Cinnabar and Alabaster

34. "text, say the genrists, can be described by its genre or purpose following the edict of 'form follows function'"; genre working its way into curriculum battles "promises to be...a clash between formalist or bottom-up and constructavist of top-down language instruction camps, but this time with a claim for that moral middle ground"
35. the theory, in kind-enough terms: "for genre studies advocates, a text has certain stylistic features that distinguish it from other texts, and to fail to apprise students of these distinguishing features of the established modes of discourse is to fail to educate them for a world where such knowledge is power"
36. an (ostensibly neutral) implication: "if a student wanted to know the structure of a procedural text for a piece of technical writing, you could coach that student through a series of sentences or paragraphs to produce it"
39. the key question: "now, do you want to do it? do you believe that you should teach specific text production, just because you can?"; he contends: "the genrists may have had their definitions mixed up to start with. what they call genres are really text components and those different features or components are always found in blends in longer written discourse outside of classroom samples"; isolated feature-sets are interesting, but "in the world at large, it's the blends by master craftsmen that hold sway"; "if" (& for him it's not an if) "we don't write in discreet little genre-specific packets, but rather express ourselves on issues with broadly-conceived discourse plans, then there is not much point in teaching the micro-text"; to do this "is to mislead writers into believing that there is only one correct blueprint for the text"; also sawyer & watson "assert[] that 'premature emphasis on form can hinder learning'" (& i'm sure they're not the only ones who've noticed)
40. ("although sometimes we may wonder whether any one human being can acutally teach another how to achieve fluency in written discourse, we still have to know what methods are being advocated by which interest groups, if only to avoid the ridiculous" <--here's another classic why-bother. why do we bother, when our publishing contributors can't resist the barbs revealing that they can't really hold on either?)
42. "power for me in education is the ability to make distinctions and to use them. it is more important to express effectively--to do what works--than to be able to specify the generic features of each member of a taxonomy of texts" <--& everybody i've read writing in genre studies would agree with him; does he know that & is taking the extreme to show where the slide when christie & the let's-make-it-explicit camp can lead, or has he really only seen them?
43. "explicit instruction may have a beneficial influence on the work of weaker students" but only as a prepping-for-the-assignment move; there's no guarantee they learn anything about meaning & applicability beyond the moment. his argument for what matters is the same thing devitt & bawarshi promote: "showing students how texts are designed to produce a desired purpose; that is, how authors...employ a variety of constructions to achieve that desired purpose"; his definitions are just different: "the essay may be viewed or deconstructed to illustrate its schematic, but purpose, not consistency of genre, must be the focus"