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written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms. It is very difficult to make up for gaps in a lifetime of reading and practice over the course of a fifteen-week semester. As Mark Richardson, an assistant professor of writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, says, “Writing involves abilities we develop over our lifetimes. Some students are more advanced in them when they come to college than are others. Those who are less advanced will not develop to a level comparable to the more-prepared students in one year or even in two, although they may reach adequate levels of ability over time.” 2
    All that said, there had to be something to this textbook. It had gone through a half-dozen editions. The authors, in their acknowledgments section, thanked no fewer than forty-one college teachers from all over the country for their input. The book had all the bells and whistles, including a companion Web site, and as the preface informed me, the text featured “realistic treatment of the rhetorical methods,” “extensive thematic connections,” and “abundant editorial apparatus.”
    We read and talked about the readings that accompanied the compare-contrast instruction. We diagrammed their form on the board. We read Bruce Catton closely, as tens of thousands of classes have before us (the essay was published in 1956, and is in nearly every writing textbook I have ever seen). Outside of the English 101 curriculum, though, he is something of a forgotten figure. Fifty years ago, his narrative histories were best sellers, and he was as ubiquitous in the popular culture as, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin is today. When I was a kid, his works were well represented on my family’s bookshelf. Banners at Shenandoah and A Stillness at Appomattox were among the books I found so alluring—whose titles were poetry to me—that I vowed to read them when I got old enough to understand them, along with A. J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders , and an oversize graying book of photographs called Women Are Here to Stay: The Durable Sex in Its Infinite Variety Through Half a Century of American Life. Of course, once I got old enough to truly understand things, I never read a single one of them. Such an odd way for Catton’s career to play out, with one perfectly crafted essay preserved between the covers of so many textbooks.
    We extracted all we could out of Bruce. We had all the side-by-side lists you could want. Lee “might have ridden down from the old age of chivalry, lance in hand, silken banner fluttering over his head.” Grant, in contrast, was the “modern man emerging; beyond him, ready to come on the stage, was the great age of steel and machinery, of crowded cities and a restless, burgeoning vitality.” We even talked about Catton’s occasionally old-fashioned style, with its charming inversions (“Daring and resourcefulness they had, too . . . ”) so appropriate for the grandeur of the subject matter.
    The students wrote everything down in their notebooks.
    We read the whimsical “Neat People vs. Sloppy People” by Suzanne Britt. I find Britt’s piece funny, though not as funny as the next piece, “Batting Clean-up and Striking Out” by Dave Barry. Barry’s essay wanders off in directions only he can go; his ability to deliver bits of adolescent silliness using the hoariest comic forms—all with a wide-eyed earnestness—and have it all come out actually funny may make him the most singular literary talent of our age. It goes without saying that the class had never heard of Dave Barry. They laughed, a great many of them, rather heartily. Some didn’t, perhaps because they simply didn’t find him funny or perhaps school had always been so tense for them that they had long ago shut off the receptors that react spontaneously to anything presented in a