Much of our advice about writing is oversimplified and passed on to us by tradition. It's no fluke that textbooks haven't changed or improved much in eighty years. They're fat, expensive compendiums of ritual knowledge, folklore, common sense, and exhortation. In this context, take a look at my collection of no duh comments in English textbooks . For one thing, teaching involves power and control.
Teaching also involves magic, mystery.
They claim special, privileged knowledge. All you have to do is look at what writing teachers publish to see the problem. By debating the values of open-handed rhetoric, by contending with the terms and conditions of a pedagogy of democratic citizenship, a pedagogy in which learning to write is an act of acquiring the skills and attitudes necessary for complete participatory citizenship, composition studies reproduces and reiterates, at the same time that it transforms and critiques, the larger struggles of contemporary American life as these are fought out through social organizations that distribute power and authority according to race, class, and gender. As the dominated members of the dominant, teachers can use such representations to negotiate their own interests and those of their students, as I have shown above, establishing by traditional measures of academic worth a legitimized place for basic writing and basic writers in the academy. Though in one sense that drama can seem sufficiently removed from the immediate demands of the classroom to be safely ignored, in fact its force inevitably mediates the values, beliefs, and actions of students and teachers in the classroom, the location and conditions of that classroom, and the aims and performance of all concerned with the course, day by day, year by year.