Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is fundamentally different from teaching something like science and the rigid way American high schools teach essay writing. Galchen also ponders whether the best writers and scientists might have some things in common:
They say that Milton wrote much of “Paradise Lost” from a kind of sleep, and I believe it. But I believe that in most every intellectual endeavor, the extremes of its work come from an unteachable dark.
