Lawrence Yap's article is delightful: funny, passionate, well-
written. Applying it? Well, not literally. Yes, what he is saying
is "true". But he does not mean for it to be didactic. He scored by
breaking the rules at the end of a course; I would hate to advise
one of my students in a Writing Centre conference to take that
chance. My student would surely get an F and say that I had
encouraged him to do it that way!
In my Effective Writing course, I encouraged students to break
"rules" after they had learned to write within certain structures--
like improvisation in music. Yap obviously knows academia well enough
to give himself the freedom to give it a blast. Good for him!
But back to Margaret's question. I like to think that we Writing
Centre people aren't selling out to the extent that we deserve to be
stereotyped like Yap's unimaginative "advisor."
Nevertheless, he does put the knife in, I have to admit: there
you are, Roberta Lee, talking platitudes to those students, you who
think you're above all that----ha ha.
Supervisor, Writing Centre
University of New Brunswick, Saint John
P.O. Box 5050
Saint John, NB
E2L 4L5
Fax: (506) 648-5528
Phone: (506) 648-5502
Email: [log in to unmask]
