Thirdly, writing is useful when it helps students interject critical questions regarding the writing and the reading we ask them to do. Marilyn Cooper has written about this term. So have Jim Berlin, Ira Shor, and others. Really useful knowledge refers to knowledge that develop in praxis. Just as Nancy demonstrates in her paper, praxis is a concept that sees the personal and the theoretical as intertwined.
Theories are stories, afterall.
Ways of seeing the world which we develop by virtue of our experiences in the world. I wind myself to Miller and Cooper and Berlin from Nancy's paper because Nancy is remarking on a problem having not only to do with the position and value of creative writing but having to do with the position and value of composition as well. And illustration may help here. Susan Miller has argued in Textual Carnivals and elsewhere that current process approaches to teaching first-year composition trivialize student writing. Trivializing their personal experiences and their relationship to the world they live in.