A Reflection on Johnson

A lot of what Johnson said resonates with me. For example, when describing the energy his students exhibited while writing, he said 'he'd always assumed that it came from opening onto the raw flow of the composing process and from engaging the particulars of the immediate context.' I suppose that is where we got lost. The ancients had the ability to tap into the raw flow, and then somewhere along the way it got subverted. He likens the pain now associated with writing to a medieval rite of passage whereby boys became gentlemen through the memorization of rules and regular floggings. Composition instructors must be cognizant of this. We must follow the tradition of the renegade rhetoricians. We have allow our students to derive 'pleasure from an open-ended process'. School will suck forever if we don't relax strictures and let our students laugh as they create.