Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
730. developmental psych's approache to cognitive sequencing "fails to consider the extent to which cognitive development may be influenced by a child's exposure to different kinds of discourse," plus, "the ability to achieve college-level literacy will often depend upon a student's prior familiarity with the discursive behavior he or she is asked to exhibit in school," which is why we "need...a social...basis" instead. argument: "every student possesses a socially constituted generic lexicon, which functions as a complex code of verbal behavior," & "our success with students whose generic lexicon does not already predict success with the essay depends, then, upon our ability to establish mediating links between familiar and unfamiliar generic contexts"
733. effective "generic replacement serves to counteract the inherent advantage of teachers over students"--one in which academy members & academic genres are always more isolated, intellectual, & removed from social realities than the genres of students.
738. "when individuals lose connection with the currents of familiar social discourse, when they isolate themselves in a distant observatory or are isolated within a barren discursive tract, then madness--or dullness--or both--threaten"--"intellecutal and discursive solitude" leads to "a feeling of powerlessness"
739. to reverse this, bringing "the...ficure of knowledge...into contact with patterns of interaction from a more familiar sphere....brings about a recontextualization of knowledge"
745. "missing from Elbow's celebration of free-writing is an indication of how students are to move from lyrical self-expression to successful writing in school"--the demands of school writing "suggest[] the need for a differen kind of intervention, a shift in the students' conceptual relation to writing"--"a shift towards [using in classrooms] genres that inscribe a sense of writing as direct communication": "we might, in other words, imagine a sequence of assignments moving from generic contexts closer to actual patterns of verbal interaction to patterns further removed"
747. his model "refamiliarizes students with the conversational cues that inform their face-to-face interactions and then gradually shows them how to submerge these cues within the more discursive strategies of essay organization. the movement is from imagining a familiar, highly specific reader to positing an unfamiliar audience; from exploring familiar topics generated from texts; from writing within a 'climate' that encourages the first person voice, informal development of thought, vairety of tone, and so on, to establishing a more formal context, within which one ix expected to use the third person and develop a coherent, unified argument"