Lousy College Writing Blog
In the article, “That horrible and strange article about writing by John G. Maguire,” Steve Krause writes about how John Maguire’s article (“Why So Many College Students Are Lousy at Writing--And How Mr. Miyagi Can Help”), and how it wasn’t a proven fact that students can’t write proper sentences. This blog is meant for anyone that has read John Maguire’s article in the Washington Post. This can be seen by looking at the end of the first paragraph. The sentence says, “but I’ll start with this really horrible and strange article about writing instruction from The Washington Post.” That sentence tells us, that this is in response to Maguire’s article that was published and Krause is writing in response to how the WPA’s article
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Krause’s goal for this article is to change the audience’s mind. This can be seen by the bullet points at the end of the article, in which one states, “At the end of the day, what Maguire is really trying to do here is sell his textbook. So really, what the WaPo did for him is run an advertisement in the form of an op-ed piece.” The takeaway from this quote is that Krause truly believes that Maguire was only trying to get people to read his book. He doesn’t actually know if students can write a “good” sentence, which can be seen by Krause saying, “frankly, there is not really much of anything in Maguire’s article that is accurate. There’s the uncritical citation of the book Academically Adrift, a study with some clear methodological shortcomings.” Krause clearly did his research by looking into Maguire’s background as to how he is a freelance writer. Krause is trying to change our mind, to show that Maguire is an adjunct professor that is