Writing: January 2004 Archive Page

[I]t is the most common thing in the world for a new English teacher to demand that her students throw out everything they've worked so hard to learn and then start completely from scratch. New semester, new teacher, new rules.

I say we have no right.

I tell my students that, too--we have no right!

How, you might wonder, do I square this conviction with the fact that I explicitly tell my students that they must not write the way a lot of other teachers have taught them to write?

Well, I throw myself on their intellectual mercy, as it were. I appeal to their intelligence as readers. "What sort of writing do you like to read?" I ask them. "What sort of writing do you actually find out there in the real world? Does it look anything like what you were taught to write in your English classes?" -- Tina Blue --AP English Blather (Teacher Blue)

Via Mike Arnzen, whose comments are also well worth reading: "In many cases, AP English writers are also allowed to skip college writing classes...and end up being the very same English teachers that reproduce this problem! Additionally, many composition teachers were skilled enough to 'test out' of composition when they were undergrads, so most of the composition teachers I know NEVER TOOK composition..."

The term 'flash fiction' can be used to describe several genres or modes of writing. Such writing can include traditional or mainstream short-short stories as well as various other types such as American haibun, ghost stories, monologues, epistles, mysteries, myths, tall tales, fables, anti-fables, parables, romance, fairy tales, horror, suspense, science fiction, prose poetry, and more. It can also embrace several "isms" such as magical realism, dadaism, futurism, surrealism, irrealism, and postmodernism. Charles Baxter notes that these short-short stories occupy many thresholds--"they are between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd." --Pamelyn Casto --Dazzled by Flash Fiction (Flashes on the Meridian)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

Donald sat in the corner of the room, barely illuminated by the dim moonlight filtering through the window. He was trembling badly; the events of the last few hours still storming through his mind. How the hell could he have known? How could he have known? He brought his shaking hands up to his face, and as he hid behind them the smell of fresh gunpowder brought the sickening moment back to him in full force. [Excerpt from a writing sample.]

What you're doing with this kind of opening is: You are forcing us to face the character's raw emotions without giving us any information about the story or any reason to care about the character. It is the opposite of how it has to work. We should not face the emotions until we completely understand the entire situation so that we will feel those emotions ourselves -- and then the character does not have to "tremble badly" and waste our time sitting around while memories "storm" through his mind. --Orson Scott Card --Uncle Orson's Writing Class (Hatrack River)

Orson Scott Card is a science-fiction author whose website includes a wealth of free writing advice. The same lesson also mentions "another common but killer mistake. You are trying to establish his point of view, to see the world through his eyes. However, this description is completely from outside himself -- in fact, it consists of the omniscient viewpoint in which the author talks to the reader, and the character is viewed as through a telescope, from a distance."

I think both issues stem from the tendency of beginning writers to first visualize a scene from a movie, so that their transcription into prose relies too much on external visuals and sounds, rather than on the internal emotions that prose narrative conveys so well.

(Thanks for pointing out the OSC website, Josh.)

--'She's a Flight Risk' Resumes

Isabella v has started posting again, after a long hiatus (which I noted in December).

I only learned about it after getting an e-mail from "isagirl@hushmail.com" responding to a blog entry I wrote last year.

A few questions spring out from this. It is generally accepted that giving credit for creation is important; is it the same for ?link discovery credit?? Will (should) the practice of linking to sources of links come to be taken very seriously by bloggers, out of a shared concern to keep things fair and transparent, in a similar manner to standards of citation in academia? Should one link to the immediate source or make an effort to trace links back to the original source? (Is it always clear which is ?the? original source?) --Sebastian Paquet --Link Propagation and 'Discovery Credit' (Many-To-Many)

I don't credit metasites like Google News or Blogdex when I find stories there.

If journalist A publishes a quote from a source, journalist B can try to contact the source directly and get him or her to repeat the statement; if the source cooperates, journalist B doesn't have to cite journalist A as the source.

Obsessing too much about link discovery is something like wanting to give credit to the taxi driver who took you to the library where you found the source you were looking for.

Still, as Jill Walker notes, "The economy of links is not product oriented. It is service oriented, and the service is the link." (Seb's article links to Jill's "Links and Power," a wonderful theoretical piece that was well worth a revisit.)

There are times when I first see link A on site X, but I'm not motivated to blog anything about A until I see commentary on site Y. In that case, site Y is being more than a taxi driver -- blogger Y deserves the credit on my blog, even if blogger X had the link first. Or link A might point to a website where articles soon disappear behind a paid subscription wall; in those cases, I'll often Google up a different link on the same subject.

I will say that a link to the original article/document being discussed is vital... it's not sufficient simply to link to the blog that quotes some off-site document. That blog may go offline one day, or the quote may turn out to be inaccurate or taken out of context.

(Suggested in a comment posted by Susan, who credits J-walk.)

I wanted to tell you that I am scared to death of your class... Give me something known. I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. I don't take hints. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me. I am not good at reading between the lines. I was never taught in school how to do that. I need help in that area. I don't always remember everything I read. When I study for a test... I have to recite things in my head 50 times before I remember it. What I am trying to say is I am going to give this class my 100%. I will do my very best. It just might not be THE BEST compared to everyone else. I will need a lot of help. -- A student in my American literature surveyA Student's Plea: 'Give Me Something Known'E-Mail)

I was touched by the honesty, passion, and determination in in this student's plea (excerpted here with permission). During the first class meeting, I tried to emphasize how a college-level literature course differs from a high school English class; I am not looking for papers that accurately summarize major plot events, or essays that spit back at me my own lecture notes.

In a literature course, I am of course trying to teach content; I'd like students to know who F. Scott Fitzgerald is, to recognize why A Streetcar Named Desire struck the right cords at the right time, to apply the social and spiritual messages in The Secret Life of Bees to their own lives, and to understand some of the major cultural and historical forces that have shaped American culture in the last century (feminism, Freudianism, Marxism, etc.).

In order to have the kind of deep, thoughtful conversations that build communities and lead us to personal revelations, we will of course have to read the darn texts about which we are supposed to be talking. And my student asks a legitimate question... how are we supposed to read literature? Lurking behind that question is a deeper one... why do these authors make their messages so darn hard to decipher? Why don't they just condense their message down to a few sentences, so that we can read it quickly, think about it, and then move on with our lives?

"Give me something known," my student writes.

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot responds to a very similar statement.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The question is, who knows it? And when and where was it known? For a long time, it was "known" that the Earth is flat, that women have inferior intellects, that the Bible sanctifies slavery, etc. Pythagoras and his followers were greatly troubled by their discovery that the square root of 2 is irrational, because it upset what they "knew" about the cultural function of numbers (to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world).

"I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me."

But what if someone doesn't want you to know something? What if someone is generating lies, using half-truths to influence your mind?

I have written about Michael Moore in the past; he's a brilliant filmmaker and political activist. All documentary films persuade a particular point of view, and Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" is a masterpiece. Everyone "knows" that "Bowling for Columbine" refers to the bowling class that the killers attended shortly before their spree. But did they attend bowling class? When challenged, Moore claimed that the reference to bowling in the title was a silly distraction. Perhaps more telling is this... have you heard that George Bush held up a plastic turkey for the TV cameras during his secret trip to Iraq? The Washington Post reported that it was indeed a real turkey, roasted and decorated just the way Grandma would have done it.

A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays, the officials said. They said the bird was not placed there in anticipation of Bush's stealthy visit, and military sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines.

No reporter ever called the turkey plastic -- it was a real cooked bird, but its purpose was decorative. Look at how Michael Moore introduced the subject.

it turns out that big, beautiful turkey of yours was never eaten by the troops! It wasn't eaten by anyone! That's because it wasn't real! It was a STUNT turkey, brought in to look like a real edible turkey for all those great camera angles.

Nowhere does he call the turkey "plastic," but later he writes that " fake stuffing in the fake bird was just the right symbol for our country" under Bush. While it's defensible to call the turkey a stunt turkey, it was still a real turkey -- not a fake one, just as a stuntman is still a real man. I don't have any information on whether that stunt turkey was eaten or not, and my guess is that neither does Moore.

Moore could simply have written "Bush sucks," but anyone can do that; his method of creating a scene, convincing his readers to become enraged at the scene, and then prompting them to come to a particular conclusion is far more effective than the simple expression my student longs for.

I won't spend any more words writing sweeping romantic generalizations about what literature is, or why the books we study are supposedly great (actually, I choose some that are mediocre; there's even a complete flop on the syllabus). Neither I nor my students has the resources to determine whether George Bush's statement X is a lie, or whether Michael Moore's video clip X is a misrepresentation. We don't have access to the White House or to Moore's cutting room floor.

But we can agree to focus on a particular text that is finite and known; F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't going to write another chapter of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" anytime soon. We can all read this primary text, which is the complete and total authority of all things relating to the world of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and then practice, in a civil and responsible manner, the skills that permit us to compare our interpretations, to probe our disagreements, and to examine the biases and cultural values that condition us to react a particular way to our shared texts.

I can give some practical tips on how to read literature... write notes in the margins; underline unfamiliar words and look them up; read once to get a basic sense of what's happening, scan looking for patterns and ambiguous areas, and then read again with the intention of testing a thesis. For instance, a few years ago when I re-read Bernice Bobs Her Hair, I noticed a racial thread that was extremely obvious once I started looking for it. (I'll have to leave that for later, since my class is about to begin.)

Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail. | Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line. --Michelle Delio --Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad  (Wired)

Spam is evil.

The above article lists some of the new rules of e-mail. I have my e-mail spam filter set to block any message with more than two exclamation marks or the word "sex" in the subject line. (The only person who might ever want to talk to me about sex is my wife, and she doesn't need to use e-mail to get my attention.)

I've stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, adding anti-spam protection to our SHU installation of MoveableType. There were scores of links to viagra, digital camera, and gambling websites tucked away in older blog entries. (The spammers want Google to find links to their sites, thus artificially raising their rankings.)

I've also read that we can expect to start seeing full-screen advertisements that load stealthily in the background while we are surfing a site, and that play after we click away from a website.

I have four different ad-blocking tools installed on the computer I'm using now: Webwasher (which not only blocks ads but closes up the space on the screen where the ad used to be; I sometimes have to shut off because it interferes with my webmail), Google's Toolbar (great for stopping popups; hold down ctrl when clicking if you know you want a popup this time; or, click a button to permanently allow popups on the domain -- very useful), NoFlash (which kills Macromedia Flash ads; I can easily turn it back on if I know I want the flash thingy), and a few minutes ago I just added the unimaginatively-named Mike Skallas's Ad Blocking Host File (a list of ad-serving hosts that your browser will ignore, registering only errors where the ads are supposed to be... not pretty, but effective).

Avalanche is a great word. Its onomatopoeia is horrific. The very syllables bring to mind a Frenchman tumbling down a mountainside, until he meets his demise in a crunching vortex of snow and rock and ice: "Ahhhh...vahhh...laaaaaaaa...uNNCHHH!" -- Mike Arnzen --Oddly Chilling Thoughts (The Goreletter)

When she got home she found her inbox stuffed with new messages, many of which were junk mail. One message was titled "BBC World service proposal," but Onwueme said she just skipped over it. | The BBC sent a second e-mail, which she also did not take the time to read because it had the same vague title. --Susan MacLaughlin --Professor lands international radio deal (UWEC Spectator)

Tess Onwueme, a playwright from Nigeria, is a former colleague of mine from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The Beeb was trying to ask her if they could broadcast a radio performance of her play, Shakara, The Dancehall Queen.

I always taught one or two of her plays whenever I had a drama class. I would tell the students that we would have a guest lecturer who "is an expert in the plays of Tess Onwueme." When Tess walked in the door, often wearing a bright purple or red turban, I'd tell them who she was. The students always got a kick out of her visits.

She also makes a great plantain dish, the recipe for which my wife has bugged me a few times to request from her.

A student at McGill University has won the right to have his assignments marked without first submitting them to an American, anti-plagiarism website.

--McGill student wins fight over anti-cheating website  (CBC)

As a former resident of Canada, I couldn't repress a smirk at the CBC's need to identify the website as "American" in the lead. (The site is TurnitIn.com.)

Private vs. Public

Anyone can read this: professors, classmates

Don't write about your love life or last weekend'sactivities unless you want your professors (or Dr. Gawalek) to read about it

Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates

Also, watch what you write -- don't link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at Seton Hill. Someone will invariably turn you in.

--Julie Young --Getting the Most Out of Your Academic Weblog (Work in Progress)

Julie also offers sections titled "Academic=Thought", "Foster Discussion", and "The Upside".

"Dr. Gawalek" is Mary Ann Gawelek, the academic vice president here at Seton Hill University.

My first scholarly monograph, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, has rocketed to the 1.6 millionth bestseller (up from 1.8 millionth a few weeks ago) on Amazon.com. (Stop presses! -- now it's zoomed up to the 1.49 millionth! Take that, Distributional Ecology and Abundance of Dung and Carrion-Feeding Beetles (Scarabaeidae) in Tropical Rain Forests in Sarawak, Borneo, still mired at a pitiful number 1.596 million.) A big movie deal now seems inevitable. Buy it now and you can say you knew me before I was rich and famous. --Jack Lynch --Jack Lynch's Home Page (Rutgers)

Lynch is the author of one of the great free online writing resources, the "Guide to Grammar and Style and the "Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms."

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

• What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?

--George H. Williams --Sharing Teaching Resources (George H. Williams)

Over the last two decades, academic [book] titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons. --Jennifer Jabson --No Mark of Distinction (Chronicle)

The title of my dissertation is "Soul and Society in a Technological Age: American Drama, 1920-1950." When it was accepted for publication, I was told that it would be retitled "Technology in American Drama 1920-1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine." I was momentarily miffed that nobody had asked my opinion, but they were absolutely right. My father, who for years was a technical editor for the government, spent much of his career prying semicolons out of dense academic reports. He finds the sentences in my book generally too long, but he only found a very small number of mistakes -- apparently I left a "the the" in the text somewhere, and there are a few subject-verb disagreements (hidden in strings of semicolons, which is why I and my copyeditor didn't catch it). So I think I did pretty well.

Oddly enough, one of the handful of general style notes my advisor gave me was: although the writing is clear, the sentences are so short that in places it reads like a newspaper story; I took that as a compliment -- nevertheless, I gave my semicolon key and hyphen keys (not to mention the parentheses keys) a quick workout: I wanted to match the diction that my adviser requested.

"It was the Critic, in the New Yorker, with the essay." --Eric Mayer --Who Killed the Detective Novel? (Eric Mayer)

Not, says Eric.

Suddenly the cold white marble warmed up and flushed a deep golden brown, and the cold white pupils were suddenly swept by a wash of black. They turned to stare at the sculptor who was still kneeling in supplication. When he felt a warm hand upon his shoulder, he jumped back with alarm, but when he looked up to see his beloved, he cried tears of joy. He grasped her hands and told her how much he loved her, how she was more beautiful that he could have ever imagined, and begged her to stay and be his wife. | The (former) statue stared at him for a second or two, absorbing his balding pate, his weak, petulant mouth, his soft second chin, his dirty hands, his greedy eyes... Jasleen Modi --The truth about Pygmalion finally revealed  (University of Minnesota Daily)

A politically correct version of the legend. I wanted to like it more than I do now, but it did help me expand upon my earlier post.

The life-giving role of the goddess Aphrodite is played by an unnamed male god; this, and the addition of the (unresolved) subplot with the sculptor's friends creates a masculine conspiracy against the helpless statue, which is interesting, but undeveloped. The cutesy parenthetical insertions distract from the message, and by first describing the color changes in the statue from an omniscient viewpoint, the author diminishes the dramatic effect of having Pygmalion notice the warm hand. (The author has probably internally developed this scene as a movie and is describing the shots for us; I see that in a lot of student authors.) Similarly, we are told right away that the sculptor is "stupid," which detracts from the author's ability to show us actions which we ourselves can judge as stupid. (See "Show, Don't (Just) Tell"). And to call Pygmalion "perverted" for "doodling naked women" is far too prudish, even for the sake of a joke; the sculptor in the story has international fame, and thus he seemed to do pretty well for himself by ignoring his other studies in favor of practicing his art.

I encourage my literature students not to judge the cultures of the past by the standards of the present. Critique them? Of course! Condemn them? Well...

Certain actions by certain people and certain widely-followed practices don't hold up to modern scrutiny, but it is harsh to dismiss a whole society made up of individual members that that lived in a completely different moral world. I'd rather spend time exploring that moral world and seeing how the medium reflects, transgresses, or perpetuates it. When I teach Shakespeare, there are always a few students who are so excited by their first women's studies courses that they cannot get past the way certain male characters treat certain female characters abominably, and write theses that boil down to "Both Hamlet and Othello mistreat women they profess to love; therefore, men oppress women." Their later papers swap in new texts, but typically make the exact same argument. But when you compare Shakespeare's strong heroines to the female characters depicted by his contemporaries, it's pretty easy to see Shakespeare as a champion of the strength, character, and humanity of women.

"Pygmalion" exists in the context of a large mythology of transformations, some of them arbitrary, capricious, and downright cruel. In the original legend, we aren't asked to examine the statue's viewpoint, of course; and one of the great traditions of postmodern literature is to revisit well-known stories from the perspective of marginalized characters (often women, though consider Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). Modi's essay fits into that tradition. Though she succeeds in distancing us from Pygmalion's perspective, she puts nothing in its place.

The references to body image and (in the added subplot with Pygmalion's friends) men's social objectification of women are modern touches; but what if the sculptor were not old, ugly, and ill-kempt, but young, handsome, and well-groomed? Would his actions be any more justifiable, according to the modern, gender-blind ideology Modi asks us to apply to Pygmalion? In A Doll House, would Nora be as interesting a character if she left Torvald because she suddenly realized that all along he was a disgusting old letcher?

Far more interesting to me are the multiply-branching storylines of Emily Short's "Galatea" a text-based computer game in which you play an art critic examining the statue. Short's version of Galatea becomes sentient before she comes to life -- that is, she was aware of her creator's actions while she was still a statue; and, when asked, she will describe and reflect on her experiences in a very engaging way.

Well, That was Unexpected.Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I showed my five-year-old son the two recent blog entries in which he features (Johnstown Flood and The Meatball), and to my surprise he spent the next 40 minutes dictating responses to all the comments left by readers. It was interesting watching his composition process... the sentences are choppy not because he speaks in choppy sentences, but because he has to pause in order for me to type what he says.

Anyway, now that I know how detailed and occasionally off-topic his responses are, I'll try to encourage him to dictate private e-mails instead -- those of you who aren't parents can probably only take so much of this unbridled cuteness. Well, according to Peter, it's time to play Legos now, so bye.

From email messages and front-page news in the New York Times to published books and magazine articles, the 10 ouchies listed here crop up everywhere. They're so pernicious that even respected Internet columnists are not immune. | The list also could be called, "10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR," because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be. --Pat Holt

--10 Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)  (Holt Uncensored)

Mostly geared towards fiction writers. Some of the tips are a bit too broad; number 8, "awkward phrasing," isn't that helpful. Still, I appreciate this glimpse into the mind of a literary editor.

From pictograms to pixel fonts, written language has evolved over time, changing in response to communication methods and printing technology. This overview is presented as an introduction to the origins, evolution, and applications of modern letterforms. --The Evolution of Type (Medium Bold)

The ubiquity of the word processor has changed what it means to write. I still hear professors talk about "note cards," which were part of the writing process taught to me when I was in high school. The idea, of course, was that you could rearrange your note cards during the early drafting process, so that you would have some idea of the organization of your ideas before you actually started writing. For those of you born in the last 25 or so years, yes indeed, we actually wrote our papers out by hand, and then when we revised them we had to write them over again. We had a motivation to cut deadwood, since we could get the draft finished faster if we didn't copy that whole wordy opening paragraph and instead just copied the one sentence that actually introduced the subject we were really going to write about.

I'm not advocating that students should go back to the process of hand-writing their papers; instead, I'm simply noting that today's most experienced teachers learned to write in a very different way. I started word-processing some of my school assignments in middle school, around 1980 (although some of my teachers were refusing dot-matrix printouts). I have a great, satisfying sensory memory of picking up a stack of fan-folded paper, tearing off the rows of holes on the outer edges, and then separating the pages. I never bothered to tear apart all those perforations unless the printout was intended for someone else to read, and to this day I associate tearing perforated paper with that "job well done" feeling. When I was an undergrad at U.Va., for major assignments I would walk my disk to the laser printers in the computer lab (my favorite was a few steps from Cabell Hall at the other end of the Central Grounds from the Rotunda).

Since it is now push-button easy to get high-quality copies of drafts that are in progress, I wonder how much that affects the ability of today's students to recognize when they have put sufficient work into a paper. In medieval times, if you wanted about 20 pages to write on, you had to kill a sheep, skin it, and tan the hide (I recall the process has something to do with urine). So all writing that was produced was precious. That's taking it a bit too far, of course -- to make a mistake was costly, in terms of both time and resources, which undoubtedly affected the activities of a scribe (whose main job was to copy faithfully and accurately the words that somebody else had composed).