Topic: Problems in Comprehending Poetry

Topic: Problems in Comprehending Poetry

10-second review: IA Richards’ famous study about problems that prevent readers from understanding poetry.

Title: “The Practical Criticism of IA Richards and Reading Comprehension.” RE Shafer. Journal of Reading (November 1970), 101-108. The Journal of Reading was renamed Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy from the International Reading Association (IRA).

Summary: IA Richards tried to find out why people had difficulty reading and interpreting poems. Some of the reasons were failure to understand the plain sense of the poem, failure to recognize its rhythm, and failure to visualize images in figurative language. He also found a variety of personal distractions, including prior beliefs about the nature of poetry and emotional personal experiences that distorted the poet’s overall meaning.

Comment: As a result of Richards’ Practical Criticism, the “New Critics” eliminated outside distractions like the lives of the poets and the readers’ personal experiences from the interpretation of literature. Thanks to Louise Rosenblatt, the use of personal experience in interpretation has been restored to literary criticism. As is often true in education in “either/or” situations, the combination of both points of view is helpful: the focus on poetic technique and personal experience. RayS.

Topic: Research and Reform

10-second review: Educators designed a program in teacher training in English for a specific locality—three rural communities. The educators soon learned that they were in a situation way over their heads. Moral: Recognize that reality will destroy idealism every time.

Title: “Everyone to the Rescue.” A O’Regan. English Education (Spring 1971), 165-172. A publication concerning the preparation of teachers of English by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Summary: When the educators arrived on the scene of the three separate rural communities, they found that the communities’ problems were simply too complex to be resolved. The educators beat a hasty retreat without, mercifully, causing any serious social problems.

Quote: “Pend Oreille [the school for the rural communities] was made for saving. On our very first visit, heroic images crowded the mind. Here was a place that needed a steersman, a healer, a diviner, a law giver; here was a chance to give, to fulfill, to expiate—that above all; whatever kind of obligation education owed to society could be paid off here.” p. 168.

Comment: This is the kind of article that I see only rarely—an attempt to analyze what went wrong. In this case the problem was an idealistic view of the community, soon corrected by experience and reality. The people and the issues were much too complex. The educators needed to learn from Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. They cannot change people. If anything the people and the community will change the educators and the educators’ theories. RayS.

Topic: Oral Culture and Writing

10-second review: Ten minutes a day enabled me to help students eliminate the influence of an oral culture on writing.

Comment: What are the elements of an oral culture? Repetition. The over-use of “it,” “get,” “thing,” “there,” and demonstrative pronouns without clear antecedents. Unnecessarily repeated words.

My purpose was to introduce students to “formal style.”

Students came to class prepared to write on a subject of their choice. They wrote for ten minutes as well as they could write. At the end of ten minutes, I collected the papers.

That night, I rewrote their original 10-minute essays, showing them how to eliminate “it,” “get,” “thing,” “there” and any unnecessarily repeated words. I also showed them how to make clear the antecedents of the demonstrative pronouns, “this,” “that,” “these,” and “those.”

Example: “That was what I meant” became: “That negative attitude was what I meant by alienating his audience.”

10 minutes a day. 10-minute essays. I returned them corrected. They rewrote, incorporating any changes. The results? By the end of the semester, they wrote clearly, specifically and precisely. They had eliminated the influence of the oral culture from their writing.

Of course, I pointed out that increasing repetition also made their writing less formal. And informality in writing has some advantages, depending on the audience. Now, if they needed to write formally—or informally—they could do so. RayS.

Topic: Oral Culture and Writing

10-second review: The author compared 1,000 themes written in the 1950s and 1,000 themes written in the 1970s and concludes that writing by students in the 1970s is more oral in nature, leading to a decline in thought, sentence structure, spelling and precision in language.

Title: “The Subversive Effect of an Oral Culture on Student Writing.” Gary Sloan. College Composition and Communication (May 1979), 156-160. A quarterly publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Summary: The author notes certain kinds of mistakes in writing in the 1970s that are symptomatic of the increasing influence of oral culture in students’ written work: running words together, like “alot.” Confusion of similar-sounding words: “their/there.” Misspellings: “trys/tries”; “recieve/receive”; “existance/existence.” The hardest word to spell in the 1970s was “ecstasy” (Might not be hard to spell in the 2000s because of the date rape pill RayS.). Sentence fragments (we use them when we speak); run-on sentences (we use them when we speak); proliferation of the “you” point of view (in the sense of “one”); the use of ordinary speaking vocabulary in writing rather than precision in word choice.

The author concludes: “The general character of the 70s themes perhaps offers some support for the voguish contention that we are moving ineluctably toward an age where print will be a well-nigh archaic means of communication, where sundry electronic media will make essays, stories, letters and the like as old fashioned as cuneiform and hieroglyphics.” p. 160.

Comment: The author notes, “It’s easier to document the titanic influence of an oral culture than to know what to do about it.” p. 159. In my next blog, I will tell you what I did about the influence of our oral culture on writing—and very successfully, too. RayS.

Topic: Sharing a Book with Those You Love

10-second review: Instead of fending off your loved one’s offer of a book to share, take twenty minutes to sample its pages and ideas and then engage in a discussion that will be more rewarding than any you have ever had.

Title: “The Pages from Our Lives.” Ray Wolpow. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (September 2004), 6-9. The secondary school publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Summary: The author’s Grandpa taught him how to sample books his grandpa loved as a prelude to a rich discussion of their ideas.

Comment: I don’t know why, but when someone recommends a book to me, I instinctively don’t want to read it. Maybe it comes from years of being forced to read what I didn’t want to read in school. Because of that, my father, a lawyer, said that he would never read another book after he graduated and he never did.

But this article showed me how to welcome the offer of a book.

I have developed techniques to sample books and then I am ready to engage in a rewarding discussion.

Nonfiction: Read the foreword and the first and last paragraphs of each chapter.

Fiction: Read for five minutes near the beginning, five minutes half-way through the novel, three-fourths through the novel and near the end.

Both techniques will cause you to raise all the questions you will need to engage in a stimulating discussion. RayS.

Topic: College Writing

10-second review: In 1974 and 1975, the Writing Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee asked faculty, business people and professionals to assess the reading and writing skills of students and employees. They rated about half of the students/employees adequate or below in reading and writing skills. The three most important writing formats needed were essay exams, reports and research.

Title: “A Survey of Undergraduate Reading and Writing Needs.” RI Sherwood. College Composition and Communication (May 1977), 145-149. College Composition and Communication is a quarterly publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: I know what the implication of the results of this survey would be for me: Beyond the writing process, organization and careful editing, I would focus on essay exams, writing reports of various types and the research paper.

The heck with description, narration, personal experience, process, cause and effect, comparison and contrast and analogy. There simply is not enough time in a semester-length college course to do all that when the essay exam is what is expected by other faculty members and report-writing needed by business people and professionals. RayS.

Topic: 10-Minute Essays

10-second review: Bonnie Rubenstein in 1967 introduced ten-minutes of writing each class period. Since the teacher’s remarks were non-corrective, they could be read quickly and commented on reasonably quickly outside of class. The purpose was developing the writing habit and fluency. A student chose the topic and the rest of the students wrote on the topic.

Title: “The Five-Minute Writing: An Aid to Teaching Composition.” G J Jones. College Composition and Communication (No Date), pp. 194-195. A quarterly publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Summary: the author reduced the amount of time to five minutes and used the writing for a variety of purposes, including fluency. Again, a single student gave the topic and the other students wrote on it. They were interested in how different students had different ideas on the topic.

Students could write various types of paragraphs—narrative, descriptive or argumentative. Another idea—write one good sentence on the topic. Vary the diction—a 4-year-old, a “hood,” a sophisticate. Another topic might be response to a piece of literature.

Comment: I also used the ten-minute essay. Students chose their own topics on anything in which they were interested. I asked them to write as well as they could. Then I corrected grammar, style, clarity and smoothness by actually rewriting the problem on the paper. I would rewrite, for example, a dangling modifier, a misplaced modifier, parallel structure, etc. In style, I would change the sentence beginning with “There” to the same sentence beginning with the subject of the sentence. Students responded well to this technique, saying, “It gave me confidence in my writing.” If you wish more details on how I used the technique, write to raystop2@comcast.net.

As the author said, this practice is not a substitute for writing instruction; it is a supplemental tool. RayS.