...This is an interesting one...

My oh my!!! Do the ideas of cooking and Elbow ring like the bells of Big Ben?! At first I was sure this entire book would be full of ideas surrounding structured writing and ideas that make students "good" writers. So I may have been a bit hasty in my predictions. When I began reading a chapter titled "Best Practices" I expected the same, a chapter full of tried and true methods. However, when I got to the portion on page 108 talking about Invention and so on, I began to feel a nostalgia. The nostalgia I felt was of Elbow's ideas surrounding "cooking"... Williams (whether on purpose or not) outlines his sub-topics just like Elbow did cooking. He begins with "Discussion", then "Outlining", "Freewriting", and so on. It is as if Williams takes all the emphasis off of grammar and structure and gets to the roots of what it takes to produce acceptable and good writing. Additionally in his portion "Freewriting", Williams cites Elbow and supports his idea of "The main goal is to discover things to say about a topic rather than to plan the paper" (109, Williams).
I have to say, I also agree with something Williams says on page 108 under the heading "Outlining". It is that "the focus is on the structural details of the outline rather that its content. That is, students spend much effort deciding whether an A must have a B; whether a primary heading begins with a Roman numeral or an upper-case letter..." (108, Williams)... I had never thought of this idea before, but I can agree completely! If I were a teacher in a classroom, and I assigned students a paper that required an outline, I would require their outline to be written with bullet points in succession with no indentation. My philosophy would be to just get one's ideas down on paper so one can go back later and make sense of them. This ties right into Elbow's idea of freewriting. Eventually with a mess of words down on paper, an idea or main theme with reveal itself. The same goes for the type of outlining I would prescribe. Also, I would consider the fact that outlining implies that a student would be forced to write down exactly what their ideas are in the order they would write them. I however disagree, which is why I would enforce a bullet point method with no indentation. That way all it is is abbreviated feewriting.
There are many ideas in this chapter that caught my eye, and I could go on for pages describing them, however what caught me as strong as Williams regurgitation of Elbow would be his ideas under the subtitle "Teacher as Coach". In composition classes when a teacher assigns a topic, who is the student writing for? The answer through the student's eyes is they are writing for the teacher. Williams says "Weak writers, for example, have a tendency to assume that the only reader of their essays will be the teacher, who already knows what the topic is, so they fail to identify the topic explicitly in their texts." (105, Williams). ALL HAIL WILLIAMS!!! I have found myself in the shoes of every student that Williams describes. Williams makes an interesting word choice by saying "weak writers", but I would have to argue that 90% of students qualify as "weak writers", because they write based on what the teacher has assigned, knowing the teacher assigned the work. If that is NOT the case for 90% of students then it was the case for me, and it took me to my Junior year in college to realize I needed to do differently.
The last thing I'd like to discuss is something I will surely bring up in class tomorrow... It is the notion of "Talk-Write" which Williams discusses on page 111. "...asking students to construct a plan mentally and to deliver an oral composition to the class." (111, Williams) The first thing that came to my mind was speech class in high-school and doing impromptu speeches. The task of taking an off-hand topic and preparing in little time to make a speech that is substantial. I believe this to be a very beneficial exercise because it takes the pen out of the hand of the writer. This is a brain marathon. My prediction then, would be that when the pen is put back into the hand of the writer, their thoughts will come out clear, concise, and more organized because they have had to do so without the luxury of any recording device other than their tongue. However, I could be completely wrong.