welch

In the bean patch, Didier knelt down. He knelt down, my husband of just two months, and he reached out, snapped off a bean. For the past month we had been preparing for the worst and now here was something worser still. Worser. How could we talk of such things? Even grammar was against us. (Nancy Welch, "Managed Care: An Essay about Irony, Illness, and Teaching," in Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach, edited by David Starkey, p. 10)

hapgood

If fields of winter freshmen were
A heavy fall of virgin snow,
Then I would be a shoveler
Of ashes. Rhythmically, I'd sow
My cinders, scatter broadcast flake
On flake of petaled grey on white.
Piously, I'd know my wake
Was ugly, but a harbinger
Of fructifying summer things,
Like Mercury's touch and Flora's flings
In Primavera's wanton rite.

(Robert Hapgood, "Corrupting the Youth," in College English, volume 18, number 8, May 1957, p. 400)

britton

I look at the world in the light of what I have learned to expect from past experience of the world. That is to say, there is on the one hand my world representation - the accumulated record of my past experience - and there is on the other hand the process of representing to myself whatever of the world confronts me at any given moment. It is as though, in confrontation, my world representation were a body of expectations from which I select and match: the selecting and matching being in response to whatever cues the situation offers (but influenced also by my mood of the moment). What takes place in the confrontation may contradict or modify or confirm my expectations. My expectations are hypotheses which I submit to the test of encounter with the actual. The outcome affects not only my representation of the present moment, but, if necessary, my whole accumulated representation of the world. Every encounter with the actual is an experimental committal of all I have learned from experience. (James Britton, Language and Learning, p. 15, quoted in Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 4th ed., p. 90)

de zengotita

...when you hear statistics about AIDS in Africa for the 349th time, or see your 927th picture of a weeping fireman or an oil-drenched seabird, you can’t help but become fundamentally indifferent - unless it happens to be “your issue,” of course, one you “identify with,” a social responsibility option you have chosen. Otherwise, you glide on, you have to, because you are exposed to things like this all the time. All the time. Over breakfast. In the waiting room. Driving to work. At the checkout counter. All the time. (Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, pp. 23-24)