ABSTRACT
Ken Macrorie (1918–2009) taught and wrote amid the sweeping changes in composition studies during the mid-20th century, exerting important influence over early critiques of current-traditional pedagogy. He published his first book in 1959, The Perceptive Writer, Speaker, and Reader, a traditional textbook that he later criticized as being “written by an author blind to what he was doing.” 1 Long a champion of authentic student writing, Macrorie taught for 17 years before discovering an approach that would elicit this type of writing. One day in 1964, fed up with affected student writing—lifeless academic prose that he termed “Engfish”—he told his advanced writing students to go home and write for ten minutes or until they had filled a page. While the results were uneven, the prose was “often alive.” 2
