Summary Of Linda Brodkey's Writing On The Bias

The purpose of Linda Brodkey's “Writing on the Bias” was too illustrate that learning how to write cannot be done through a strict set of rules that someone simply follows blindly. Brodkey disagrees with the way she was taught to read in school and how it is not real writing. She tells how as a child all she wanted to do was follow the rules of writing. This did her no good, it was not until her last years in college that she actually began questioning those who were setting down these rules she was supposed to be following. After she realized this was when she really learned how to write, which in a way set her free. School writing has no substance. “Yet when I look back I see only a young girl intent on getting it right, eager to produce flawless prose, and not a trace of the woman who years later would write that school writing is to writing as catsup to tomatoes: as junk food to food” (Brodkey 528). …show more content…
She read about it and followed the set of rules set in front of her. She thought by following the pictures in the book about ballet, and copying them exactly that then “poof” she would be dancing ballet. Just learning the movements that make up ballet is not actually fluently dancing ballet. In the same way as learning grammar, spelling, punctuation, and paragraph structure does not then make you a writer. “By contrast, the book I read illustrated ballet as a set of discrete skills to be learned and then routinely deployed in seemingly endless and sexless reenactments of tableaux-bodies transfixed in rather than moving through space” (Brodkey