Bianca Rincon

Macrorie: The Poisoned Fish

Composition: An Art; ones natural voice

o With all that fish smell permeating the room, the teacher feels
queasy. He tries other ways of getting rid of Engfish. He asks the
students to keep a personal journal. Maybe if they talk about
themselves they will find their natural voices. Page 2
Consequences of composition:
o Bad composition: The writing is unnatural. It feels forced and
fake.
The co-captain of the respective teams are going out to
the middle of the field for the toss of the coin. Engfish
again. Only two teams play in a football game and there
could be no reason in that sentence for using the word
respective. But it was the sort of word the boy thought
Engfish teachers wanted. Page 2
Pure Engfish undefiled, a tongue never spoken outside the
walls. No student would stop another on campus and say,
I desire assistance in locating Sangren Hall, or Will you
show me the most effective way to the bus stop?
Naturally the student thinks the textbook is a model of the
language the teacher wants, so she gives that language to
him.
The trouble with bad student writing is the trouble with all
bad writing. It is not serious, and it does not tell the truth.
o Good composition: The writing is genuine and real. It is truthful.
The difference between the college students writing and
the third grade childs is simple: One is dead, the other
alive. In the childs comments the words speak to each
other high speaks to lower. And the ideas and the ideas
and things speak to each other The Hawaiian guitar is like
grandmother, and when she was sick she was like a jar
with a lid on. The whole passage speaks to the reader. It is
not pretentious. It is not phony. It is not private. In the
Engfish paragraphs of the student themes the words
almost never speak to each other, and when they do, they
only say Blah.
All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Part of growing up is learning to tell lies, big and little,
sophisticated and crude, conscious and unconscious. The
goo writer differs from the bad one in constantly trying to
shake the habit. She holds herself to the highest standard
of truth telling.
How is It done? Skills/Strategies to Perfect?

Id like to be a car. You get to go all over and get to go

through mud puddles without getting yelled at thats
what Id like to see. (Example of good composition: 7th
grade boys writing
The statement strikes with force because because
the boy speaks truly: his shoes and the tires of the
car do become muddy. He gets yelled at by his
parents and the car does not. The comparison
surprises. Its candor draws a smile from the reader.
o Strategies to perfect include using a genuine
voice and speaking truthfully through ones
writing.
More strategies to perfect composition include writing
freely without focus (writing 10 minutes as fast as one can
without stopping to ponder a thought. It leads to No
Engfish in that writing. No phoniness or pretension.
Apparently the writer put down words so fast he used his
own natural language without thinking of his expression.
He got a lot said in a short space, and at times wrote
skillfully, as when he rendered exactly the effect of the
explosion: Just one impression was the result, not heat or
light or sound all of them rolled into one impact when the
torch set off the fumes.
The emphasize the important of writing freely
without worrying about punctuation or grammar or
style before writing with more purpose later on,
letting ideas flow freely all the while.
Writing four suggests writing freely for 20 30 minutes
about something or somebody you knew in order to record
the lumps and grooves, the dents and spikes.
Who is and/or should be involved in comp?
o Everyone can be involved in composition; they need only speak
earnestly and come from a place of truth in what they say.
(Examples above)
To what end is it practiced or performed?
o Students compose regularly, although it is often Engfish instead
of English. This is difficult to escape for the reasons that this
quote below explains:
Any person trying to write honestly and accurately soon
finds he has already learned a hundred ways of writing
falsely. As a child he soke and wrote honestly and truth
come harder. The pressures on his ego are greater. He
reaches for impressive language; often it is pretentious and
phony. He imitates the style of adults, who are often bad
writers themselves.

How is comp taught?: A teacher becomes fed up with writing like that. He
doesnt see that most of the signals in the school are telling students to write
Engfish. Even the textbook begins with an Engfish sentence, and surely it
should be a model of writing for students. Its first sentence is: If you are a
student who desires assistance in order to write effectively and fluently, then
this textbook is written for yo. P3
o Students thoroughly trained in Engfish are hard to put to find their
natural voices in the classroom. They have left them out in the hall.
Much earlier in life, though, they occasionally have written sharply and
truly. P3
Composition is often taught unsuccessfully through the form in
which is is taught in the classroom by educators. It becomes
unnatural fake. Teachers begin to hear what students believe
they want to hear, following the example of textbooks assigned
to them. Composition can still be taught successfully if void of
the artificiality often accompanied by English literature/teaching
practices/norms.