Mere Rhetoric

Welllllcome to Meeeeere Rhetooooooooric! Ooooh, it’s Halloween week, which means here at Mere Rhetoric, we bring you a spoooooky story. Last year we explored the dark side of anonymous peer review and this year we get to talk about another scary aspect of the academic life: writing prompts. Writing prompts are, as genre theory has informed us, their own weird genre, with better and worse practices. Generally speaking, giving students a clear sense of direction in what to write while empowering them to pursue their own objectives for writing gives them a chance to become independent writers. Give them busy work and, usally, they’ll resent you and even writing. In the worst cases, though, they may produce something far worse… As M. R. James illustrates in his classic tale “A School Story.”   TWO men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. "At our school," said A., "we had a ghost's footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square to