Craft of Writing: Personification & Semicolon

In the last Craft of Writing post we looked at a mini-lesson focusing on hyperbaton. In support of an integrated approach to Module C, this entry outlines two further examples of writing craft that students can examine and hopefully use in their own writing alongside the previously mentioned rhetorical device. 

In Term 3 my class will be looking at the modes of writing mentioned in Module C's rubric, however, before we get to that point I'm hoping the students will pick up a few ideas that activate a deeper level of thinking when constructing language. Taking a few minutes at the start of each lesson with these mini-lessons represents an attempt to address a greater sense of student independence when writing.

Personification

What is it: A metaphorical figure of speech in which an idea, object or something else inanimate is given human attributes, or treated like a human character by the author of a text.

Examples: (All from Shakespeare's The Tempest, in support of Module A: Textual Conversations)

• "Time / goes upright with his carriage"
• "Patience / says it is past her cure"
• "Though the seas threaten, they are merciful"

Why use it:

• Allows for an elaboration on the nature of a abstract quality by comparing aspects of it with human behaviour or qualities.
• Adds increased meaning and depth to expressions.
• It allows us to reposition things from a human perspective to increase our understanding and develop a connection.

Quick Activity:

Think of an abstract quality (EG. Love, Truth, Death, Time, Hate, Anxiety) and use personification to illustrate a character's relationship with this quality.

Semicolon

What is it: A punctuation mark that allows for two related clauses to exist in the same sentences without a conjunction or connective word. Some clauses are closely related enough that they should be in the same sentence and the reader's understanding of one is improved by the other; this can sometimes rely on the use of a semicolon to work.

Examples:

• "There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself" - The Awakening, Kate Chopin
• "Harry had never been inside Filch's office before; it was a place most students avoided" - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling

Why use it:

• To connect an explanation to something mentioned in the previous clause.
• Used as a 'soft' full stop - showing that two sentences have a closer relationship than they would with a full stop.
• Two independent clauses in a compound sentence are typically joined by a connecrive term such as 'and', 'or', 'but', etc. A semicolon can sometimes take their place.
• Can be used completely differently as a 'super-comma' if commas are being used in a sentence for smaller separate items alongside larger ones, EG. "The tall, barky trees; the roaring, blood-crazed bears; and the rivers that had burst their muddy banks." 

Quick Activity: Write a paragraph in which describe the recipe for a meal. Ensure that you correctly include a semicolon. 

Here are both of these writing elements alongside hyperbaton on a sheet for student use:

• Writology Issue 2

Happy writing!

Mountains of Stories: The Role of Creative Writing in the West

High Street, Penrith. The horizon that sits above the buildings is the Blue Mountains. This elevated horizon allowed me to always know which direction was 'west' when I was a kid.

It's perhaps undeniable that the Blue Mountains exist as a kind of nexus point for artists and teachers. I've heard it said that there are more school teachers living in the Blue Mountains per capita than anywhere else in Australia, and my wife and I have crossed paths with more famous artists in this area than anywhere else we visit. Living in Penrith, I've come to appreciate being equidistant from both the mountains and the city. The opportunities my geography has afforded me hasn't gone unappreciated and, no matter how often I may feel despondent at some of the attitudes I've grown up around, I know that I will forever remain tied to this town with some degree of belonging. But being a writer here isn't a way of life that I have come to easily.

Yesterday my friend Kira and I travelled up to the Springwood Learning Hub for the Mountains of Stories creative writing workshop run by Cymbeline Buhler.

This was the advertisement for the workshop. It was $25, which is incredibly inexpensive considering it went for 4 and a half hours.

It was a fantastic day in that it focused on letting us write. Cymbeline used prompting activities to encourage creativity (new activities that I hadn't really had any exposure to before) and we experimented with synaesthesia, unreliable narration, and grounding our writing intentions in figurative analogies. 

It got me thinking about this writing game and why it's important.

I have to admit that, having grown up in Western Sydney around the practicality of 'working class' concerns, I often struggle with a certain inherent tension that arises from wanting to write. I hear this nagging voice that tells me that delving too far into creative pursuits is a waste of time... art has its place in enriching society but there's just so much of it. There are so many people who want to devote their entire life to writing - how could they all be worth listening to? How do I know that I'm worth listening to?

It's insecurity but I can also recognise that it comes from being enculturated by those around me. So many of my peers, my friends, my neighbours, my extended family live their lives in the pursuit of creating a foundation of security and comfort for the generations to come. Writing about feelings and the senses just doesn't come into it; how does one earn a living from that? How can people in this community connect to each other over discussions of the abstract?

I've spent a lot of my life thinking about the role of the intellectual in a world of sport, cars, trades, and family. I worked in retail for ten years because I wasn't convinced of the value of an ideology grounded in thinking and writing. I played music in a handful of bands and wrote countless film reviews, but it never felt like a real thing to do. Becoming an English teacher at the age of 29 was my first step in accepting that education and academia had an important role to play in the West.

Cymbeline Buhler brainstorming word associations during the 'Mountains of Stories' workshop.

So why write?

I've come to realise in recent years that the extension and development of a beautiful and extensive vocabulary allows us to put increasingly complex thoughts into words. Words are the backbone of symbolism; each letter represents a sound, each combination of letters becomes a word that means something. The denotative and connotative possibilities of each word means that these small collections of symbols have great potential for meaning. 

The more combinations of letters we know, the more shades of meaning. The more we can express in language, the closer we get to articulating the endless complexity of thought. 

Regardless of whether every aspirant writer becomes professional or well-known in this field, the pursuit of increased lexical expression can only serve to improve the depth and breadth of our communication with one another. When teaching my classes, whether it's a low ability Year 7 group in need of extra support or a Year 12 Advanced English class, I spend a lot of time teaching vocabulary through explicit instruction. The exponential development of individual vocabularies allows for more nuance in language.

Even if some students walk away from school unable to write an essay, or completely unmoved by the works of Shakespeare, I would hope that they have at least achieved two things:

1. Improved the lexicon from which they draw upon when communicating.
2. Acquired the skill to continue building their vocabulary by using the materials around them (conversations, TV shows, news stories, etc.) to expand on their ability to think.

This is creating active, intelligent citizenship. By achieving a mindset of growth in relation to language we can instill the foundation for life-long learning that will enable future generations to advocate for themselves.

I've always written. When I was a student I wrote extensively - I loved 'Journal period' where, once a week in English, we could write our own stories in our journal book. After school I studied journalism and went on to write a range of published and unpublished materials but nothing extensive. As an English/History teacher I've rediscovered my love for writing through the creation of texts for student engagement and it's been an empowering experience. I now find myself working unprecedentedly close with language after a long and winding journey to this point and I'm voracious to know and learn more. Creative writing workshops like Mountains of Stories have been instrumental in reinforcing my role as a 'writing English teacher': IE. Someone who engages directly with creative language in order to model sample texts for students.    

Word associations. Cymbeline had us brainstorm words in relation to a central term and then we had to describe the central term on the other sheet using the words from the first one.

 

 

Here is the piece I wrote in response to the brainstorms above. The brief was to describe 'Hope' with words relating to 'Sweet' in just a few minutes. I found it tricky to get my head around at first but I found a bit of a groove after thinking about it a bit:

Hope is sugary. Its saccharine, ebbing through the bloodstream to cause intense emotion. It flows across my gums, soft and watery, and leaves a sticky residue that is hard to shift. The high leaves me exhausted. My jaw aches as if it has been closing around the fibrous stem of sugar cane, my teeth working against something essentially inedible yet fraught with potential for sweetness. Hope is like love. Hope defies us with our experience of it and it never, truly leaves us.

Anyway.

The vast majority of our students won't become professional writers. In fact, you might not ever have a student who becomes a (successful) professional writer. So what does this mean for us as English teachers? How do we teach creative writing authentically if it's not going to be an authentic experience in the sense of a post-school career for many of our students? 

The answer is that creative writing provides a forum for the extension of our vocabulary. We can use creative freedom to experiment in word choice without the restrictions necessitated by other text types, and through this students can exercise their imagination with increasing complexity. With a wider variety of terminology a person will be able to better express what's going on in their heads or respond to the language used by others.

For more on Cymbeline Buhler's creative writing workshops: Big Stone Creations

Metonym: Figurative Technique in Metropolis

Freder builds a bridge between Grot (the unofficial leader of the workers) and Joh Fredersen (the architect and de facto ruler of Metropolis)

Being a silent film, Metropolis is primarily a visual text - a piece of cinema reliant on the audience's ability to read film grammar. If a silent film cannot convey its narrative in this way then it will die on its feet and, thankfully, Metropolis is highly effective to this end. Visual literacy aside though, I wanted to get my students to tap into the core message of the film by examining the epigraph that precedes the action:

"The mediator between Head and Hands must be the Heart"

...which is a quote that skews towards literary analysis rather than the visual. In this case it's a piece of figurative language, making use of the metaphorical device known as metonymy.

I start by showing the epigraph to the students via a worksheet as an example of a metonym and ask if anyone would like to venture a guess as to what exactly this technique is (or how it works). I then go on to explain it on the worksheet:

Metonymy is a metaphorical/rhetorical device in which a thing or concept is not called by its proper name but instead referred to by a part of the overall whole, or something associated with the whole. In other words, metonyms are usually parts of a thing/concept that are used to stand-in for the bigger idea. 

Examples:

• Washington refers to the American Government.
• The King's Hand (in Game of Thrones) refers to an actual person designated to do the King's work, not just their hand.
• The bush refers to Australian forest. Not just one bush!
• Chili is an American dish made up on beans, mince and chili peppers, yet it is only referred to by the one defining ingredient.
• The Crown refers to the British royal family.
• A hired gun isn't just a gun, you're paying for the whole assassin who holds the gun.
• Chernobyl is a city in Ukraine but the word on its own has also come to refer to the nuclear disaster that occurred there in 1986, EG. "We don't want another Cheynobyl".

Students can examine a few more by explaining them on their own, and could even come up with some of their own identified examples:

1. 9/11
2. "Going down the street"
3. "We've got 10 000 boots on the ground"  

Then, to bring it all full circle, the big question is:

Explain the example from Metropolis, as seen in the epigraph.

Students should at first address it on the most immediate level, that the Heart refers to Freder operating as the 'mediator' (the figure foretold by Maria when she sermonises the workers). In addition to this, though, students should connect the epigraph on a figurative level to the class system in Metropolis. The Hands are the workers, with the metonym connecting to connotations associated with the working class and the sort of labour they undertake, and the Head is Joh Fredersen - a sole figure who controls all else, cold and calculating.

The worksheet can be found here.