I were horsing around in front of the Sonora Youth Center. Some friendly banter arose between us and an older group in a pickup truck, two high school boys and one girl. Our jabber rose to shouts as they sped away. Once upon a seminar in the mid-1980s, a cadre of graduate teaching assistants gathered to hear a talk delivered by the author of a textbook designed for courses in freshman English. She extended her arms from a billowing smock of clashing colors and balanced an invisible balloon upon her head.
Writing is about self-realization.
You have the power to help your students discover their own uniqueness. Mere writing, stringing words together with concision and clarity, suddenly seemed pedestrian. What those TAs could not figure out, though, was how her textbook, damp with its New Age mist of self-discovery, could help to teach anyone how to write anything one might generously call English. You don't have to use long words when you write. Most of the time, you can make your points quite well with short ones.