Craft of Writing: Modality, Pathetic Fallacy, and Iambic Pentameter

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:

1. Use high or low modality to write 2-3 sentences describing a fictional politician.
2. 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:

• Writology Issue 3

Happy writing!

(Picture sourced from East Riding Theatre Twitter feed. Not sure who drew it!)

Macbeth: A New Translation

Macbeth is, for many teachers, the gateway point for attempting to get students to love Shakespeare. Many schools teach it in Stage 5 English as an introductory point for students because of its accessibility and relative brevity. It has witches in it, lots of medieval violence, and that weird stuff about Lady Macbeth's milk ducts turning into bile. How could that not be interesting? It also happens to be one of Shakespeare's major Tragedy plays, and it works well as an access point for this genre if you're a teacher preparing students for Advanced English later in their schooling. Whether it's Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear, all of these plays make use of the Ancient Greek dramatic concept of hamartia (a fatal flaw that brings down a heroic character) and this is something that can be introduced with much discussion when teaching Macbeth. 

This year is my fifth time teaching Macbeth to Year 10. I've taught it to a wide variety of classes - from the high achieving to those who would rather see the play sacrificed to Hecate herself, and each time I've found the biggest challenge to be the language. Even the most literate and classically-minded student will struggle with decoding a lot of Shakespeare's highly stylised use of blank verse. This has often left me in a bit of a quandary; do I focus on Shakespeare's language and finding ways for students to come to a better understanding of the way he wrote? Or do I focus on Shakespeare's sophisticated use of plotting, characterisation, and concepts to create timeless works of universal worth?

Sometimes these two things aren't always compatible, especially when there's also Johnny McRandom, age 15, smearing pen ink all over his table, asking to go to the bathroom for the third time in the space of an hour, and asking me repeatedly which football team I go for while I try to teach the class about the wonder of iambic pentameter.

In the past I've used No Fear's version of Macbeth with students but I haven't always found a lot of success with the No Fear editions. So this year I decided instead to create a fresh translation of the text that could be used with my class. Reasons for this are as follows:

• No Fear makes use of two columns for each page - showing the original text side-by-side with the modern translation. Some students tend to find this both distracting and confusing.
• I wanted the dialogue to be a little bit more naturalistic and less stilted. I don't think I necessarily succeeded at this in the earlier scenes but I felt like I got into the swing of it a bit more as the play went on.
• Shakespeare's plays are notoriously light on stage direction when compared to their modern counterparts - I wanted to layer an interpretation of the characters' actions into the text so that students could visualise the energy of the play a little bit more.
• I found that, by working through the original text and translating it piece by piece, I also personally arrived at a much better understanding of the play.

The last reason given here is driven more by self-interest than the others. Just because I'd taught Macbeth several times that didn't mean that I'd really read it properly that many times. Sometimes I would just work through a couple of key scenes with particular classes and then give them plot summaries - but I found that this was becoming a carbon-copy version of understanding the play. I knew the essence of it, but I couldn't always answer with the complete confidence why certain characters did what they did. By reading through the entire play really carefully, and having to consider how I would translate each and every line for an audience made up of 15-year-olds, I was able to arrive at a whole new sense of clarity in regards to the text.

For instance, here are some things I realised for the first time (no judgement please!)

• Ross and Macduff are cousins. 
• There's an 'unseen' scene between Act 1, Scene 6 and Act 1, Scene 7 where Macbeth entertains King Duncan at his dinner table.
• I was finally able to pinpoint the exact parts of the play that obliquely refer to Lady Macbeth having once had a child. 
• The 'bell' that Macbeth refers to at the end of his soliloquy in Act 2, Scene 1 is an actual bell that Lady Macbeth rings off-stage to signify that the poisoned drinks are ready for the servants.  
• There are several references to owls throughout the play - this motif is symbolic of the fact that this bird of prey hunts under cover of night and, therefore, is somewhat representative of Macbeth's duplicity and subterfuge. 
• There is a rivalry between Macbeth and Macduff long before Macduff actually suspects Macbeth of murdering the King. You can see this in Act 2, Scene 3 when Macduff and Macbeth both compete to be the one to wake the King up. Yes, Macbeth is hoping to control the flow of events here as he has just murdered Duncan, but Macduff is unaware of that at this point and is quite insistent on being the first person the King sees in the morning, suggesting that Macduff is not willing to defer to Macbeth in any situation.
• Macbeth starts using the collective pronoun 'we' in Act 3, Scene 1. This royal pronoun is used to expressed the monarch's collective grouping with God, and demonstrates a subtle shift in how Macbeth presents himself after assuming the throne.
• The 'Murderers' that Macbeth sets onto Banquo aren't actually hired killers but are apparently just really angry peasants. Macbeth has somehow convinced them that Banquo is responsible for every piece of bad luck in their lives (we aren't actually told how Banquo is supposed to have done this, Macbeth just tells the peasants this and they buy it almost immediately).
• During the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth tells the other guests that Macbeth suffers from seizures (to cover up for his seeing Banquo's ghost). What isn't clear here is whether Macbeth truly did suffer seizures at some point prior to the narrative of the play or whether Lady Macbeth has made this up on the spot. 
• Also in the banquet scene, Macbeth makes a reference to nature moving the trees in order to enact revenge on the guilty (foreshadowing the apparition's premonition about Birnam Wood in Act 4).
• Hecate, the evil spirit that rules over the witches, actually seems to think that Macbeth isn't a good target for the witches. Is this because he is unsuited to the demands of evil? She also mentions Macbeth's destiny, which implies that he was always meant to become King - perhaps the witches haven't actually manipulated him into this position as much as we might think?
• When Macbeth threatens the witches in Act 4, Scene 1, he says that he is willing to destroy churches in order to get more information - a symbolic threat that indicates the full extent of his tyranny and his new alignment with evil.
• The witches refer to the apparitions as their 'masters' and reprimand Macbeth for talking directly to them. Previously I had believed these apparitions to be a conjuring trick, but now I see them more as spirits that the witches are servants to.
• The King of England, Edward, is described but not seen in Act 4, Scene 3. He provides a point of contrast with Macbeth in that he is a Christian and good King, and has inherited the power to heal people through his family line - illustrating the idea that God works His power through official royal lines of succession such as Edward's (rather than those who have established themselves as King through unholy means, such as Macbeth). Another interesting aspect of Edward is that he is said to have the power of seeing into the future - like the witches!
• The whole bit with Macbeth killing Young Siward makes a bit more sense after reading the part where the older Siward, who presides over Northumberland (the land between Scotland and England), is introduced. Siward-the-elder is said to control a large army populated by teenage boys who will prove themselves in the battle to come. This harkens to the values of the time in which violence is seen as the test of true manhood. Compare old Siward's introductory scene here with his final scene in the play, where he hears that his son died fighting Macbeth and is quite cheerful about the death provided that his son died with battle wounds in the front of his body (rather than the back). There is also a line prior to this where the older Siward remarks that you can't win a battle without a few losses (a fine example of dramatic irony as the audience is already aware here that his son has died, even though old Siward is yet to be informed).

Anyway, here's the play itself: the play's the thing.

Macbeth and Grammar Analysis

The lightbulb moment.

It's that point where you see a student's facial expression shift as the meaning of what you're saying dawns on them. You don't always see it in every lesson, or even in every week, but when you do see it - you know it. I haven't seen half as many lightbulb moments in all my other lessons combined as I have when explicitly teaching grammar skills.   

These skills include, but aren't limited to:

• Lexical Chains (also known as 'text chains')
• Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentences
• Embedded Clauses
• Adjectival Clauses
• Ellipsis
• Lexical Density and Grammatical Intricacy 

I recently spent a lesson with my Year 10 class honing in on text chains. This was done in conjunction with teaching Shakespeare's Macbeth. The first thing I did was get the students to copy this short piece of text on some of the play's themes.

The copying is the easy part, and you can even skip this step by just handing them the text on a piece of paper. The next bit is the interesting part where they have to start engaging with some text analysis. This is done through the identification and highlighting of 'lexical chains' (also known as 'text chains'):

1. Model an example first. Highlight the name of the play, 'Macbeth', in one colour and then highlight three other words or word-groups that mean the same thing, drawing arrows to show the 'chain' that runs through the text. (The other three examples are 'the play', 'this text', and 'piece of theatre').
2. Once students have seen one of these chains, ask them to identify some of their own. Examples could include: 'Shakespeare' and associated terms, 'themes' and associated terms, and 'Macbeth' (the character) and associated terms.

The purpose of this activity is to show students the way synonyms can be used to increase the cohesion of a text. 'Cohesion' refers to the way a text hangs together, and text chains are one of several ways that increased sophistication can be achieved in writing. 

Here are the completed examples:

The point here is that students begin to get a better sense of why it's important to utilise a wider vocabulary, and they can also now see explicit lines of meaning that tie the text together. The longer a particular text chain the more the piece can be said to maintain this specific theme throughout the paragraph or essay.

Another byproduct of this process is that it assists students in decoding unfamiliar terms. The lexical chains encourage the reader to 'read' the text in a different way, building up their understanding, and gathering further literacy tools with which they can attack increasingly sophisticated pieces of writing. For those of you out there who are keen on Super Six comprehension, this comes under monitoring.

Coming to grips with text chains is the point where students have that aforementioned 'lightbulb' moment, and it primes them for further analysis of the text in other ways. It's empowering for students to now see at least one clear way that they can determine the quality of a piece of a text. I point out here that it isn't by any means the only indicator of quality, however, it is nonetheless a way in which students can assess both their own writing and the writing of others. Having gained a better understanding of how an extensive vocabulary can improve writing, students now also seem much more willing to try a few other new things. They've essentially been scaffolded to a point where they can begin an even closer reading of the text.

Here's how we can build further. Ask students to do the following:

The first question is asking students to actively decode new words by using what they've already learned. I nudge them along at this point but it's important to let them have a few educated guesses first, and for them to share their answers with one another. 

The second question is a way to make students consider the usefulness of adjectives in building deeper shades of meaning. Take an example, such as 'underlying concepts', and demonstrate the way in which 'underlying' can be removed without changing the essential meaning of the sentence. Then ask students to consider what the adjective 'underlying' adds to the word 'concepts'. This demonstrates the overall point of the adjective as a grammatical function that describes an attribute of the noun it precedes.

The third question deals with the cohesive device known as 'ellipsis'. In this context, an ellipsis is any word that is implied but not stated. The phrase 'Chief amongst these are' omits the word 'themes' between 'these' and 'are' due to the fact that the term 'themes' has already been made clear in the prior sentence. Gaining an understanding of ellipsis is dependent on context; students need to read the preceding and proceeding sentences to achieve greater awareness of the word that is subject to omission. Ellipsis exists (much like synonym use to build text chains) as another way for writers to avoid unnecessary repetition. Getting students to become consciously aware of this allows for further empowerment in their own writing.

Socratic Circles in the Classroom

Socratic Circle configuration

Back in 2009, when Susan Boyle had the biggest selling album in the world and Australia was 4 Prime Ministers younger, I was undertaking my Master of Teaching and learning about all the ways I could engage students in their learning. A lot of this stuff was particular to my English method but one thing that transcended the subject area was Socratic Seminars.

The Socratic Seminar is a social method of teaching in which discussion and listening are used to prompt students in their critical engagement with a text or issue. Back at university I didn't really want to sit in on this activity and argue with a bunch of strangers, but it actually turned out to be a really useful way to articulate ideas and had just the right amount of structure to keep things civilised and relevant.

I filed this lesson away and didn't really think about it for a few years. I learned how to teach and had a great journey in discovering my vocation as an educator (that's a whole other story) but during those beginning years I always remembered the circles used in the Socratic Seminar. I remembered how different it was to structure a discussion in this way, but I wasn't game to try it in a classroom. As any teacher knows, those first few years of teaching are mostly about behaviour management. I tried plenty of new ideas (technically, everything was new to me at that point) but I held off on some of the more experimental things whilst I built up my organisation and administration skills.

Fast-forward to 2015, and by this point I'm making it a thing to always try something completely new with each class every term. For my Year 10 English class in Term 2 I decided it was time to introduce the Socratic Circles. I will note at this point that my current Year 10 class is impeccably behaved (thus why I was game to give the circles a try with this particular class).

I picked last period on a Thursday, when I knew the kids would be tired and not all that enthused about writing, and had them walk into a reconfigured room where all the chairs were arranged into two concentric circles. Here's how the lesson ran:

1. Half of the class are instructed to sit in the middle circle, whilst the other half sit in the outer circle.

2. I introduce a question, in this case it was: To what extent was Lady Macbeth to blame for the events in Shakespeare's Macbeth?

3. The inner circle are told to give each other their views. The outer circle's job is to listen only; they are forbidden to speak or interact.

4. After some time has passed, the circles are swapped and the discussion is allowed to continue. Only the inner circle may speak.

5. This process is repeated as many times as the arguments allow for, and new questions can be introduced by the teacher at any point.

The teacher's job is to moderate the circles and judge when a question has run out of steam. I was lucky with the Macbeth question because my students really ran with it and spent a whole 40 minutes passionately arguing about it. It helped that the question itself is something that scholars have argued over for hundreds of years, and the newness of the activity probably had something to do with the enthusiasm of the students but, suffice to say, it was a hit with my kids.

Since then, I've had Socratic Circle lessons with this class about twice a term. I think it works really well for a number of reason:

• Not all students do their best work in the form of writing. By giving students the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in alternative ways, it empowers those with speaking skills.
• Also, as any English teacher knows, the mode of Listening is one of the key areas that we have to assess on from Grades 7-12. Aside from asking students to answer comprehension questions about audio texts, or having students interview each other, there are precious few other ways to involve listening as a primary skill in an activity without it feeling tokenistic. The role of the outer circle in Socratic Seminars is therefore quite a useful way for students to practice the skill of gathering information through active listening.
• Even the best students get tired of reading or writing all the time. The use of a Socratic Seminar as a way to build critical engagement is often something that many students will gladly get on board on with.
• Probably most important of all is the fact that all students need to speak in this activity. I've observed many of my shyest students passionately defend a viewpoint in the inner circle, feeling more comfortable about speaking in this half-class environment than a regular whole class setup. 
• I think it also helps if the teacher is not involved in the discussion beyond the odd interjected question, as it forces the students to take control and move their own thoughts to centrestage.

During Term 3, I used the Socratic Seminar to have Year 10 grapple with several questions related to the text Jasper Jones, especially in regards to the roles of sport and intellectualism in Australian culture. Some of the ideas the students discussed were incredibly sophisticated and insightful, and I have no doubt in my mind that this assisted them with their essay responses later in the term.

More recently I also opened the circles up to a range of current affairs to help broaden the argumentation and elaboration skills of the students. Some of the questions I threw into the circle were:

- Is Australia's policy to 'stop the boats' fair?

- What makes someone Australian?

- Has technology changed society for better or worse?

- Why are movies better than books?

And here are some choice snippets I quickly jotted down from the discussions that ensued.

"Don't you think that everyone in the world should get access to better health before we get a new iPhone?" - Rory

"Movies aren't better than books because they're a group activity; you don't get to have your imagination of what is happening" - Elleece

"We're the last generation of sanity" - Mel (on iPhones becoming too invasive)

"Using computers to research things dumbs down our ability to use books for the same purpose" - Kodee

"You don't have a certificate to say you're human or a person, so why should you have one to say you're Australian?" - Elleece

Next year, if I get the chance to continue using the circles, I plan to have the outer circle start making notes to help them focus on the inner circle's discussion a bit more. This can hopefully be built into lessons as a way to generate ideas and continue fostering a healthy atmosphere of open discussion that's focused on curriculum.