Gordon Harvey Learning Through Writing

As Lisa Ede made abundantly clear in “Rethinking Writing”, our modern world is more inundated with writing than ever. As writing steadily gains prominence in the technological age, it also loses any sense of formality. The myriad everyday ways and settings in which we use writing can engender serious obstacles to our generation’s awareness of the value of writing. Awash in a deluge of mundane, quotidian writing, we can easily lose sight of the impactful ways that writing, and the means we choose to deliver it, can affect us. Something struck me upon reading Gordon Harvey’s grading rubric in “Learning Through Writing”. The other two rubrics seemed to be mainly concerned with factors such as clarity, tone, and presentation. While I concede that these are all important details, what I found so refreshing about Harvey’s take on quality writing was his focus on ambition. In my response, I …show more content…
A piece of academic writing with fully realized ambition will have no extraneous information, because it fully and accurately expresses the thoughts of the author. Ambition is therefore manifested in writing as the choice of what to write, and how best to go about writing it. Every word written since that historic first symbol in ancient Sumer has served some purpose. Each of the trillions of words that humans have written served to further the flow of an idea in some minuscule way. In essence, each word has its own ambition- what the author is seeking to achieve by choosing that word over the countless other words of the English language. These tiny building blocks of ambition are then stacked to form sentences , then paragraphs. Each step brings the author closer to the capability to articulate the very extremes of human experience and imagination, encompassing any concept that the human mind is capable of