Elements of Writing: For Teachers and Students

My firstgoal is to get students and teachers to think differently about writing, tochange their perspective. But the perspectives I offer may not be easy toaccept, whereas some of you may see these perspectives as a given. Certainly,there is nothing new about what I have gathered here, except for theperspectives that evolve from how I order this information to help usunderstand how we use language and how we communicate. I believe we willunderstand each other as a result. Sometimes,thinking differently about something we think we already know promotes growth.You may findthis book helpful in many ways, including improving your writing, or helpingothers to do so.  The more you understandhow you have come to use language, and what language does, the better you willwrite. But if those linguists who affirm that language is thought are accurate,then the more clearly one understands one’s language the more clearly one mayalso think!The overallgoal of this book is to get students and teachers to think—and talk—moreclearly about how they use language to communicate in writing, but also in speech.I believe better writing, and teaching of writing, will result.TheElements of Writing is not a data dump of information! Instead, this bookattempts to be transformative, to change the reader’s thinking. Metaphorically,I hope to help you shed the chains of inaccurate and dysfunctional thinkingabout writing. In this respect, I hope you will challenge my concepts, and testthem in your day-to-day experiences.