Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...excruciatingly frustrating experience. The typical reader might mutter back at the author, "But what did she say?" The text is an ambling description that lacks any clues to the humanity behind the name Carmen Santana. It is written as a newspaper article, in crisp, clear, objective, unemotional prose, and from start to finish the journalistic facade never cracks...
...thing, has been getting fuzzier for some time. Poems about writing poetry are now cliche--indeed since Yeats's "circus animals," his faithful images deserted him, verse has turned in on itself to the point where most poems seem to be written about being unable to compose poetry. Prose, too, introspects to analysis or suggestion modern novelists seem lost in a funhouse of potential trips that stay potential, journalists discuss other journalists' intents in the New Yorker and the 20 most interesting minutes of the Carter-Ford debate were those in which the newscasters debated the concept, aim and probable...
...Although I myself believed the journalism expos was just as good a writing course as any other section, one of the committee members felt the course was geared to 'hip' writing rather than developing clear, felicitous prose," he said. "Another member felt the course had no place in the curriculum of a University where courses in applied music and drama were forbidden," he said...
...what I took to be the concern of the expository writing program," Jean Slingerland, assistant director of expository writing before Byker, said. "The sections were not designed to turn out newspapermen. Their goal was to teach people how to put words on paper in concise, lucid prose, with generalizations backed up with proof, and to meet a deadline. These happen to be the same as the values in journalism. Unfortunately, to list the course as journalism, you're apt to give the impression you're teaching about fillers and the number of words to the column inch...
Yates can make reading about humdrum pathos - the slow smashup of befuddled lives - invigorating and even gripping. He knows how to pace his material for maximum interest - when to summarize, when to show a scene in full. The dialogue is artful enough to sound natural. In his descriptive prose every word works quietly to inspire the illusion that things are happening by themselves. Even Emily's walk-on lovers are able to stand - as characters - on their own two legs...