Re: Developing an ear

1

This is not quite an answer because I have really complicated thoughts on my girls' language and literacy that don't entirely have to do with me and not so much with this post, either, but I do have a possibly pertinent anecdote.

We were leaving a birthday party and driving to watch a documentary a week or two ago when one of the girls said, "Mommy, what do YOU think a text is?" and I was kind of baffled about how to respond and said, "Well, I think the text is whatever it is that you're trying to understand." And actually it must have been Mara (first grade) asking because Nia (second grade) immediately piped in with, "Yeah, because you have to make text-to-text and text-to-self and text-to-world connections!" which I know from conducting the teacher interviews is at the core of the intensive literacy program at the school, but still was kind of weird for me to hear even though I loved it. It's also making me wonder if I could intervene now and raise them natively Derridean or something.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 8:57 AM
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That is amazing, Thorn.


Posted by: AWB | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:03 AM
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Huh. I learned to write by the Rivka method (grade school involved almost no writing at all, but I soaked in prose written for adults in ridiculous amounts). And I'm not a terrible writer, but I have always found it really difficult and unpleasant (blog comments don't count, I'm not writing, I'm talking) -- I am always in the throes of writers block, and writing anything is a painful process of grinding it out sentence by repulsive sentence.

Part of that is individual neurosis and hating to work, but I think some of it is that my critical sense of what a minimally adequate piece of writing has to be was so far ahead of my writing skills for so long that I couldn't handle the dissonance, and the negative reaction to my own writing as impossibly clumsy and ugly got stuck. I think I would have been better off with what my kids got: assignments to produce large volumes of incompetent, uninhibited drivel in grade school. And they seem to find writing much less unpleasant than I did and do.

Everyone's mileage may vary, but I think my reaction is one possible failure mode of the Rivka method.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:06 AM
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I wish I'd paid more attention to the exact wording of their responses, but it went "Of course it's NOT the same as a text on a phone!" And I said, "Well, a text on a phone IS one kind of text like we're talking about, but yes, the word is being used two different ways." And then they said that the movie was going to be a text and books are texts and so are sentences but probably not words and that they weren't sure if talking about this was a text but maybe. And then my mind was blown and Selah started shrieking about wanting her favorite Rastamouse songs played and I said that those were texts too and then we were there.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:08 AM
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That is mindblowing. It's as if New Math had worked, and all the kids being moderately confused about set theory had really developed the deep understanding of the foundations of mathematics that the people introducing it had been hoping for.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:11 AM
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When working with students with really basic writing skills, I often asked them to imitate passages. We'd take a really short few paragraphs of great writing (something really bitchy and arrogant, for fun) and I have them replicate the rhetorical moves of each sentence, but make it about a topic of their own choosing. None of them had ever done imitations before. It seemed to be effective not only for developing the ear, but also for showing the difference between plagiarism and imitation. It also mirrors what I think a lot of people who are good writers in college were doing on their own in junior high and high school--reading Kafka or Vonnegut and then writing like Kafka or Vonnegut.


Posted by: AWB | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:14 AM
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Okay, more details from here. For Mara, who tends toward perfectionism, having to write a daily journal in kindergarten and now first grade has given her the discipline to keep trying when she's having a hard time or makes a mistake. Nia still struggles with literacy and hasn't gotten to grade level yet (though she's at end-of-first-grade reading level at not yet halfway through second grade, so I do think she can catch up this year if she keeps going as she has been) and writing seems like a reasonable part of the practice she needs to just figure out how words fit together.

Mara still has extremely weird diction, but no one at school or at the hospital thinks it quite rises to the point where she needs interventions. It's just a little hard emotionally as Selah, at two, is now speaking in full grammatical sentences a lot of the time in ways that Mara still doesn't care to. Mara's understanding is fine and her reading is great, but she still says things like "What's that is?" that are pretty much unique to her. I'm just trusting it will eventually come together for now, because she is still young and she also doesn't care or feel an incentive to change, but it's a little unsettling sometimes. And Nia deliberately took up "ain't" a week ago to sound like her friend and we put the kibosh on that one quickly saying that code-switching is fine but is not the same as being a copycat. (Meow, as Selah always says when that word comes up, since it's usually in reference to her.)


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:14 AM
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It also mirrors what I think a lot of people who are good writers in college were doing on their own in junior high and high school--reading Kafka or Vonnegut and then writing like Kafka or Vonnegut.

Oh god, so guilty as charged.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:16 AM
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Not that I was necessarily a good writer in college.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:16 AM
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she still says things like "What's that is?" that are pretty much unique to her.

Sounds better in French - "qu'est-ce que c'est?" She's clearly speaking Stage Frenchman English. Does she say things like "name of a dog!" when upset?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:17 AM
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Buck has a college story about reading Kerouac, hating him, and turning in an essay about how much he hated it written as Kerouac pastiche (got a terrible grade). I never did anything fun like that.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:18 AM
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I took a class in beat literature. For my final project, I had an idea which I knew would get an A+, but was so hopelessly smug and obnoxious that I was embarrassed to do it. Eventually my desire for the A+ beat my embarrassment, and so I wrote - in about ten minutes - a comparison of Beat culture and 90s rap culture. Complete with mix tape. And I got my goddamn A+ and the TA went out of his way to praise it in class, so I also got some extra embarrassment.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:22 AM
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10 is really not far off from the curses she mutters under her breath, though she won't repeat them. She wants to learn French, but I've sort of been waiting for her English to standardize before adding any other languages, which maybe isn't fair to her. (Her imaginary boyfriend, Bar/be/cue Sa/uce Jo/nes, is in France at the moment, and so we didn't have a proper mailing address for the letters she wrote him all weekend.)


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:24 AM
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LB's 3 sounds like me, though I can't actually recall much about how I learned to write (in this way that everything before about fifth grade is near-complete fog). "Writing anything is a painful process of grinding it out sentence by repulsive sentence" describes exactly how I feel, and it's even at the point of hurting me professionally.


Posted by: Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:27 AM
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Nathan and LB are very different from me. I found it easy to churn out sentences that sounded smooth, but was incredibly late in grasping the point of writing - we're actually trying to communicate something to your reader, not dazzle them with your super-smooth facility with big words.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:31 AM
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11 is what I did whenever the assignment made it possible (not the hating part, but the imitation part), and my profs/TAs usually liked getting that kind of thing. It was indeed fun, and those were the only assignments where I didn't suffer the whole way through, for reasons similar to 3.2.


Posted by: Awl | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:36 AM
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I learned in school and seem to avoided both of the methods above--no mimicry or endless journal entries. I've always been quite comfortable with my writing--and I read voraciously from a young age, which is what I'll give credit to.


Posted by: Mooseking | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:36 AM
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14 is a hard state to be in. I wish you peace. I really like writing, but have to remind myself that I like it, especially when doing hard academic writing. I have to trust that something is really happening, that it really will go somewhere, and that I want to tell people something that I think and know really well. It's hard when everything conspires to make you feel like no one will really ever read your work.

Of the peer reviews I've gotten, I only just now received a positive one, ever. My previous publications have been because the editors overruled their reviewers in some degree. For the first time, I just got one that said it was the best essay the reviewer had ever received for a journal. I about fell out of my chair. Usually my reviewers say weird shit like "Obviously this author is a man." That's an insult?


Posted by: AWB | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:37 AM
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Also, Bar/be/cue Sa/uce Jo/nes (and "Bar/be/cue Sa/uce Jo/nes") is awesome.


Posted by: Awl | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:37 AM
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Her imaginary boyfriend, Bar/be/cue Sa/uce Jo/nes

We are googleproofing imaginary people now?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:37 AM
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21

Mara's imaginary boyfriend's name is the best.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:38 AM
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I don't know! Halford's not here to tell me if I have to pay her fees for using the name or something. (Mostly it's that it's too cute not to use the real name but also feels like I'm being unfair to her in sharing it when I don't even use her real name.) She announces most mornings what she and Barbecue did in the night, eating shrimp and going to movies and so on, though she's threatened to outsource any kissing to Nia, because she's not down with that.

On the OP, I do think reading a lot of Victorians at an impressionable age made Greek/Latin translation easier.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:41 AM
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The name is truly terrific. I can actually picture him right now. I bet he sings the blues.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:43 AM
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re: 23

Neckerchief. Maybe a straw hat?


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:45 AM
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23, 24: Also, he's a muppet.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:53 AM
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19, 21 and 23 fourthed.


Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:53 AM
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I think my elementary school took an approach in between what's described in the post. Lots of regular free-form writing but I don't think we got to five paragraph essays before fifth grade (I changed schools at that point so I don't know what they did for sixth grade). I guess we wrote reports but those were more like summaries of info than essays, which I've always thought of as having an argument or at least a point.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:54 AM
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I write pretty well, if I don't have too much time to rewrite. So, academic essays or seminar papers done under time pressure, or exam papers, or whatever, were normally very good [even if I do say so myself].

I find rewriting a horrible painful process, though, and the outcome is shitty over-worked unclear prose. Both my postgraduate theses read like they were written by someone quite different from the person writing my shorter stuff.

I used to try when I was teaching to actually teach people how to structure written work, and express arguments. I don't know how possible it is to teach them how to write engagingly, or with a good prose style if they don't have the ear that you get from a lot of reading.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 9:57 AM
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29

My favorite writing assignments were ones where we were supposed to write an extra chapter (not full length) to be inserted between two chapters of the novel we were reading, ideally in the author's style and with logical connection to the plot.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:03 AM
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Also, he's a muppet.

Well, I just assume everyone on the internet is a Muppet unless I know otherwise.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:05 AM
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I certainly am.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:06 AM
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32

29: I've never heard of an assignment like that, but it sounds fun.


Posted by: urple | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:08 AM
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All I remember from elementary school is the endless numbered series of "reading comprehension" questions, answers to which were required to be in complete sentences repeating the form of the question.

4. Why does Henry go back to the grocery store after baseball practice?

4. Henry goes back to the grocery store after baseball practice because he stupid forgot his stupid hat at the stupid register. It is now 11:03. I have 57 more minutes of writing these.

Did nobody else have to do this? If I hadn't liked to read for other reasons I'd be nonverbal by now.


Posted by: lourdes kayak | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:09 AM
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32: I vaguely remember doing a couple of those at school. It just made me decide that pastiche was way more fun than actually writing original stuff.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:10 AM
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33: That is a central memory of mine, for sure.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:14 AM
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In 7th grade we were supposed to learn to write "the perfect paragraph." I don't think I ever managed to write even a perfect sentence. The best I'm able to do is occassionally spell a word correctly.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:14 AM
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34: Didn't someone recently discover that there is no such thing as original writing and it's pastiche all the way down?


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:15 AM
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38

Actually, no, I credit my present verbality to my family going to the UK for a year, where we did suddenly do a lot more imaginative writing in school, including things like 29. It was the best. I have no idea if there were actual differences in national curricula to thank, or just different schools/teachers.


Posted by: lourdes kayak | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:15 AM
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39

Wildcats rule.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:18 AM
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I credit my answer in 15 to my IB high school education, where we took 4 hour essay exams, with the expectation that you would produce two ten page (hand-written) essays in that time. There's one official four hour exam, but our program had us doing them for practice from 9th grade on. Stream-of-smooth-bullshit training.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:24 AM
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Part of that is individual neurosis and hating to work, but I think some of it is that my critical sense of what a minimally adequate piece of writing has to be was so far ahead of my writing skills for so long that I couldn't handle the dissonance, and the negative reaction to my own writing as impossibly clumsy and ugly got stuck.

That describes me as well.

Honestly, commenting at unfogged improved my writing -- precisely because it provided a forum for churning out small bits of writing on a regular basis.

(For that matter, LB, you're clearly capable of generating large amounts of clear, well-written blog comments without any apparent pain._


Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:24 AM
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Commenting on Unfogged has done wonders for me in terms of understanding what the hell it means to critique an argument.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:26 AM
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40 reminds me that my highschool (Catholic, single-sex) had an annual "schoolwide essay," where we would get a sheet of open-ended questions and had to use the books we'd read in English class that year to write one long essay in response and the essays would then be randomly allocated to the English teachers to grade, so it wasn't your teacher giving you a score. I don't know if people stressed out about it and it can't have been all that much of the grade for that reason, but I really liked it and still think it's probably a good idea.

To 33, I'm finding that first grade comprehension questions are like that, though with a word or phrase as the answer. By second grade, you're supposed to be able to answer higher-order questions in your own words. They still don't have to be spelled right, though, because we don't use the system Rivka does.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:28 AM
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33: The National Police Officer Selection Test (NPOST) has a section just like that, requiring basic answers to questions in a grammatically correct complete sentence just to weed out the extreme meatheads. And god, the things people write on witness statements. Oh, your entire written statement about the fight you witnessed is "there was yelling, and then PEOPLE WERE FIGHTING"? Awesome.


Posted by: gswift | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:44 AM
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"Those cats were fast as lightning."


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:45 AM
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Also, belatedly, 1 is amazing and I hope they start working "always already" into their everyday vocabulary.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 10:54 AM
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My favorite writing assignments were ones where we were supposed to write an extra chapter (not full length) to be inserted between two chapters of the novel we were reading, ideally in the author's style and with logical connection to the plot.

That helps to explain one of this blog's greatest comments ever.


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 11:37 AM
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If you liked that, Jesus, you might also enjoy this entry from the Yelping with Cormac tumblr. They're not all great, but for me the Taco (Bell) Trilogy was a hoot.


Posted by: Stranded in Lubbock | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 12:39 PM
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19: my kid's dramatic reading of the Asterix when they go to England used to reduce me to helpless giggling. He does an impeccable Franglais.


Posted by: dairy queen | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 1:32 PM
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50

That was to 10, not 19!


Posted by: dairy queen | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 2:40 PM
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BBQSJ is great.

The idea of training an ear is interesting. I don't remember being asked to write much at length until quite late in primary school. I had the glib / smooth approach to writing until quite late in uni. In the last ten years I seem to get slower and more critical of what I write every year. It feels like I'm thinking about it more carefully at the time, but honestly I'm not sure if I am developing some critical discrimination or my writing skills are just atrophying from under-use. A certain kind of corporate environment encourages bullet pointillism.


Posted by: conflated | Link to this comment | 11-25-14 6:45 AM
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