Forming and Meaning: Writing the Counterpoint Essay.
Although many composition teachers talk about the need to find "or ganic" forms in composing, students are often content to organize their writing in formulaic ways, frequently resorting to the five-paragraph theme?an introduction followed by three or four supporting points and a summary conclusion. Most students have internalized this form to such a degree that it has become the "default drive" for expository writing. When teachers ignore the form that student writing will take, they are not necessarily allowing students to produce organic structures but are generally encourag ing conformity to standard patterns of exposition. Much of our resistance to discussing form with students comes from a romantic view of composition that posits form as a product of inspiration and suggests that specifying a form for composition, therefore, inevitably limits a writer's individual genius. In other words, form is often associated with conformity?, with rigid rules and "boiler plate" prose. However, as students become aware of different options for organizing discourse, they are not simply learning alternative methods of arrangement; they are learning new ways of thinking about their subject. A growing recognition that form serves a generative purpose in writing, that it liberates rather than limits many student writers, is evident in the scholarship of such writers as Chris Anderson, Richard Coe, Frank D'Angelo, Keith Fort, and Ross Winterowd. Further, Ann Berthoff argues that form is the creative force behind composition:
Teaching Students What Not to Say: Iser, Didion, and the Rhetoric of Gaps.
We all teach our freshmen that coherent writing depends on the use of transitional words and obvious signposts of structure to signal the relationships and sequences of ideas. At the freshman level, we necessarily teach explicitness and transition. Using the literary theory of Wolfgang Iser and the nonfiction of Joan Didion, I want to consider a paradox about coherence that experienced writers soon discover: powerful writing often depends on the deliberate omission of signposts and commentary; meaning sometimes carries across the gaps or silences in a discourse with greater power than words them selves can bear. This is not a new idea, either in rhetorical theory or in pedagogy. My purpose, however, is both to propose a somewhat different theoretical approach to the concept of implicitness and to make some practical suggestions for teaching implicitness to our students. I will begin with a quick sketch of Iser's theory, apply the theory to Didion's strikingly stark style, and then discuss how to apply this theory in the advanced composition class.1 My focus throughout will be restricted to what Ronald Weber has called "literary nonfiction": informative and reflective writing, primarily narrative and dramatic in mode, in which the language has an intrinsic literary interest. Iser's notion of implicitness, I will argue, is one way of explaining this "literary" quality. Furthermore, my recommendations for teaching will be limited to advanced composition. In my view, the rhetoric of gaps should be taught only after conventional instruction in cohesion and only as a means of supplementing traditional notions of how sentences and paragraphs fit together. The rhetoric of gaps gives us a vocabulary for teaching the kind of creative, exploratory, open-ended nonfiction that we want our students to try once they have mastered the basics of form, structure, and coherence.
Assessment of some agro-technological parameters of cactus pear fruit ( Opuntia ficus-indica Mill . ) in Morocco cultivars
Cactaceae had always attracted attention by their strange shapes and important adaptability supporting extreme conditions. For this reasons, Fruit traits were measured on 13 cultivars growing in different locations in Morocco. Results show significant differences between the cultivars. The source of this variation was probably genetic without excluding the geographic effects. The Tamri, Berkan, Ait Baha cultivars showed small fruit dimensions and weight. In contrast, Sidi-Ifni M, Nador, Mohammedia and Ben Guerir were greater than 100 g by fruit. Sidi-Ifni M, Hoceima, Mohammedia and Nador, although larger, contained few seeds, about 200 seeds per fruit; while Tamri, Ait Baha, Safi, Meknes and Tafraout contained over than 230 seeds per fruit. High levels of juice about 62 ml/100 g pulp were obtained with Sidi-Ifni M, Nador, Mohammedia and Ben Guerir cultivars. Total sugars of the 13 cultivars were quite similar and pH was low in Tamri and close to neutrality in the rest of cultivars. Therefore, oil extracted from Opuntia ficus-indica seeds constituted 13.6% of the whole seed. Thin-layer chromatography in conjunction with gas-liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry revealed a relatively high degree of unsaturation, 83.32% and 16% for saturated fatty acid, with a linoleic acid content of 63.66% followed by oleic 18.34%, palmitic 12.84% and stearic acid 2.81%. Based on these results, O. ficus-indica seed oil appears to be a good potential source of edible oil for human and (or) animal consumption. Our investigation describes that Tamri and Tafraout cultivars are not really a commercial viable fruit due to low total soluble solids value and highest seeds number per fruit. Against Mohammedia, Sidi Ifni M and Nador cultivars proved to have the highest fruit weight, very good total soluble solids value and low number of seeds, these cultivars can therefore be planted for both fruit production and for harvesting of cladodes for animal feed.