Lazyteacher » writing

Style and the love of words

nstearns — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:53:48 +0000

I recently read Style: An Anti-Textbook by Richard Lanham and was impressed. It doesn’t have a load of useful or immediately effective info in it, but what it does have is a clear, well-argued claim that the best way to teach writing is to instill a love of words and what they can do. Lantham indulges in a lot of snarky and very fun scalpelling of “The Books”–the traditional composition textbooks– as well as of the common bureaucratic-speak and academia fog machine prose. But he kept coming around to the idea that Style is not so much a love of clarity in the sense of limpid mountain pools but in the expressive sense of a style that attends to the purpose of the writing. In this way, even crazy, pull out your armhair and stab yourself with a #2 pencil postmodern speak has a purpose: to proclaim the writer a member of the secret Illuminati of semioticians.

What does this mean for next year?

One thing I want to work on is finding ways to introduce a sense of playfulness in language. Sometimes that can be accomplished by showing models of this (such as this review of the Hulk and this one of The Happening or even this one of the book How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read). This I’ve done. The other is to try to play games. For instance:

Will Shortz word games
Scrabble
Writing captions for the New Yorker cartoon contest
Rewriting lyrics to songs
Neologisms or slang dictionaries
Online Word Games

What’s the emoticon for trepatiousness?

nstearns — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:56:57 +0000

Re: The Onion

Did you know you have 412 emotions? Simon Baron Cohen (Not this guy) and his crack team of researchers narrowed down the entire range of human feeling to 412 discrete emotions. In Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, the pop sci author does a whirlinwind tour of brain science from the point of view of, well, a dude such as himself trying to understand himself. He explores emotion, memory, personality, and brain scans to shed light on what’s going on in our heads that we might not be able to quite access with our conscious mind.

The research on 412 emotions–meant to assist autistics who need to study human emotion like I need to study Spanish–reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics where he shows how to draw differing emotion-feeling faces by combining simple emotions.

Other researchers such as Robert Plutchik cobbled together cute little charts that dissect emotions. For instance, he explains that optimism = love + joy (apparently not madness + full belly) or that love = joy + acceptance (isn’t that contradictory? didn’t you need joy to have love? Is optimism just love with a lot more joy?).

Anyway, why would this matter for writing teachers? Sometimes I imagine that I’m half-Asperger’s (though my score on the Autism Quotient is actually ok) and emotions aren’t always easy for me to decode. It might be interesting to have students use one of these half-mathematical emotional theories to pre-write for creative writing. For instance, you could plan on writing a story about remorse and you would plan to dramatize how and why your main character would feel both sadness and disgust; writers would need to create separate ways of showing how those two emotions are manifested. The sadness might be shown by doodling cartoons of a favorite puppy over and over again and the disgust might come through in a telephone conversation with a friend where the main character constantly puts herself down.

Hopefully, the kids will come up with better examples than that.

18 down and 182 to go

nstearns — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:41:57 +0000

Can you handle the Trollope? I don’ think you can.

I’ve blogged for awhile but for the most part the only audience I cultivated was under-18. And they were compelled by the State of Washington to read my musings because I cleverly mixed them in with stuff like what the homework was or how to figure out the difference between a simile and a metaphor. This is my first foray into blogging for an audience who isn’t forced upon pain of a future digging ditches to read my work.

Which means I’ll probably have a small audience.

Still, this does give me the chance to write out some of my thoughts and impressions as I begin work on my novel. Like any other cliche’s English teacher, I’ve always thought I had a book or 7 in me and this summer I have a goal to get 200 pages into my first draft. I read a story about Trollope where he describes getting down his “alotted number of pages” even when he’s throwing up in his cabin on a sea voyage to France. Of course, Trollope says that he gets

The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went.

Yikes. I–not being a real man like Trollope–have settled on 3, 3 pages a day, unless I’m working out. And it’s working. I’ve got 18 pages and I’m trying not to think so much if they’re any good or if I’ll publish them or if I’ll die of embarrassment if someone reads them. The process of writing has reminded me how anxious writing can make you. Before I start writing, I’m fidgeting and getting shaky hands. Once I start, I’m fine; I hit the zone pretty fast. But afterwards the most common feeling is not “I’m proud of myself” but “dang, am I glad I finished that.”

Simultaneously, I’ve been watching Konrad Glogowski’s presentation on blogging and thinking about how he emphasizes the fact that teachers need to engage in some of the same assignments students work on. My AP rhetoric students constantly bugged me to show them writing. I demurred. Next year, I hope to show them some of the novel (bowlderized perhaps) and choose a few of the lessons to have students assign me. For instance, I always have students write My Turn like essays in Essay Fundamentals; it might work to have them assign me something, give them some choices and have a vote and then publish along with them. Scary for me; hopefully, empowering for them.

This is something I think the Google is making us stupid article misses. It imagines that the Internet is only of use a content inhalation device. When it’s good, the Internets gets us talking to others.

Image Credit: Harper’s Anthony Trollope

Putter-inners vs. Taker-outers

nstearns — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:35:39 +0000

I’ve always loved Stephen King, even when I knew better. I read It. Even the whole set of Richard Bachman books. The English teacher-y side of me has always tried to tell the rest of me to cut it out, but it wasn’t very successful. I don’t even dig horror that much, but the parts of King I liked were the characters. They felt real and had inner lives that I bought into. The descriptions felt crisp without being overwritten. It was reading that had an effortless quality to it. I recommend it to my students all the time.

So, how can I use King to teach writing. What can we learn from him. In his book on writing called On Writing (natch), he tells this story.

[Gould] started in on the feature piece with a large
black pen and taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft. I
wish I still had the piece – it deserves to be framed, editorial
corrections and all – but I can remember pretty well how it looked when he had finished with it. Here’s an example:

Last night, in the well-loved gymnasium of Lisbon High School,
partisans and Jay Hills fans alike were stunned by an athletic
performance unequaled in school history: Bob Ransom, known as “Bullet”
Bob for both his size and accuracy, scored thirty-seven points. He did
it with grace and speed … and he did it with an odd courtesy as well,
committing only two personal fouls in his knight-like quest for a
record which has eluded Lisbon thinclads since 1953….
(after edit marks)

Last night, in the Lisbon High School gymnasium, partisans and Jay
Hills fans alike were stunned by an athletic performance unequaled in
school history: Bob Ransom scored thirty-seven points. He did it with
grace and speed … and he did it with an odd courtesy as well,
committing only two personal fouls in his quest for a record which has
eluded Lisbon’s basketball team since 1953….

When Gould finished marking up my copy in the manner I have
indicated above, he looked up and must have seen something on my face.
I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was
revelation.
“I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”
“I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and
yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”
“If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can
do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.
And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

I love that. And the best part of it is that it’s not so obvious to a non-writer why the second part is better. Students can learn a lot from combing through the changes and realizing why the 2nd version is better. The Tom Wolfe shot at F. Scott is relevant here. Sometimes we rock because of what we refrained from putting it in rather than from what might have been shoveled onto the page.

Still, with kids it’s really only half the issue. Some kids are constantly overwriting and use way more words than is necessary: the prose is clogged with weasely words and extra doodads that should be shunted off to the recycle bin. But other kids write small. They have very few words, little description, not a whole lot of detail, and suffer from a deep lack of something. These kids are harder to reach for me.

I want to tell them to live harder and put more in. Go crazy. Read Howl. Make mistakes. Write badly…as badly as humanly possible. It seems much more pitiable to me to be neither a putter-inner nor a taker-outer but a not have anything in at all-er…How do we help kids make more?