JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 28, Numbers 3 & 4, 2008 Page: 480
391-836, [2] p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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480
those of Bloom's text. Here is an excerpt from the opening of Bloom's
essay:
Although composition studies handbooks and rhetorics hold out
the Platonic ideals of excellence, particularly when their illustra-
tions are from professional writers, classroom teachers perforce
read these through the realistic lenses of"good enough." The label,
"good enough writing," is an analogue of British psychoanalyst
D.W. Winnicott's concept of the "good enough mother," neither
negligent nor a smother-mother, but good enough to provide
adequate physical and psychological nurture that will ensure the
development of a distinctive individual, a healthy child (17-19).
Most of us tend to teach to the class average (or slightly above, but
still within the B range), yet oddly enough, given the tacit accep-
tance throughout the country of this pervasive concept, it has never
been given a label that has stuck. Like Moliere's Bourgeois
Gentleman, who was delighted to finally have a label to acknowl-
edge that he had been speaking prose all his life, the label "good
enough writing" tells us what we've been teaching our students to
do all along. Now we know what to call the resulting work; if good
enough writing is not the best outcome, it is certainly the normative
practice that we tolerate. (72-73)
From here, Bloom outlines the characteristics of "good enough writ-
ing"-Rationality, Conformity/Conventionality, Adherence to standard
English and Rules, Decorum, Self-Reliance/Responsibility/Honesty,
Order, Modesty in Form and Style, Efficiency/Economy, and Punctual-
ity. Bloom also describes the kinds of writing represented in composition
readers to show how conceptions of"good enough writing" have changed
and are changing. The essay runs twenty pages, includes seven substan-
tial endnotes, and cites forty sources, almost all peer-reviewed articles
and books, including eight titles Bloom either wrote or edited.
Community. Bloom locates herself among those who write, edit, and
critique one range of artifacts within her discipline-"composition
studies handbooks and rhetorics" (72)-while at the same time signaling
her distance from those artifacts, noting that classroom teachers read the
handbooks and rhetorics through the "realistic lenses of 'good enough."'
However, in the remainder of Bloom's essay, she speaks as teacher only
once, and briefly, when she explains how assignments in her course,jac
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 28, Numbers 3 & 4, 2008, periodical, 2008; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc268404/m1/92/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .