Beginning with the word
Three clusters of practices are at the heart of this course:
Imitate/reproduce/copy
Un-write Emulate/innovate/compose |
Read Jay Heinrichs Word Hero, Chapter 3: "Capture the Secrets," paying special attention to pages 37-45. |
Why imitate another writer's sentences?
Imitation is an ancient rhetorical practice that iterates the way we learn language from the very beginning: we copy those around us who speak to others and who speak to us. Consequently, the basic patterns of our speaking and writing derive from the dominant patterns we imitated as we learned the languages we speak and write today.
The aim of such a practice is not to remain entirely within a particular style, but to emulate and innovate from a range of mastered tropes and schemes, and to make these tropes and schemes yours.
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Imitate/Reproduce/Copy
Copy the sentence word for word as many times as it takes to reproduce the entire sentence (phrases and clauses in whatever pattern) without having to look at the original sentence.
When we practice copying another's sentence, word for word, it is worth avoiding cutting any corners; the repetitive act of writing will give you an opportunity to make the pattern of the sentence part of your writing repertoire.
I recommend writing the sentences long hand, though you still can use other writing technologies, including recording yourself speak. Beware of the assumption that "getting" the sentence on a conceptual level does the trick. Doing so won't impact you as much as the actual physical practice, so do not merely read the sentence and then move on to the next step. While copying the sentence, you need to analyze the sentence, making clear all its parts and how they are all related to each other. As Stanley Fish, who defines a sentence as a logical structure of things, exhorts us, you are to ask:
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Note: having the goal of reproducing the sentence without having to refer to it is more important than succeeding at doing so, especially when copying longer, more ornate sentences. So, avoid getting too caught up in this step of the process unless you really want to master the original form, that is, you really value the sentence and would like to have it memorized to use at will. |
Un-writing the sentenceUnpack the meaning of the sentence, rendering it as plainly as possible in familiar language. This requires of you to perform the rhetorical figure called synonymia (also called expolitio or exergasia).
This step requires some work at translation to attempt to get at the "unfigural" rendering of the figural sentence (whether a trope or a scheme), which may take several attempts, some better than others. In the process, you will exercise and develop what Renaissance rhetorician Erasmus called "copiousness."
Here is the question to strive to answer: what does the sentence say if it were to follow everyday conventions of readibility (active voice, cohesive, coherent, familiar, and concise--aka, the "low style")? In Chapter 3 of Word Hero (38), Heinrichs breaks down the steps like this:
An example of unwriting occurs on page 175 of the book Eloquence, where Mark Forsyth quotes from Christopher Marlowe's play Dr. Faustus:
And Forsyth then "un-writes" the figure (synecdoche and metonymy and hyperbole and eponym and paromoion) as follows:
Forsyth still left the form of the question. What if we unwrite the sentence without the question to bring out what is implied, or left unsaid when a rhetorical question, or erotesis is maintained?
Or again, further:
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We see that here, between the letter and the meaning, between what the poet has written and what he thought, there is a gap, a space, and like all space, it possesses a form. This form is called a figure, and there will be as many figures as one can find forms in the space that is created on each occasion between the line of the signifier ("la tristesse s'envole" --sorrow flies away) and that of the signified ("le chagrin ne dure pas" --sadness does not last), which is obviously merely another signifier offered as the literal one. Often times, un-writing a figure will lead to longer sentences. Concision is still operative as every word and phrase is needed to expose (as in "writing exposition") what is implicit in the figure. |
Step 4: Emulate/Innovate/Compose
The next move is to practice translating each un-written figure back into the figure you are practicing, which requires us to examine the basic pattern of the sentence itself.
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