notes on Tuesday night

[alexr_rwx]

- Paul Graham is one hoopy frood. Not only does he write books about Lisp and essays about programming, he's put out a lovely essay on the topic of essay-ing, surprise and being observant, and the development of weird situations in society like comb-overs and highschool and English departments. Here's an excerpt:

For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

Yes, this was on /., but a lot of you don't read /., and a lot of you who do wouldn't follow a link from it to read an essay about essays by a guy who normally writes about Lisp. But I've read the article, and it's excellent... and I recommend that you read it too. So there!

- Earlier on tonight, Mike and I got our compilers project working, with nearly six hours to spare. *jubilation*

- Everybody likes the new gym at Tech. Everybody. It's lovely, and I'm pleasantly sore :)

- Congrambolations to Tim neuroticmonk on his 100 days of uptime! We're from the band Limozeen!

Comments

[rheavatarin.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I do not believe that all critical analysis of literature (or whatever topic you feel is appropriate) is entirely a waste. I think that my key arguement is that the only kind of writing that is taught in the average secondary school is of such a type. As Alex pointed out, I competed in extemporanious speech and original oratory forensics events in high school and strongly believe that persuasion is a very important skill. My point is that writing as a particular means of communication is not taught in schools, while the argumentative format taken in critical analysis is. A better approach, IMO would be to teach writing as a means of communication and then adapt that tool to whatever particular job you need it for. Similar with speech, it can be used in a persuasive mode or in a storytelling mode or a conversational mode, et al. I believe it would be better to give students the tools with which to properly communicate and then (in a cross-disciplinary manner) show how these tools can be used.