I, You, and It by James Moffett

It’s an interesting article which used the cafeteria experience to interpret the writing styles and the perspective on teaching English writing. I believe that re-read this article would be a good choice before working on the writing class syllabus. As the article mentions about the usage of vocabulary, style, logic and rhetoric on page 20, I agree with that choosing the appropriate words to describe an event or tell a story is so important which helps the readers understand the meaning in the context; however, there is a stereotype thought living in many EFL students’ minds that a good writer always chooses difficult words or sentence patterns to write. However, these students may not understand the real meaning of these words they use. There is another stereotype thought living in EFL writing instructors’ mind that good English writing needs to fit the format or formula which always representing as 5 paragraphs such as 1 Intro, 3 Body and 1 Conclusion. Most of writing teachers only teach writing-test writing. Thus, they may neither teach students what to write in each paragraph nor give students enough sentence patterns exercise nor enough examples to understand the concept of each paragraph. Thus, I believe that good English writing has to start with basic ideas and lots of practices. In addition, I think reading is another principal work for EFL students. Those who read too few also lack of chance to write down their thoughts in their lives.