4 - Three licensing stories: The literate inscriber, the good writer, and the author writer

Summary

Dysgraphia is a form of agraphia, the total inability to write. It is seen in children who are slow to develop writing skills and in adults who acquire the syndrome due to brain injury.

Diane Walton Cavey, Dysgraphia: Why Johnny Can't Write

America's universities don't teach college kids how to write – at least, not how to write very well.

Stanley K. Ridgley, National Review Online

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

Stephen King, On Writing

If we hope to understand our important metaphors and metonymies for writing, we also have to understand the stories that license these figures. As I found in my earlier research on metaphors in the discourse of trade and business, metaphors are integrally associated with stories that provide rhetorical support – that make a given metaphor seem either true or false. When I asked a series of focus-group participants to discuss whether or not certain metaphors seemed true to them (e.g., Trade Is War, Trade Is A Game, Markets Are Containers, Trade Is A Journey), they persistently justified their responses by supplying stories of how trade works or how the world works.