Thursday, April 13, 2006
The Word
I'm in the midst of grading papers from one of my classes and it's striking how different people can be in how they present themselves in the spoken and written word. I have one student who can hardly talk - she gets so flustered that she can hardly utter a syllable. But give her a paper to write and her expressiveness is lovely. Almost poetic. Of course the converse is true as well, with the student who is so good at talking in class but whose slickness falls apart when exposed to the logic of print. Something profound there...
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2 comments:
"Something profound there..."
There's variation amongst individuals and their abilities? Don't judge a book by its cover? Don't pee into the wind in the middle of a tornado?
It's said of Francisco Suárez that he had great difficulty in public disputations, stumbling over words, and being bested in speech by young upstart students even into his middle age.
He was granted admission to the Jesuit order only on a probationary basis, having failed the entrace exams twice.
Later on, however, things fell into place, we might say, and Suárez was regarded during his lifetime as being the greatest living philosopher and theologian, and given the nickname Doctor Eximius
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