Hello! Here are another three Craft of Writing mini-lessons designed to support students in practising writing craft all year-round. As mentioned in previous blogs on other writing elements - here, here, here, and here - this approach involves covering a writing technique in a ten minute segment at the start of each lesson. Students are shown how to use a technique, alongside examples, and then put it into practice.
Modality
What is it: A choice of words indicating how definite the writer/speaker is about something. High modality language is certain and definite, whereas low modality makes the author sound unsure about their subject.
Examples:
- "'We need Duncan to make the call.' I guess that's what he says. There's much noise" - Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk
- "Historians have always written their work in narrative form" - The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle
Why use it:
- High modality language is used to persuade the audience to agree with a point of view, or for purposes of characterisation.
- Low modality language can lull the reader into a false sense of security, or to create a kind of character.
Quick Activity:
- Use high or low modality to write 2-3 sentences describing a fictional politician.
- Swap with the person next to you. Rewrite their sequence in the opposite modality.
Pathetic Fallacy
What is it: A kind of figurative device that highlights the relationship between a character or author's emotional state with the world around them. Most commonly represented through the weather acting as a symbol for a character's feelings. The term 'pathetic' is used here because it relates to pathos (using emotions to persuade).
Examples:
- "Some say the Earth was feverous and did shake" - an Old Man in William Shakespeare's Macbeth describes the strange weather that occurred during King Duncan's death.
- "The white cold virgin snow upon my heart / abates the ardour of my liver" - Ferdinand in The Tempest, William Shakespeare.
Why use it:
- In Shakespeare terms, nature and the weather were seen as reflections of God's feelings or a way for God to communicate with the world. As the King was seen as God's representative on Earth, this meant that the weather was closely tied to the King's wellbeing.
- By externalising emotions in this way (or using these kinds of comparisons), writers are able to deepen the reader's understanding of abstract feelings.
- Offers a unique perspective on familiar feelings.
Quick Activity: In regards to Shakespeare's The Tempest, use pathetic fallacy to describe the emotional state of Caliban, Miranda or Prospero.
Iambic Pentameter
What is it: A form of writing presented as 'blank verse' (unrhymed poetry). Each line is made up of five (the pentameter) double-syllable units (the iambs). More technically, the iambs are made up of one short syllable followed by a longer 'stressed' syllable. The stresses direct how each line is spoken by the performer.
Examples:
- "Dull thin, I say so: he, that Caliban / Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st" - Prospero in The Tempest, William Shakespeare
- "Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys, / Who would believe that there were mountaineers" - Gonzalo in The Tempest, William Shakespeare
- "These tags I'll pop, and boast in rhyming verse / That what I wear puts swagger in my gait; / Though twenty shillings have I in my purse, / My self-esteem and manhood both inflate" - Shakespearean version of Thrift Shop by Macklemore, found on that most magical of places: the Internet.
Why use it:
- The Elizabethans used this precise and consciously rhythmic form of writing in their poetry to represent the grand and highly educated nature of the nobility.
- Allows the writer to shape the pace and intonation of the actor or performer reading their verse.
- Believed to give dialogue a natural and poetic sense of rhythm due to the way the iambs mirror the beat of the human heart.
Quick Activity: Go back to a previous paragraph you have written for one of these activities and convert it into four lines of iambic pentameter.
Here are these three writing elements all in the one sheet for ease of use:
Happy writing!(Picture sourced from East Riding Theatre Twitter feed. Not sure who drew it!)
I adapted my favourite crime novel, Robert Gott's Good Murder, for the stage a couple of years ago. The detective in the play is a pretentious Shakespearean actor, so I wrote a lot of the adaptation in pentameter. Here's the opening of the play:
ReplyDeleteIn Maryborough, the water tower sits
upon a crossroad – Adelaide and Anne.
A million gallons. Thirty feet. You reach
the top by climbing up a wonky ladder,
iron. It’s a drop. But Maryborough
is on the river flat, so from the top
you see the lazy gridlines, March and Kent,
the streets within the river’s curving loop,
the Army camp, the engineering works –
the Navy Corvettes. Near twelve hundred men
are banging out the warships for the fight
with Hirohito and the Japs.
It holds a million gallons, as I said,
distributed to every house and home,
and for two weeks in 1942
it also held the body of a girl:
Miss Polly Drummond, twenty-four years old.
When she was found up here it took a while
For those within the town to realise
That for about two weeks, each bath, each cup
Of tea – that every time they’d turned a tap
They’d shared a bit of Polly’s sad demise.
We’d gargled, brushed our teeth, we’d washed our clothes –
A little piece of Polly’s slow dissolve,
The foul, corrupted liquids of the dead
were now so deep in us imbrued, that no
amount of Lifebuoy soap would ever scrub
us clean. Now me, my job was cleaning up
this mess. And first I looked to William Power,
an actor, new in town, rehearsing for
a Shakespeare play. He thought that Titus –
Titus Andronicus – somehow would lead
the simple country folk from hereabouts
to culture. Did he do’t? Find out for
yourselves, in this two hours of very bloody traffic –
Here’s the play.
I found that it gave me a particular freedom that you don't get with straight dialogue. Your characters can use heightened language, you can pack in more metaphors than you would with speech and it adds resonances to the drama.
Wow, thanks for sharing that Stewart - the rhythm reads so smoothly but I know a fair bit of work would have gone into making it fit!
ReplyDeleteI wonder - you explained in your mini-lesson so well why the term 'pathetic' is used....but why 'fallacy'?
ReplyDeleteSomething to do with the 19th century literary theorist Ruskin, he coined the term apparently as a dig at 'false'/fake sentimentality - the meaning has changed somewhat since the 1850s
ReplyDelete