What is a review? What are they doing, and what makes a good one?
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My students, when they arrive, think they have mastered writing. They confidently hand in a paper with five paragraphs on it, and act confused when I tell them to change it. These students might as well have shown me five trees of the same kind planted in a perfectly ordered row on a lawn cleared of everything but those trees and the grass, and ask me to evaluate their forest.
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The primary shift, it seems to me, is a kind of rebalancing of literature and storytelling away from exposition and toward scenes. The adjective “cinematic” is noted as a selling-point for stories, more so than “musical” or “architectural” or “sculptural” or “painterly,” because the ideal of storytelling is no longer the epic novel, but instead the film. This shift isn’t just a slow move, though, it’s an ongoing vector of movement: because film and literature – as major narrative art forms – are tied together, a shift in one often has a knock-on-effect on the other.
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Utopia is a funny thing, and I don’t know about anyone else, but whenever I hear the word “utopia” I immediately feel my hackles rise: not because I don’t want the world to get better, but because it always seems to me that it’s used to mean its inverse
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This is the point of failure for American writing education: it simply produced bad writers. The reason it does this is because it treats writing as something where requirements are meant to be filled, as if lining up all of the ingredients of a cake on the counter were the same thing as baking. Which, I would like to emphasize, is not the fault of the teachers, but the fault of the administrators and bureaucrats who decided that writing education needed to be standardized.
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