Language Study #6: enjoy writing

Ideally, students learn to enjoy the satisfactions of composing and comprehending.

Satisfaction takes time; digestion proceeds across minutes, hours or days.  For students to experience satisfaction in composing or comprehending, they need time to feel it.  Recognition of accomplishment plays an equally important role in this process.  Teachers promote this satisfaction by giving students time to compose, alongside the burgeoning ability to recognize accomplishment.  These are quiet joys, internal joys amid today's spectacularly visual and electronic culture.  [Ed. note, I wrote the first pieces of this series eight years ago, but have chosen to keep their original wording.]  In terms of composition, students can feel satisfaction, for example, at overcoming an obstacle.  How will they begin a letter, essay or poem?  How will they find a word or sentence that says what they want, that, according to Tolstoi, infects the audience with the writer's feeling?  In terms of comprehension, students can feel satisfaction, for example, when detecting a pattern.  While reading The Age of Innocence recently, I was made impatient by the narrator.  I began to think Wharton was cheating me with her omniscient narrator.  From the beginning, again influenced by Tolstoi's What is Art?, I asked which character Wharton cares about.  She sides with no one, except perhaps Countess Oleska.  Her criticism runs so close to anger that she exploits the narrator.  She uses it as her own personal tool.  As a result, moments of Archer's thoughts in the narration ring less true.  I enjoy comprehending the story to this degree, and wish similar enjoyment for students.

Picture.Student Writers # 1: Invite your audience

  

 First in a series of architectural analogies meant to help student writers. 

 

  Walk my neighborhood, as I do daily with our dog, Sybil, and you will see a variety of interesting buildings.  The photographs in this series help me remember some basic principles of successful writing. 

 

Invite your audience.

I like this doorstep because of the two pots of purple flowers, the strength of the purple against the gray steps, and the clean lines of the whole entryway.  This house elegantly invites my eyes up the stairs to the arch at the top.  For example, since the pots sit against the house rather than on the street-side ledge, my eyes move from left to right--from unadorned to adorned ledge.  Simplicity also plays a role.  These steps have just two pots, and that's it.  This simplicity, in turn, establishes contrast between the gray steps and purple flowers. (Incidentally, the plant's leaves are dark purple.)  Finally, whoever painted these steps did a careful job.  The painter has applied the paint evenly, without any stray swatches or splatters.  The resulting clean lines complete the inviting nature of this entrance.

In writing, carefully paint the entrance to your story, poem or essay.  Invite your readers by giving them something to look at--something towards which their eyes will naturally move.  Start simply, with clear lines.  A cluttered stairway haphazardly composed may send them down the street looking for a more inviting entrance.

Language Study #5: "details" of language

Ideally, students learn to understand details of language well enough to shape it themselves and see how others shape it.

The "details of language" occur in words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, pages and books.  They involve vocabulary, semantics, syntax and grammar.  The more students understand how to identify and use these details, the more they can shape language to their desired ends.  Important to instruction is recognizing both publicly and privately the satisfaction derived from such shaping.  That satisfaction does not come automatically, even in this particular sketch.  At times, the desired end or audience grows foggy and the writing gathers lines in a journal but little else.  Recognizing the trial-and-error, the drafting, the eventual nature of successful composition has become perhaps an even more important ingredient in today's writing instruction.  The fastfood/electronic/digital culture tends to reward instantaneous action.  The faster the better.  Writing, though, at least the kind that brings personal satisfaction to me, involves several stages of invention, re-invention and polish.  The shaping occurs over time.  Consider a book like John Wideman's novel, Philadelphia Fire, which sports across the page like one of its street ball stars on a West Philly basketball court.  Even such apparently free-wheeling approaches demand forethought, first runs at the basket, responses from fellow reader-writers, then a "tedious" return to the detailed choices about words, phrases and sentences.  What do you want to convey about the bombing of a West Philly neighborhood?  And to whom?  What style and arrangement of words will work?  What's available to me.

Follow-up: Concrete Imagery (with student view)

In an earlier post (26 December 09), I wrote about details and poetry's ability to demonstrate their value.  In a comment on that post, I mentioned a student who had successfully explained her understanding of this value.  I have since received her permission to publish her explanation.

First, some context for her writing.  She and her classmates, in the Poetry class, had written an original poem, as well as a required commentary called a PDF.  In this commentary, students describe what they Planned, as they began and proceeded with composing.  Next they explain what they Discovered about the subject or their plans.  In the last section, they express Final Reflections on the subject matter, the specific poem or poetry in general.

This student wrote a poem ("Details of the Stars") about a simple car ride back from a basketball game.  In the final reflection, she explains how the details have benefited her, her poem and other people.  Below, you see the unedited text of her reflection.  I am grateful not only for this student's permission to publish, but also for her carefully considered insights.

"I now understand a reward that comes from writing a poem:  the process of writing can make an experience richer, more valuable, and, if written carefully, can capture the moment.  I believe that in order to represent the emotional center of an experience in a poem, it helps to remember as many details as possible.  For instance, I was able to include dialogue, specific feelings and even actions that I remembered from the car ride.  These details gave rise to the contentedness I feel encompasses the center of the poem.  I am proud that I was able to convey what the experience meant to me for others, as well as enrich the experience for myself."

Language Study #3: empathy

Ideally, students learn to work and live beside other people.

We all arrive with our own agendas, like Mr. Mouth on yesterday’s M1 bus.  The lower Manhattan subways had shut off after a Con Edison explosion in their plant at 15^th and Avenue C.  We had been touring the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Dan.  After he showed us his office, he took us to Grimaldi’s Pizzeria on Fulton Street, just a block from the East River.  The ample tour of a spacious work environment preceded a wonderfully flavorful meal at a no-nonsense, friendly neighborhood restaurant with a well-deserved reputation.  After lunch we ate ice cream down by the docks.  The metal railing displayed a passage from one of Whitman’s poems.  He loved Brooklyn and NYC.  He saw most people as his companions and co-workers.  He empathized with common workers.  The man on the M1, however, provides a sharp contrast.  Although all of us on Church Street heading north from City Hall were either flagging cabs or watching for  buses, he somehow felt, once the bus did arrive,  that his need to board the bus outweighed everyone else’s.  Although the bus stopped ahead of his spot, he pushed past others as he reprimanded the driver for not stopping in front of him.  Once on the bus, he never stopped voicing his anger, suspicion or insults at strangers.  Sometimes teenagers, like all of us, have the potential to act this way.  They, we, need to learn Whitman’s empathy.  He loved to ride the Fulton Street Ferry to be with the other travelers.

July 2002

Composing the Whole Page

Our son sent us a new woodcut of his.  As I kept admiring the purple dove on heavy white stock, I began to appreciate the symmetry of the print.   The beak points gently down to the right, while the extended wing and tail feathers point up to the left at a similar angle.  The large single white eye--we see the dove's profile--is echoed by white circles and stars in the body.  The round-bellied breast is echoed by the shape of the up-thrust wing, itself striated with purple and white.

My wife reminds me of Dan's ability from a very early age to see the whole page.  He has had a seemingly innate capacity to compose and arrange in the space provided.  In the context of his visual-spatial intelligence, I wonder about teenagers composing essays.  When and how do they gain the intelligence to see the whole "page" of the piece they will construct?  At his young age, Dan had a sense of satisfying placement.  Granted students' composing an essay involves an array of word-based skills, but I can't help but wonder how to use parts of what Dan has been showing me over the years with his woodcuts.

Philosophical Interlude: Cultivating Discipline

" 'Correct discipline' and 'enough time' are inseparable notions.  Correct discipline cannot be hurried, for it is both the knowledge of what ought to be done, and the willingness to do it--all of it, properly.  The good worker will not suppose that good work can be made answerable to haste, urgency, or even emergency.  But the good worker knows too that after it is done work requires yet more time to prove its worth.  One must stay to experience and study and understand the consequences--must understand them by living with them, and then correct them, if necessary, by longer living and more work.  It won't do to correct mistakes made in one place by moving to another place, as has been the common fashion in America. . . . Distraction is inimical to correct discipline, and enough time is beyond the reach of anyone who has too much to do."

from Wendell Berry's essay, "People, Land and Community"
in Standing by Woods: Essays (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1983)

This passage resonates with me as a teacher of today's high school students, especially those in an urban environment.  Both they and I need to cultivate this kind of discipline.  Berry's passage comes from his description of farming the same hillside for many years.

Poetic Interlude: Concrete Imagery

Poetry teaches students the value of concrete images.

For example, it teaches us to look beyond the abstract term "nature," in order to see the tall redwood growing between two buildings. It trains our eye down the thin alley between two long apartment buildings in a San Francisco neighborhood. It stretches our arms such that our finger tips rub the stucco on either wall at the same time. At the back of the buildings, we see that the fifty-foot tree, first noticed from the sidewalk, actually grows out of the soil at its feet--just as Blake's poison tree and Whitman's live oak have done. Poetry, in other words, leads us down that dark alley to see the strength of this single evergreen. It instructs us to look past the facades and see the roots taking hold in someone's, yes someone's, backyard.

Language Study #2: the power and the beauty

Ideally, students learn to appreciate the power and beauty of artistic language.

John Wray’s first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, comes to mind—partly because I recently finished it (July 2002), but perhaps even more so because it paints a remarkably wise, patient and compassionate portrait of Austrian life between the wars. I am not only grateful for his history and geography lessons, but also indebted to his sentences, many of which I admire for their grace alone. The sounds and rhythms impress me as carefully crafted pleasures. So, too, do the turns of phrase that capture persistent emotions of the novel. Most memorable, in part because I have described it to friends, is the protagonist Oscar’s reply to his girlfriend when she relays her Austrian cousin’s complicity in ruining an Austrian Jew’s business. Without apparent disapproval, she reports that while the German SS destroyed the man’s shop, the cousin was there but did nothing. Therefore, she says, he bore no responsibility. Oscar replies in a tone that characterizes much of his disheartened, resilient repugnance. He says that she will have to explain her statement to him sometime when they are both feeling quite patient. As my friend, Doug, pointed out, it is the second half of Oscar’s remark that distinguishes it from other iterations of this wounded, angry incomprehension. John’s beautifully powerful language recognizes the role of time’s cumulative effect. He finds several ways of capturing initially vague images that resolve themselves as writer and reader approach them.

July 2002

Language Study #1: clear, full expression

First in a series about what students ideally learn to do through language study in schools.
In July 2002, I hand-wrote the first six of the series in a MiniComp notebook (6 x 31/2"), limiting each mini-essay to one page front and back.  For numbers seven through ten, I have just the topics.

 

Ideally, students learn to express themselves clearly and fully.

Children, teenagers no less than other children, need to be understood. Even adults who have lived together, talked together for years, struggle to express themselves clearly to one another. Writing instruction during the teenage years gives students focused work on consciously narrowing the gap between emotions, thoughts and perceptions on the one hand and verbal expression on the other. Our ideas and feelings are constantly changing. The process of expression does not apply to a static content longing for effective form. What does remain steady is the challenge of identifying and articulating one’s perceptions and interpretations at any given moment. The specific nature of the moment changes, but not the general chemistry. In this sense, verbal expression always contains an artistic quality. “How best to capture my view” is the writer’s question. That same question moves, for example, Eiko and Koma in their performance piece, “The Offering,” last night in Battery Park City, across West End Avenue from the World Trade Center site. The artists’ tools included: orange-yellow artificial light (morning-sun color); an altar of sticks, earth and flame; human movement and poses of three dancers—two Japanese and one East Indian; and music of a clarinet. The writer also has tools, a vision and an audience. Teenagers need regular practice with various tools, in order to express their vision to a particular audience.
July 2002