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January 06, 2005

Sontag's Thinking and the Core Dump Style of Writing

Here's a nice description of typical thinking from The American Spectator.

What I mean is that, for all her rhetorical gifts, Sontag could not think -- or, rather, she could not reason. She didn't do if-then logic. She tossed around ideas as though they were horseshoes and hoped that their proximity to a thesis formed an argument. This method made her consistently provocative, consistently readable, and consistently irrelevant.

It is teaching logical thinking that I find most important and most challenging. The description makes me think of the "core dump" style of writing for test essays: write down every fact you know that is connected with the subject of the question and hope the right answer is in there somewhere.

Posted by erasmuse at January 6, 2005 01:48 PM

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