I've been slow to respond to this issue because I have a high and somewhat rueful respect for the power of a metaphor, and the right brain/left brain metaphor is a powerful one that has swept through education, the social sciences, and popular science writing. In spite of the fact that it's largely hooey. A part of brain research up into the sixties involved research into localization of function, and the study of hemispheric lateralization and the consequences of hemispherectomy or of the surgical severing of the corpus callosum led to interesting hypotheses about the functions of the hemispheres and their behavior under pathological conditions. Culturally, this research became something of the elephant in the bathtub: it spread quickly into the popular magazines and from there into educational circles as the right/left brain metaphor. However, brain researchers were well aware, and cautioned others, that they were studying abnormal phenomena that didn't necessarily shed light on the functioning of the normal brain. Once techniques like MRI and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) became available, much subtler studies of brain function became possible, and techniques have gotten even better since then. One of the major findings about language was that language activity in normal subjects, subjects without a diagnosable neural pathology, activated areas all over the brain and in both hemispheres. Different activities, like processing irregular vs. regular verbs, were distributed differently, but they still involved areas all over the brain. The same was true of lexical storage, retrieval, and learning. As a metaphor, the right brain/left brain dichotomy encapsulates some very broad-brushed differences in learning styles, interests, abilities, etc. But the danger of taking the metaphor as scientific reality is that we overlook the fact that differences like these are scalar and multi-faceted in ways that a dichotomy simply can't capture. Gordon and others are entirely correct in their approach that we must consider individual learning styles and not reduce them to a simple, broad-brushed metaphor. Herb Dick - I think that the issue goes beyond being "like us" (yes, I, too, admit to an ancient attachment to diagramming!) and reaches to the heart of the issue that we have with NCTE and their various attacks against grammar. If we can move grammar away from the side of the writing process that deals with error correction and more towards what classical rhetoric would call "invention," then we can demonstrate that grammar can, indeed, play a major role in creative ("right brain") part the writing process. In fact, I think that grammar can a more powerful creative tool than so-called "unstructure free-writing." Students can use standard grammatical constructions to create original, powerful sentences, paragraphs, and even entire essays starting with little more than simple subject-predicate combinations. There truly is a grammar for the right brain, and as you indicated, it doesn't need to be separated from the left brain. In fact, it is the structure of grammar that allows both halves to work so well together! Grammar is an "all brain" subject! Geoff Layton _________________________________________________________________ Fixing up the home? Live Search can help http://imagine-windowslive.com/search/kits/default.aspx?kit=improve&loca le=en-US&source=hmemailtaglinenov06&FORM=WLMTAG To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/