Telling Writing: A Study In How Not To Write A Book

I was going to write about music but that takes way too long and I am in a ranting mood. My topic of choice today will be Ken Macrorie, author of Telling Writing. Let me preface this by saying that I think this book is a worthwhile read for our APW class; my frustrations lies not with the content, but the delivery.

The vast majority of this book is spent on fake passages written by the author, who is deviously pretending he didn't write them. After each passage, he either tears the passage apart or lauds its literary merit. I wouldn't mind this so much if it weren't so blatantly obvious that he writes everything himself. To prove this point, I opened up to a random page of the book (page 76) and sure enough, here, in all its glory, is a page-long passage that is supposedly written by a member of a writing class. Let me give you a sample of this passage:

"Now don't forget: I want you home by midnight," my father barked.
"Have a good time, but be good," my mother chirped.

Apparently, Mr. Macrorie has never actually read anyone else's writing before because nobody actually writes like that. It wouldn't bother me so much if he would just admit his passages were hypothetical. But no, every single one of them is prefaced by "here is a passage written by a high school girl" or "a woman used the following dialogue in her journal entry." Oh Ken, you are so sneaky.