it's (nobody's actually tracking these titles)

Ah, Smith. The theoretician shows insight. I loved it. But you all new I loved Smith already. What did I love? Spelling and punctuation and the distinction between revision and editing. I believe I've mentioned before that I often help my friend with her drafts of Crim J papers/articles she's producing. I'm becoming more familiar with criminological theory and terminology via my exposure to her work and realized that this learning on my part is analogous to how we learn both spelling and grammar. Alese has not "taught" me about her discipline in a direct manner. I have LEARNED how much of it goes by the demonstrations of it she keeps presenting to me. We often argue about proper word choice to make points in as concise a manner as possible (and she is armed with a Blackberry, so online dictionaries are not a simple solution). But it's during this interplay that we both see how vocabulary and spelling are done and accepted. While arguing over the use of "apogee" or "apex" we ended up polling passersby in the coffee shop to make a final decision. When Smith says that "Every convention of writing is tied to an intention that lies behind writing" we need to see that the audience is intimately tied upo in these intentions. Add to this the need for purpose and I have a much greater appreciation for Alese's assertion that she hates writing any academic piece that she's unlikely to submit for publication. Her purpose is publication, literary masturbation is not enjoyable to everyone.

Hartwell brought back memories long forgotten of diagramming sentences with Mr Smith (Andrew, not Frank) in Honors English in High School. Chalk all over the place and the end result an alien graphic representation with subjects and predicates in the center while adjectives, conjunctions, and adverbs radiated outwards the the flagella from some alien beast. Oddly, since I often have a visually oriented mind, these moments cemented how the word-components of a sentence structure worked together and linked up, for me. I was in the minority. But I think this is like giving the chance at different methods to compose. Show it, give it a chance, but don't cram it down the students throat as THE way.