Reading chapter 2 just reminds of what I see and experience in education today.  I see so many grammar worksheets as part of the mandatory writing assignments students have at the junior high school I work for.  Yet, I haven’t really  seen students implement the grammatical skills they learn on those worksheets in their own writing.  Because grammar and writing seem to be taught as separate entities from each other, students get the idea that grammar and writing are two separate things.  Just this past winter, an english teacher assigned her students an “English Packet” which basically consisted of work sheets relating to Nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, tense etc., and as well as an essay for winter break.  When the break was over, I looked at the essay of a student I was tutoring and found that his grammar in his essays wasn’t at all different than his grammar in his his previous essays.  I asked him if he learned anything at all from that monster of a packet he was assigned.  He replied with, “I guess I did..”.   Well, whatever he learned from that packed, he was NOT applying it in his actually writing.  Moreover, the twenty vocabulary words these students learn for the week, were NOT appearing into their writing.  

Williams also goes over how many English teachers today use a “cookbook”  approach to writing.  These approaches include the various rhetorical modes of writing essays such as the definition essay, comparison/contrast essay, or process  essay.  Students are taught to construct these essays using the five paragraph model, among other recipes, for essays.  I have no problem with these recipes of writing essays as I was taught to use them myself.   One particular method that has been beneficial for me through my undergrad career was a method I learned from one of my English professors in community college.  I was taught that a strong essay consisted a thesis of course and paragraphs which consisted of a topic sentence, context, quote and analysis.  I don’t particularly stick to this method but I often teach it to the college students I tutor when they have questions about developing an analytic paragraph.   However, a teacher has to be aware that these approaches do nothing to develop one’s writing other than to organize one’s writing.  So, I often emphasize to student that while organization is important, their understanding of what they read or their analysis is more crucial.   

However, one thing that concerns me is that if “a cookbook approach to writing and teaching writing is destined to fail”, then does how the hell did I make it this far in my college career and what does this mean in the future?