Summary Of Prescriptive Writing By David Foster Wallace

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David Foster Wallace was an eccentric, well organized writer who described to me the fine lines between descriptive and prescriptive writing. I learned that descriptivism is far more valuable than prescriptivism. With the help of a couple past English courses, I was able to construct my ability to write both an effective, abstract essay while maintaining a prescriptive skeleton. Course such as mythology, my seventh grade english course, and my sophomore year English course are all examples of classes that either helped my dexterity mature or diminish.
The first English course I came to know and love was my senior year mythology course. An overall amazing course. Free spirited, problem posed, and educational. Gender specific normalities…show more content…
The class itself was a nice course; descriptive lectures, peerless presentations, and topnotch films. Numerous amounts of essays, however, had my brain on the brink of destruction. A four page paper2 due every third Monday of every month; written about the novel we had just finished reading. To prepare for each essay, and reading of the novel, we needed to develop some basic grammar skills. A superfluous amount of words were written on the board before each book reading was about to start. One by one, my teacher, Mrs. Randazzo yelled out the definition, a couple synonyms and antonyms and wrapped it up with her catch phrase “write these down, they may be on a quiz *wink*”. The course was laid out to mirror the rules of prescriptive english. We were told to use correct forms of grammar, proper wording, and traditional sentence structure. Our textbook set the foundation we were suppose to build off of. My teacher made it very clear that once we entered the room, our ‘street’ language was of no importance and would not be answered. That style of reformation was atrocious. It made children hate her even more than they already had. Day after day there would be several unanswered questions due to lack of what David Foster Wallace would call, SWE (Standard Written English). Whilst she thought it was beneficial because it was teaching us to speak like educated human being instead of street rats, we children
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