Advanced Techniques and Special Effects

As I read this week's assigned chapters from Noden, I couldn't help but question how the advanced techniques, as described in chapter 5, could be taught to younger and more inexperienced writers. Should they be taught to inexperienced writers? Of run-ons, Noden writes, "Like fragments, run-ons are powerful structures when used skillfully by professional writers." Does this mean that it is impossible for students of the English language to efficiently use run-ons and fragments meaningfully? I do not believe that this is the concept that Noden is intending to express, or that he is trying to create any sort of debate. However, I do think that there is value in sharing these types of creative techniques with students. Though these techniques do not meet the grammatical standards typically held in a secondary classroom, there is definitely importance in demonstrating that writing does not have to be a boring task of following rules. In teaching this kind of material, teachers must be careful, making it clear that run-ons and fragments must be used for reasons, rather than utilized constantly.

In chapter 6, Noden discusses the way in which writers can use grammar to create special effects in their writing. This reminded me of chapter 3, when Noden discussed using rhythm to make writing musical. I felt that this chapter was similar in that the writer is able to breathe life into a text by rearranging or changing punctuation to create a noticeable effect.

I really appreciated Noden's discussion of Dawkin's Punctuation Hierarchy. This is the first time that I have every encountered this and feel that it makes sense of exactly how to use punctuation for special effects, such as a pause. I think that the chart provided in the book could be something that would work well as a handout. Students could use the hierarchy as a tool to assess what type of effect they are going for, and choose their punctuation accordingly. It also works to familiarize students with some punctuation that they may be somewhat less comfortable using, such as the semicolon and the colon.

Some of the other ideas in the chapter that I found to be very appealing were shape poetry and "tantalizing" title use. These topics connect in that they help readers to develop a first impression of a text before they begin reading it. The shape poetry section of this chapter was very interesting to me, and I think that having students study shape poetry and create their own would be a great project for a poetry unit. The title pattern suggestions would make another great handout, as it could help students write titles for any documents that they have to write for school and in the future. Titles should be catchy and meaningful, but they are often difficult to generate. Therefore, giving students these templates could help them to generate ideas and create effective and exciting titles for their papers. I also really appreciated the strategy that followed along with the tantalizing titles theme, using Amazon.com to find examples of how authors use grammatical structures in their titles.

Rhythmic Writing

This week, we read about (and I will be presenting on) using parallelism to create rhythm in writing. I like this topic because I believe that in writing, we often fail to really think about the rhythm of our sentences and paragraphs. Or maybe that is just me. Either way, in considering my own habits as a writer, I tend to read over my work to make sure that it flows well, but I rarely focus on rhythms or parallelism. Perhaps rhythms are automatic for some writers. However, I think that if we practiced going back into what we've written and vary sentence structure, we will find amazing and subtle new ways to freshen our writing style. For example, I typically use comma heavy, long sentences. It is usually beneficial for me to break some of my sentences apart when I am revising work. 

For younger writers, I think that teaching parallel structures for agreement could be a very important lesson. As Noden states, "choppy rhythms distort perceptions and interrupt the consistent flow of ideas" (63). Again, rhythm is an aspect of writing that is not often dwelt on, but a list lacking parallelism can be very distracting to a reader. 

In order to encourage students to think about and become aware of parallelism in their own writing, I think that it would be very important to incorporate auditory elements to these lessons. Students should be able to listen for parallelism and discuss how its presence enhances the writing and what effect it has on them. 

My favorite part of this chapter is that, like all of the Noden reading, it discusses writing as an art form. As a person who is very interested in both music and writing, I really felt an appreciation for the examples provided in the text. For me, this chapter provided a great example of how important grammar is to the writing process and further reminded me that, as a teacher, the best way that I can help students to improve is by teaching grammar in context. 

The Multigenre Paper

After reading about what a multigenre paper is and viewing some of the examples, I am pretty excited to get started on my own. Though I was unfamiliar with the multigenre paper prior to this course, I can easily see its value. Looking over all of the examples, I wonder why I have not heard of this type of paper before. I love that students are able to make this a personal project and are encouraged to be more creative than they would if writing a traditional essay. I think that this type of project encourages a very high level of thinking in that students must connect topics to themselves and the world in general. Their ideas about organization and content validity must also transfer clearly to readers, making the task of putting the paper together a bit more challenging. In this way, students are responsible for fluidity, and must clearly represent how each genre fits logically into their paper.

Though I looked over several examples of the multigenre paper, the one that stuck out most for me was the Modern Groom paper. I felt that the author of the paper did a fantastic job assembling the pieces and really made the content flow the way that a magazine would. This example helped me to think about the importance of tone in this type of project. Though I've never read a magazine designed for males, I thought that the author did a good job of mimicking the style of Cosmopolitan, only intending men as the audience instead of women. I could tell that the author tried to appeal to men and had the quick and witty tone of this type of magazine. I also liked that the author chose to incorporate pop culture (such as The Simpsons and MC Hammer) as a way to make the magazine appealing and commercialized.

Again, I am very excited to work on my own multigenre paper. I also am glad to have learned about this project so that I will be able to use it in my own classroom someday!

Sensory Images in Writing

This week, I continued to enjoy reading from Harry Noden and Jeff Anderson. I feel that both authors are really teaching me a lot. (I also think that my future students will benefit significantly from my experience with these books.)

Noden was the most interesting for me this week. I love to read his strategies at the end and imagine how they could be used or modified in a classroom. Most of all, I loved Noden's thorough descriptions about how to develop images in writing. Though the concepts that he expressed may not have been completely new to me, he succeeds in explaining what they are and how to put them into use. For example, Noden discusses "image blanks." Though the very description of an image blank could be vague and confusing, Noden follows by describing several ways to prevent "firing an image blank" by giving examples and eventually moving through his some of his brushstrokes to enforce his meaning. I particularly found Noden's examples of the "Lost Friend' and "One Last Wish" poems. These poems completely demonstrated that simply telling is not enough in writing. Feelings must be shown and described with sensory details. 

In my mind, sensory details are the core of teaching students how to express themselves better in writing. Asking a student to describe an idea's appearance, smell, taste, sound, and texture seems to be a quick and effective strategy in expanding the way that they approach writing. 

One of my favorite strategies from Noden this week was "Strategy 2: Paint the Personality Behind the Clothes." I think that beginning a story with an image that can be interpreted in many different varieties would really be a great exercise in a class. Students would have the opportunity to get really creative and would probably enjoy hearing the versions from their classmates to see how different their stories turned out. 

As is typical, Anderson was very helpful and specific in his writing. I really liked all of his information about comma problems and his solutions about how to fix them. Commas, though seemingly simple to use, are not as user-friendly as they appear. Students become confused about all of the different rules, and I think that Anderson helps to prepare teachers for the mistakes that they will see. I liked his discussion of FANBOYS, and how this mnemonic, though helpful, can inspire more confusion as students begin to use it. I also took note of Anderson's brief discussion about sentence imitation and thought that it connected to Noden's reading for last week. 

On a more trivial note, I have been struck by Anderson's choices of mentor texts as I have been searching for my own. I love that he uses a variety of texts, many of which students may identify with better than others. Though I am not a huge fan, I think that using Jeff Foxworthy's work as a mentor text is a really great choice. Many students identify with humor, and seeing that it has a place in writing could really fuel their interest. 

Operation: Imitation

I'm going to be honest. When I initially began reading Noden's ideas about imitating versus plagiarizing, I was a bit skeptical. I asked myself how I could teach students the difference and even wondered if there was a difference. How do you teach students that it is okay to imitate without being sure that you can make it completely clear that this does not mean that it's acceptable to copy? Noden admits that the task of imitating rather than plagiarizing is a dangerous one. Luckily, I continued reading with an open mind and found that Noden's ideas are fantastic.

Noden writes that when imitating a text, it is useful to model your writing after the writing of others in terms of structure. The way to avoid plagiarism in classrooms is to encourage students to use the structure of another writer while changing the content to original ideas from their own thoughts and experiences. Noden presents several approaches to this task, of which I will only discuss a few. The concept of imitating structure and changing content, as I mentioned before, is actually called the Hamill Approach.

I enjoyed reading most about the Van Gogh Approach. In this approach, students are taught to use writer's voices in their writing. I think that this approach could be used in many different ways in teaching in an English classroom. Noden uses the voices of Edgar Allen Poe and a newspaper reporter to tell the story of Humpty Dumpty as examples. This idea could also be used with authors such as Shakespeare. After or during teaching a unit on Shakespeare or after reading one of his plays, students could be taught about voice and tone. As an exercise, students could be instructed to write something in the voice of Shakespeare. To continue the lesson and to help students find their own writer's voice, they could write the same story or essay in their own voice, which ties to another of Noden's strategies, "Search for a Personal Voice."

Noden provides other ideas such as imitating poetic sentences, which I believe could be a great exercise. Additionally, he suggests doing some research about plagiarizers, which I also think could be valuable when practicing these types of imitation lessons.

As always, Anderson is beyond helpful in his book, Mechanically Inclined. I found his outline to be a very helpful tool in lesson planning because he really knows how to cover all of his bases and organize all that needs to be taught in these lessons. The idea of an operator's manual that contains seven sections that summarize and detail how to teach students how to fix their common errors really seems to be a good way to target and solve writing issues. Anderson is also very skilled at teaching teachers how to keep grammar fun by suggesting visual and interactive games such as a "sentence smackdown." I also really love that Anderson focuses on teaching students to find things out for themselves, such as with the search for two-word sentences.

"Recess on a Page" and Writing on the Walls

In chapter 3 of his book, Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson writes that composing text is the most important activity that students can do. Anderson's main suggestion for allowing students to write is to implement writing journals into the class. He fully details the sections and content that should be present in the students' journals. Though I thoroughly enjoyed his description of all of these sections, I want to spend the majority of this time discussing the first section of the journal and how using this method affects students.

The first section of the journal should simply be for writing. Anderson says that this should be the largest section in the journal and that it should never be corrected by an instructor. It is a safe place for the student to document their thoughts and freely write. The writing section is described as "recess on a page." I really like Anderson's thoughts about providing a writing journal for students. He writes that teachers can allow for personal reflections in this section or even give specific prompts, which may consist of only one word that are meant to serve as inspiration for the students. Students are then given the opportunity to share their writing, but they don't have to if they do not wish to. I particularly like the way that Anderson presents the journals when he has his first class of the year. He reads to the students from a moving memoir about bullying and asks them to use their journals to discuss bullying in their own experience. This not only serves as a way to get the students writing, as everyone has had experience with bullying, but also leads into his class policy about bullying. Students are prompted in a creative way to think about bullying and it reminds them of the ugliness that goes along with it. Most importantly, Anderson has begun the process of creating a writing community in which students are able to respect each other and their writing. 

Anderson also discusses some rules that go along with the writing journals. He stresses that pages should never be torn out and that students are to make their own corrections at later times. Additionally, he discusses that when he has students doing a free writing exercise, they are told that the only way that they can do the exercise incorrectly is to stop writing before he tells them to end their thoughts. 

One of the other sections of the journal is a place for students to record "Gems," which are full sentences or paragraphs that they find in anything that they read. Anderson writes that this creates a way for students to appreciate grammar like it is art. This concept also pairs well with Anderson's earlier discussions about creating a literature-rich environment by pulling sample sentences to share with the class to teach grammar. In this case, students can share their own and feel even more connected and important in the process of understanding and learning grammar in context. 

In chapter 4 of Mechanically Inclined, Anderson introduces the idea of skipping wall posters, and instead hanging large sheets of butcher paper from the wall in order to create wall charts of what students are learning in the class. This hands-on approach allows students to watch teachers add to the list, add to it themselves, and use the list in class as a tool for reference. Anderson points out that this tactic is not only helpful to students, but also can help a teacher who is not fully comfortable memorizing everything that they have taught. I really like this idea and think that it applies to all kinds of learning types. Anderson writes that mechanics is a visual skill, and I think that this is a very fitting way to help students visualize concepts. Additionally, students are able to add to the list using sentence strips. I think that the idea of letting students add to the list really portrays the idea that everyone is there to help each other and learn together. 

The other reading for this week, chapter 4 of Weaver's Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing, alerts readers to the fact that sometimes integrating grammar in writing is not enough. Even if a teacher is having students write sentences of their own, these must be connected to a broader purpose, along with being further discussed. Weaver writes that students should have the opportunity to examine grammar in a way that they are considering context, purpose, audience, and possibilities. Without fully discussing and applying grammar in writing, students are left disconnected, still believing that grammar is a separate subject and not applicable to reading and writing real literature. A particularly interesting example given is that of a teacher taking a paragraph from Lois Lowry's The Giver and changing the grammar to make the sentences short and choppy. The students are able to discuss the effect of this type of punctuation and allowed to change it. After creating their own versions, they are presented with the original paragraph and asked to discuss why Lowry made the decisions she did and how this works for the text. I really liked this example and think that it further demonstrates that grammar and how it works in writing is a type of art form.

English Teachers: Loosen Up, Read and Enjoy the Learning Process

This week, two words stuck out to me in our assigned readings: creativity and passion. These two words have a fairly obvious relationship which is especially relevant to young writers. Weaver provides the insight of Donald Graves to enforce this point. She writes that "children--everyone, really--will work much harder on a piece of writing when they are truly engaged with it and truly eager to share it with a wider audience" (183). In my own personal experience, this theory has proven very true. One of my favorite courses at Shippensburg University has been Creative Nonfiction Writing. In this course, students were allowed to write about their own life experiences in a way that would be engaging to an audience. This method works to engage the students as well as their audience because they are allowed to be creative while writing about what they know best: themselves. After all, how many people do you know that don't like to talk about themselves? The stipulation for expository writing, which is the main topic for discussion in this week's reading, is that students must be able to connect their own lives to whatever it is that they are writing about. By giving students some time to think about their topics and how to connect with them, "school writing" becomes less about boring facts and more about writing like an actual writer.

In addition to the idea of letting students incorporate themselves into their writing, Weaver iterates that the five-paragraph essay formula is hugely problematic for instructing students in their development as writers. She writes that this structure can be helpful in teaching students how to write an essay, but that students must be encouraged to build on the model and move past it. I could not agree with her more. The five-paragraph essay typically forces students into a personality-less ramble that lacks character and flow. It seems that if teachers allow students to deviate from the five-paragraph form they may make some mistakes and perhaps even lose focus. However, as Weaver describes in Chapter 9, which focuses on English language learners, errors reflect the learning process. Though Weaver is discussing ELL's as she discusses this concept, it is clear that it is also very applicable to all students.

It is also important to note that as students must be permitted to make their own errors in order to learn, that teachers must use caution as they correct students. I especially liked the Code-Switching Shopping List chart and think that this is a fun and respectful way to handle editing cultural language habits out of formal writing. The idea that formal English is as simple to put on and take off as an article of clothing makes a lot of sense and reinforces that students with diverse cultural backgrounds are not "wrong," but simply must make some adjustments for certain situations.

I also appreciated Weaver's discussion of Stephen Krashen's theory of Language Acquisition (which I am also learning about in my Teaching Reading to English Language Learner's class!) Weaver discusses the difference between students studying English  and actually learning (acquiring) English. By immersing students in literature, they will be able to pick the language up, rather than having it put upon them. Learning this way will allow students to apply what they observe to their own practices. Isolating grammar and vocabulary does not reflect the same results.

The last topic that I want to discuss is that of standardized testing and what it means for "loosening" the strings of the binding structures and rules that are so common to red pen wielding English teachers. Weaver presents ideas about writing that are controversial and may be argued against by the presence of state standards which must be met for testing purposes. For many, the idea of passing over a sentence fragment without so much as making a mark is shocking and unheard of. However, Weaver provides evidence from scorer guidelines for Michigan's Educational Assessment Program. The document states that scorers  "should not bring their own stylistic biases into the assessment" (180). The document continues to read that "a single well-turned phrase or well-chosen word or poignant example should be appreciated only to the extent that it affects the whole presentation"(180). It seems to me that this means that students should be taught that it is okay to express themselves and make art out of their writing as long as it is well-focused and meets the requirements of the prompts provided.

Giving students an environment that encourages them to love to write seems to be the key in my perspective. Though this is an easier task to say than do, I think that with practice and the right amount of freedom and structure, students can be creative as well as successful. In my mind, developing a passion (or at least a tolerance) for writing is the first step to becoming a well-rounded writer. In order for this to occurs, English teachers must allow students to make some of their own mistakes while also being less concerned with stiff structures and rules.