Travel Blog

The question the New York Times Book Review posed to its dueling essayists yesterday was: "Can writing be taught?" The question was assumed to be about creative writing - in an age of proliferating MFA programs - but Zoe Heller aptly pointed out that, long before post-grad work, schools fail to teach structure and style, i.e., those aspects of writing that can be taught. (Not to mention, in some schools' cases, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.) As a result (my conclusion, not hers) we have become a nation that teaches to become writers people who have not been taught how to write properly.