• DOI:10.1207/S15327981RR2102_03
• Corpus ID: 144654506

Sentences in Harry Potter, Students in Future Writing Classes

@article{Duffy2002SentencesIH,
  title={Sentences in Harry Potter, Students in Future Writing Classes},
  author={Edward T. Duffy},
  journal={Rhetoric Review},
  year={2002},
  volume={21},
  pages={170 - 187}
}

• E. Duffy
• Published 1 April 2002
• Education
• Rhetoric Review

All families, happy and unhappy, have their rituals. One of the happier rituals in ours has been each of us reading at bedtime to our girls. But I must confess that two years ago I was becoming increasingly bored and impatient with a constant dose of writing not far beyond the syntactical complexity of Dick and Jane. Having already read hundreds of such books with Katherine, I did not exactly relish Nora putting me through the same dull old round again. Then we all discovered Harry Potter, and it was as if the flagging spirit of my attendance at this Church of the Nightly Reading had received a new life. So thoroughly did I enjoy the Potter books that I began wondering not only about my own delight in them but also about that of my children and their friends. What is it about these books that has spread a fever for the written word among those who only yesterday did not know how to read at all? The pages that follow attempt a diagnosis of this epidemic in the joy of reading, a diagnosis whose major finding is that unlike so many of the tastes of the young, the Harry Potter craze is cause both for general celebration and for a very particular hopefulness about the college reading and writing classrooms of a decade hence. The series is not the poisoned and poisoning cup some current witch-hunters have sniffed out. Nor does its dismissal by a Whitbread Prize judge as “derivative, traditional and not particularly well written” very plausibly or effectively dispose of it and put it back in its piffling place (Safire A27).