The negative comments on my previous column (there were many positive ones too) fall neatly into two groups, the attacks on me and the attacks on my ideas.

Let’s do the ad hominem stuff first. More than a few posters declared that while I talk the talk, I don’t walk the walk. Eric issues a challenge: “So Mr. Fish, how about teaching some comp classes yourself?” English Professor is confident that “we can safely assume that Mr. Fish has never actually taught a composition class himself.” Ditto anonymous writing instructor: “I’m sure that Fish is paid too dearly for his opinions here and elsewhere to actually teach composition classes.” Maeve asks, “By the way, when’s the last time you taught a freshman composition class?”

That one’s easy. The last time I taught a regularly scheduled freshman composition class was my last year teaching in a liberal arts college. That was 2004-2005, and in the years before that, when I was the dean, I taught the course every fall. Since 2005, I’ve been a faculty member at a law school where there are no freshmen to teach, so I’ve had to make do with offering a non-credit writing workshop on Mondays; it’s my version of pro bono work and last fall 50 or so students and a few colleagues took advantage of it.

Earlier in my career I taught composition (sometimes two courses in a semester) for 12 years at the University of California, Berkeley. I was one of two full professors to do so. In 1974, I moved to Johns Hopkins, where there was no writing course because of the (mistaken) assumption that students who were good enough to get into the university didn’t need one. An enterprising graduate student named Pamela Regis enlisted my help in setting up a fledgling program, and by the time I left for Duke in 1985 the program was established and growing.

At Duke writing instruction was not housed in the English department, and so I could neither participate in it nor direct its course. After that to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I was able to get involved again. As dean, I held seminars for the T.A.’s in my college and the business college and blocked attempts to add a service learning component to the writing course. (That’s an answer to Margaret Boerner’s question, which she thinks is rhetorical: “Did he do anything about it when he was dean?”) Now I give workshops in colleges across the country, most recently at Columbia University’s Teachers College. When Max Byrd says (contemptuously), “Professor Fish might get off his high horse and teach a course himself,” I reply, Professor Byrd should climb off his low horse and do some fact-checking before he pronounces.

So that’s the experience part. Then there’s the expertise part. I am told by MC that I “don’t know a damn thing about composition.” Liz is kind enough to inform me that “there is an entire field of study on this topic; countless articles and books are written about the subject by experts.” And, she adds, it’s all too typical that people like me “who complain about poor writing don’t want to teach it themselves.” Straight face advises me to “know your limitations and defer your ignorant ‘common sense’ to the DECADES of theory and practice IN THE FIELD” and wonders why I “failed” to leave the matter of writing instruction to the “specialists” in my department.

Maybe because I was one. I haven’t written “countless articles” on the subject, but I have written some and they have been part of the conversation, especially a 1987 piece titled “Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope and the Teaching of Composition.” I have been on the editorial board of one of the leading journals, and the essays in that and other composition venues often discuss my work (not always favorably). I have written columns on writing, also widely discussed, in this newspaper and I have studied and taught many of the major composition theorists.

Of course, the fact that I can claim experience and credentials in the field doesn’t make my views correct. Those views can certainly be criticized, as they are by a number of posters. The main criticism is that my emphasis on teaching forms and only forms (a) leaves out everything interesting, (b) leads to boring classes no student would want to take and (c) has been discredited by the research years ago. That research, according to Dee, shows that “teaching grammar out of context” is ineffective, in part because, as writer teacher observes, “students are afraid that they aren’t abiding by the rules.”

If that is what is meant by teaching grammar — memorizing rules and being always afraid of breaking them — I agree. If the effect of instruction is to make students fear that they are walking through a minefield of error and that at any moment they are going to step on something that will wound them, the odds of their learning anything are small.

The research that led Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Lowell Schoer to conclude in 1963 that “the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible . . . even a harmful effect on improvement in writing,” is no doubt correct but beside my point; all it proves is that “drilling students on parts of speech” (McLoughlin) doesn’t work. What does work, I have found, is something quite different: drilling students in the forms that enable meaning; and these are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought.

A small example. Let’s say I’m teaching the neither/nor form. I begin by producing a simple neither/nor sentence. “Neither his age nor his disability prevented him from competing.” I then ask my students to write their own sentences on that model. Most of them are able to do it, and they produce sentences with 20 different contents, but only one form. The next step is for the students to figure out what that form is. Just how does a neither/nor sentence organize items and actions in the world?

It takes a while to work that out, but in not too much time students are able to explain that the form organizes three components: two conditions (age and disability) and the resolution (to compete) in relation to which they may have presented an obstacle, but did not. The important thing students learn, in addition to being able to generate neither/nor sentences forever, is that the relationship among those components, whatever they are, is always the same: two assertions that have a relationship to each other combine to highlight the unlikeliness of an action or an attitude.

Notice that this is an abstract and purely formal account of the matter and that it will fit innumerable narratives (and a narrative is what a neither/nor sentence is). While the content is variable and abundant — as David Berman says, “content is everywhere” — the form is unvarying. It follows then that what students must learn are the forms; the content will follow. A neither/nor sentence, or an even-though sentence or a nevertheless sentence, or a thousand other forms that can be studied and mastered — these do not clothe an antecedent content; they make it possible; they are not brought in to adorn a story; they are the story. In short — and I borrow this phrasing from my book editor Julia Cheiffetz — in learning how to write, it’s not the thought that counts.

That is my answer to the many posters who said things like, “students cannot write about nothing” (cyndy) or “students need to write about something” (ISE) or “the practice of writing has to be embedded in something” (Erik Borg). Writing is its own subject, and a deeper and more fascinating one than the content it makes available. Content just sprawls around; forms constrain and shape it. As Jamakaya says, “good writing skills instill good thinking,” not the other way around. Robin T. agrees: “Young people who can’t write can’t think.”

Shunyam would have it that “one can’t teach writing without topics and texts that students can be involved in,” but I have found that students very quickly become involved in the extraordinary power and generativity of ordinary forms; they are amazed, delighted and fascinated by the new analytic skills they are able to exercise. And the texts? Well, they can be anything; they are disposable; they are just filler; they are not and should not be the center of interest, which again is not mere form but enabling form.

I call this the “Karate Kid” method of teaching writing. You will remember that in the 1984 movie the title figure is being trained to perform in matches, but his teacher has him waxing cars and painting fences, repeating over and over again the same stylized motions. The kid thinks he’s not learning anything. But he’s learning everything. Like the forms my students study, these motions — formal moves — need no context and can be made effective in any context, as the final scenes show.

Of course, “The Karate Kid” is fiction, but real-life contexts are brought in by two posters who make my point. In response to George B.’s dictum that “a class in painting should not be about brushes, tubes and canvas,” Laurie declares that in fact “a course in painting should be about brushes, tubes, and canvas.” If you don’t have control of what the tools do, you’re not going to be able to go on to the “higher” activity. Chefesse, whose name identifies her profession, tells us that “learning to cook, you have to practice over and over again how to chop vegetables before you master the sauté pan.” The formal repertoire makes content-based performance possible; without a formal repertoire, internalized to the extent of being automatic, performance is haphazard and without shape or boundaries.

Finally, one criticism of me is certainly justified. It goes to my own writing in this column. Blago, among others, finds me prolix. He gives a one-word piece of advice: “Concision.” (I haven’t followed it this time, either.) Johnny provides a deeper analysis. I wrote, he says, two essays, one about writing skills, the other about conservative efforts to undermine professorial autonomy. They didn’t quite mesh and got in each other’s way.

He’s right. I should have remembered a fellow columnist’s golden rule — one topic at a time. I’ll try to do better in the future.