afternoon on Wednesday I was aware of it on my hand, and mid-morning Thursday I realized it was not.

I had been switching out summer and winter clothes as cold weather was settling in in Western Pennsylvania—pulling short-sleeve, lightweight garments off my hangers and out of the drawers and hauling big plastic tubs of heavy sweaters around in my room. Some things went into the dryer for freshening up; some things went into piles for Salvation Army. And somehow in the midst of all that my ring slipped off my finger.

My husband had designed the engagement ring for me in yellow gold. The diamond—a modest weight but of high quality--seemed to float between two swirls like hands curling around it from either side, and later the jeweler made a wedding band to follow the curves. The slender band broke shortly after our honeymoon, so we had the two pieces soldered together.  I wore it for 23 years.

The Thursday I realized I’d lost it I dedicated myself to going through every pile and tub and drawer, everywhere it might have fallen. I took almost everything out of my closet and crawled along the baseboards, listened to sounds in the vacuum as I passed the nozzle everywhere I could think of, retraced my steps in the house and garage, dug into the car I was driving when I realized it was gone. Nothing.  I held back the Salvation Army donation bags until I had a chance to sort through them again and finally released them. When spring came and I switched out clothes again, I searched everything again.  No. And the next fall and spring. No.  And the third fall, no.  Nor spring.

I finally filed an insurance claim a year ago, complete with my loving memory of the details of the ring and a photo from our wedding album—my hand, a beaded lacy point from my wedding gown, orchids,  my husband’s gold-ringed hand next to mine.  The insurance company sent a check, but we just didn’t have the heart to shop for another ring.

Meanwhile I’d been wearing my grandmother’s large diamond in a white gold setting, with a diamond wedding band—lovely but not mine.  My heart sank regularly when I considered what we had lost, what it symbolized, its beauty. Regularly I prayed that we might somehow find it. One day this summer I prayed like that, while walking on a country road:  “Lord, if that ring is anywhere out in the world, somehow, by some means, could we find it?” Even as I prayed that, other things crowded into my mind, hopes so much more important than recovering a piece of jewelry that I was ashamed to pray for its return. But I knew the Lord knew my heart—the hope of the ring became a pledge I made to believe Him for the other things.

A few weeks ago our oldest daughter became engaged, her diamond ring a delicate antique art deco filigree in white gold, and last week I drove to town to buy some gifts for her kitchen. I stopped in a local store where a particular clerk always calls out my name with a smile as she sees me coming. She knows my husband better because he stops in more often than I do. But she always cheers my heart. As she rang up my order I just happened to look at her right hand and saw what looked like my lost wedding ring! I could not believe it and looked again, then looked up at her—I know in shock—and asked where she got it, how long she’d had it. She looked a little puzzled and said her husband had bought it for her, probably five or six years ago, somewhere local but she didn’t know where. I told her briefly how I’d lost my ring and that I was almost sure it had gone to Salvation Army with a donation.

She said she didn’t think he’d gotten it at Salvation Army. No, I told her, they probably realized it was valuable and sold it to a jeweler . . . .  By this time I was aware of a couple of people in line behind me and didn’t want to take more time, but I couldn’t just turn away. I looked at her nametag, with her initials, and was ashamed that I did not know her name, even while she knows mine and my husband’s so well. I looked into her face and said, I know with tears in my eyes, that IF there was any possibility it was my ring, we would give almost anything to get it back. She asked for my number and said she’d talk to her husband, but she felt sure she’d had it longer than the three years I had been missing mine.

In my car outside, trembling, I called my husband and told him of the possibility. He could not believe it, either, but I told him I was almost sure it was my ring. We discussed it later and felt we should wait at least a couple of days for them to talk about it, to work it out. Those days turned into a long weekend, and finally she called me. Her husband, too, thought he had given her the ring four or five years ago, but they agreed that if I was convinced it was mine they wanted me to have it, and they would not accept payment for it. He could not recall what he had spent on it, and if she was content to give it to me, he was content to let her do so. I told her a little more of the history of the ring—my husband designing it and our having the band soldered to it, and we even discussed the size. I told her I wanted us BOTH to be convinced it was my ring or that it was not, and to be at peace about that. We agreed to meet the following evening. I kept trying to remember the ring—WAS it my ring? How could I be sure?

I took my husband with me to meet N-----*, and as she walked up to us she smiled her usual smile and pulled the ring off her hand. As soon as I held it in my hand I knew without a doubt. We showed her the photo from our wedding. Oh yes, she agreed, it sure looked like it!  She knew I knew it was the one, and she gave me a big hug and said “Happy Birthday!” She explained that her husband and his brother liked to get coffee together in a nearby town and then go poking around different stores. When he had seen this ring he knew she would like it, especially the design of the wedding band soldered to the engagement ring—like the one he’d given her years before.  

In the day or so since I got the ring—today is my birthday—I keep looking at it and marveling at this little miracle. It could have been lost in my own room all this time, and well I know it. But maybe it went to a Salvation Army in our town, and then to another town twenty-five miles away, and then a man from our town saw it and bought it for his sweet wife, and she’s been wearing it for two or three years, believing it much longer.  And then I happened to notice it on her right hand—had I not seen it during those two or three years? And then, amazingly, she and her husband were willing to just give it to me, content to have been temporary caretakers of a lost thing.

May the Lord bless N----- and D----* in their love, in their generosity, in the days to come.

What woman, having ten silver coins**, if she loses one coin, 

does not light a lamp, sweep the house, 

and search carefully until she finds it? 

And when she has found it, she calls her friends together, saying, 

“Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I lost!”  

Luke 15:8-9, New King James Version

*Not their real initials

** Greek drachma, "a valuable coin often worn in a ten-piece garland by married women" Ref.

"The Writing Revolution"

In this article by Peg Tyre in The Atlantic, we see the experience of a failing school as adults start investigating what's going wrong for the students. They learn that it's a lack of writing skills, so they implement a program that teaches the real nuts and bolts of writing, and with those tools students are able to build arguments and succeed.  How satisfying!

I'm interested in the debate linked here, too.  How about you?

PS  Thanks to my friend Jami for this corollary piece:  "Teaching Reading for Writing." 

Friday Fictioneers: Spring House

It's time for Friday Fictioneers!  Join us here and play.

Spring House

Brick by stone by mud and stick they closed her in, these cares. Square blocks of paperwork yet undone, a gray cold stone the aging father. Fruit flies hovered over the moldering harvest in baskets on the floor. The mending raised the lid of the chest in which it lay. Each thing cramped her, each thing walled her in.

But a window remained--an airy bright clean square in the pile. Through it she could breathe and gather sunshine, while the rivulet of her thoughts ran fresh beneath it all. A few minutes on the porch at dawn, a nourishing page of a book--or from her pen, a hymn at the piano, a tomato with basil and warm from the garden--

The window was more true and strong than all the misshapen stones around it, but they formed the substance through which the window let her soul take flight.

150 words

What the Students Can Teach Us

How could a 16th-century play, in which the stage directions are minimal, be so unsettling?

Paula Marantz Cohen avoided King Lear for years, thinking her college students couldn't handle its bleakness. But once she taught it, she learned a few things.  Read more here.

I had a similar experience a decade ago when I taught The Great Gatsby to a class of mostly eighth-graders. They took Gatsby's and Daisy's and others' adultery in stride--they reserved their real disgust for the narrator Nick.  To their minds, Nick had a responsibility as a friend to save these people from themselves, and he didn't do it--he just stood back and reported what they were doing, even facilitated it a bit.

Have your students surprised you, taught you something in the literature you've encountered together, even in their own writing?

The Doctor's Prescription for Writing

I am currently reading Otis Webb Brawley's How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011) He gives an account of his Jesuit education and the important lesson of Father Richard Polakowski, a beloved high school teacher at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School.  "Polo," as the students called him, "had a maxim that no student who took his class could miss: 'Say what you know, what you don't know, and what you believe--and label it accordingly.'" (p. 75)

Use your intellect, gentlemen. Start with knowledge, find its boundary. DO not stop! Save room for belief, but examine it fearlessly, for genuine examination knows no limitation. (p. 75)

Dr. Brawley has used this lesson in his distinguished medical career, and I think we can take it right back to the classroom. Students should examine what they know, consider the limits of their knowledge, and press a little beyond that to take a stab at an opinion and stand by a truly "educated guess."

A Brave Metaphor

David Kern, in his blog Wanderings, has a review of the movie Brave that I'm not sure I completely agree with, though I appreciate the challenge of his critique.  But I want to celebrate a great little paragraph introducing a metaphor you can understand even if you know nothing about the movie:

It’s as if the writers decided to transplant the thematic heart of the film, only they failed to properly connect all the ventricles and veins with the rest of the organs, leaving it to pump aimlessly, purposelessly. 

Well done, David!  Thanks to Lynne Spear of Sweetbriar Films for the original link.

Great Moments in Teaching

I'm so glad this teacher, Michelle Kerr, writing on the blog of Larry Cuban on June 27, 2012, shared her exhilarating hour in the classroom, and I'm glad Rod Dreher let us know about it!

"The kids carried the conversational load on that poem for ten minutes."

     --"The Miracle and the Moment"          

I love it when that happens!

She goes on to describe how what happened didn't really fit her lesson plans, that she was supervised that day and knew she'd be missing many of the stated objectives.  But something important happened there.

If you teach, I hope you have the joy of many such moments, and if you learn, I hope you are part of a miracle such as Ms. Kerr describes.  Aren't our best memories of our educations from moments like these?

Everybody Needs an Editor! (repost)

This post first appeared here in November, 2008. I am going to re-post select items from long ago as I enjoy them and hope you will, too.  Since I posted this I read Christopher Buckley's very moving Losing Mum and Pup, which suggests that perhaps WFB was indulged and not edited sometimes when he should have been, especially in the last years. CRM

Let me start by saying I admire William F. Buckley, Jr., and was sad at his passing. We have subscribed to National Review Magazine since before we could afford it, as I am fond of telling people. But I have a love-hate relationship with WFB's writing. He is famous for his impressive vocabulary, and that is kind of fun, but I think he writes some of the worst sentences I have seen in print. In the excerpt below describing the religious background of the Reagans' son Ron, who became an atheist in his teens, the first sentence is perfectly fine, but I'm not sure what he means by the second. Does the "it is popular" suggest that the belief so described is faulty? What risk are people assured of being eliminated? Which people?

We do not need to assume that a familiarity with history recalls the Ninety-Five Theses of Luther, or the causes of the Thirty Years’ War. It is popular in quarters of young America to believe that deference to individual religious inclinations eliminates any risk of submitting to indoctrination.

The next sentence, in the next paragraph, is also fine. But the final sentence is just poor, violating my teacher sensibilities about the need to enliven prose and to use more active verbs and clear nouns, and not to turn verb phrases into noun phrases. Note WFB's use of the passive voice, which has its place, but in sparing doses:

When Ron Jr. went on to reject his father’s political positions, ruing the Reagan presidency, it was not necessarily the result of alienation from the family per se. Weight by the son to his father’s principles is here given, here withheld, after thought is paid to them, cursory or profound, and how they figured in the allegiances of the parent.

From The Reagan I Knew, by William F. Buckley, Jr.
At the National Review website November 26, 2008

So how would YOU fix that last sentence? Here is my try, preserving much of the language of the original:

The son thought-- sometimes cursorily, sometimes profoundly-- about his father's principles and about how they figured in his allegiances, and he gave them weight or withheld it accordingly.

I still don't like it much, though, so here's another try, with more freedom of vocabulary:

Ron Reagan watched his father's principles at work, especially in his allegiances, and, with a teenager's alternating deep and shallow thought, respected or cast off those principles accordingly.

So can you do better? I probably can, though the exercise shows me that WFB's words "principles," "allegiances," "figured," "weight," and "accordingly" were very carefully chosen! :-)

Are there some famous writers who just don't appeal to you--people whose writing leaves you looking around bewildered, wondering what you're missing?

The Scrabble Poet

Here's a great game idea. But it's more than a game -- it's an art form.

Use the tiles from a Scrabble game to create a poem.  Mike Keith, in "Scrabble Tile Poem," did several stanzas of iambic pentameter, each using all 100 tiles.  Now THAT is a challenge!

Can you think of other ways to play with these tiles?

Thanks to Abraham Piper's 22 Words for this piece.

Essay Grades and Olympic Times

Over the years I have discussed with other writing teachers the reality we know -- that it is just plain difficult to get high grades on essays or creative writing. A piece of writing is an incredibly complex thing, and we as writing coaches want to urge our students to keep pushing for something better, something more successful, something more perfect.  I wrote this to an "A" student yesterday who was discouraged that she had not improved her essay grades over the year:

The fact that you have A grades on all your essays shows that you are an exemplary writer. . . . Once you're a really great writer it's difficult to make incremental improvements.  Think of runners or swimmers who try to "shave" their times once they're in the elite ranks. :-)  Yes, it's dramatically impressive when students make dramatic improvements -- and I wrote notes of congratulation to several who went from low B or high C grades early on to high B or low A grades by the end. They need to be encouraged about their strides. You just need the encouragement that you're continuing to do a great job, as you have from the start. You came into the course well equipped to do what we were looking for, and you have gone out of the course continuing to do it very well.

Bottom line: it's just about impossible to score a 100, and a 95 is rare -- because we writing teachers want to encourage students to keep pushing for excellence and beauty.  However, we should do what we can to structure the grades in a course so that students can succeed with their final grades even if their writing is not the best of what they do. In Composition 2 at Veritas Press Scholars Academy, essays count as 40% of the grade, exams as 20%, and participation and homework as 20% each.  The participation and homework grades are "faithfulness grades"* that allow even struggling writers to succeed in the class.





All run the race, and all can finish well, but the ones who have "Olympic potential" will get more vigorous coaching to that end, not just a grin and a pat on the back.


*Thanks to husband Glenn Marsch, physics professor at Grove City College, for this concept.


Related:  Jack Lynch:  "Getting an A on an English Paper"

Welcome to Summer!

At last I'm done with the teaching year at Veritas Press Scholars Academy online, and I'm ready to spend some time developing Writing Assessment Services for you.

Wouldn't you like some help learning how to do what I do -- evaluate writing?  That's part of what I have in mind.

Wouldn't you like some actual instruction to go with my tutorials -- visuals and audio?  That's part of what I have in mind.

Wouldn't you like some freebies? That's part of what I have in mind.

Stay tuned!

Calvin on Writing

No, not THAT Calvin.

I do not believe this, ultimately, to be my goal for my students, but I know it's possible, and I surely read a lot of this kind of writing.  Today it's just a funny, to blow out a bit of the dust in this blog.

Calvin and Hobbes Discuss The Purpose of Writing

I'm too busy teaching writing just now to blog about it.  I shall return . . . one day . . . Lord willing. :-)

Great Advertisement Language

We surf the Internet.
We swim in magazines.

I saw this ad in a magazine and tore it out, but the online version is more accessible to my students and readers here.

Here you go! 

Isn't this a good extended metaphor?

A Little Testimony

One of my almost eighty students at Veritas Press Scholars Academy online this past year wrote me a very sweet thank-you note at the end of the year, accompanied by a great handmade card. She gave me permission to share it here, the student's view of the value of Composition 2.  (About four of the six sections for 2011-2012 are full, but a couple of them still have seats.  My colleague Chris Finnegan made this course a great experience, and we're hard at work now making THIS year's class even better!)

Dear Mrs. Marsch,
. . . Thanks so much for teaching comp. class. I really enjoyed it! I have learned so much from the Lively Art of Writing. It didn't just say what to do, but she would tell how most students would do something then she would tell how to change it. I know I don't remember everything from the book but it still was very beneficial.
     You presented the material very effectively and I really loved your slides and polls.
     Thank you so much for taking the time to check papers and giving helpful feedback. Probably my favorite things was how we wrote the papers. We would start about two weeks before it was due. We could take it at a much slower pace and not feel rushed. So by the day it's due all we'd have to do was proof read it. I had never written a paper starting so far in advance before!
     The last paper (the one about math) I felt it was my best paper, even though it wasn't my best grade. :-p  I knew about the subject and could make my thoughts clear (that's always really hard!).
     Thanks again for teaching, helping me become a better writer, and using LAW. Really wish I could have met you at the end of the year gathering.
     Sincerely,
     Lauren Carmody
P.S. Sorry if there are grammatical errors :-p . . . it's a letter not an essay :-)

Christopher Hitchens and the KJV

Vanity Fair has an article by famous atheist Christopher Hitchens celebrating the King James Bible.  Thanks to almohler.com for pointing it out.  An excerpt:

Tyndale, incidentally, was generally good on the love question. Take that same Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, a few chapters later. For years, I would listen to it in chapel and wonder how an insipid, neuter word like “charity” could have gained such moral prestige. The King James version enjoins us that “now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Tyndale had put “love” throughout, and even if your Greek is as poor as mine you will have to admit that it is a greatly superior capture of the meaning of that all-important original word agape. It was actually the frigid clerical bureaucrat Thomas More who had made this into one of the many disputations between himself and Tyndale, and in opting to accept his ruling it seems as if King James’s committee also hoped to damp down the risky, ardent spontaneity of unconditional love and replace it with an idea of stern duty. Does not the notion of compulsory love, in any form, have something grotesque and fanatical about it?

A Celebration of Words

This year is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, and I invite you to celebrate with me by reading this delicious essay, "In the Beginning Was the Sound," by Ann Wroe, from Intelligent Life, a division of The Economist online. Here's a taste:

English, of course, was richer in those days, full of neesings and axletrees, habergeons and gazingstocks, if indeed a gazingstock has a plural. Modern skin has spots: the King James gives us botches, collops and blains, horridly and lumpily different. It gives us curious clutter, too, a whole storehouse of tools and knick-knacks whose use is now half-forgotten—nuff-dishes, besoms, latchets and gins, and fashions seemingly more suited to a souped-up motor than to the daughters of Jerusalem:

The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers,
The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the
headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings,
The rings, and nose jewels,
The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the
wimples, and the crisping pins… (Isaiah 3: 19-22)

Thanks to Joe Carter of First Thoughts, at FirstThings.