A RhetNet SnapShot Reply:
THE MAIN PROBLEM
Alice Trupe points to the argument that students are
different from us, which some colleagues use as
a rational for requiring "rule-based, rigid structures" in their writing.
Student are indeed different from us, but in what ways? Do they, for
example, learn language and acquire literacy in ways that are different
from the ways in which we advanced? Is their cognition somehow strangely
different from ours? Assuming that the answer is no, then the next step
is to remember how we learned sophisticated reading and writing, and observe
how we continue that process. I can tell you that I didn't know what a
topic sentence was until I became a college English teacher, and I had
earned money as a professional journalist and fiction writer before that.
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