A Few Examples of Writing Disclaimers

1.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them; 
The good is oft interred with their bones; 
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it. 
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come to speak in Caesar's funeral. . .


4. Again, a cynical reading might lead one to conclude that, well, it must be
nice for a two-career couple to have a good time while being creative, but
isn't it common knowledge that to achieve anything new and important,
especially in the arts, a person must be poor and suffering and tired of the
world?  [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi]

5.  Perhaps this sounds condescending--as though I am not treating my
students seriously enough as smart adults.  I hope not.  [Peter Elbow]

6. Of course these are idealistic goals; many students will not attain them. 
But I insist on them as reasonable goals for my teaching, because if I taught
well and if all the conditions for learning were good, I believe all my
students could achieve them.  (Peter Elbow)

7.  Am I just being naive?  Maybe.  In any case let me openly acknowledge
an arguable assumption underneath all this. [Peter Elbow]

8. I am conscious here of relying on analysis of text and context to
generalize about the writer's intention--a problematical strategy, I realize. 
Ideally, discussion with the writers would reveal the ways in which they are
conscious of their readers' expectations and seek to meet them.  Yet
analyzing text from the reader's perspective, trying to identify the social
gestures of which grateful readers take note, can also teach us something
about writing.  [Peshe C. Kuriloff, "What Discourses Have in Common:
Teaching the Transaction Between Writer and Reader," CCC 47.4
(December 1996): 496.]

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