Laura asked an important questions concerning the Unit 1 assignment, especially these two points:
I understand I am trying diversify my sentence use and making my sentence type use appropriate for what I am saying, but what do you specifically mean by "cohesion" and "coherence"? And how do I know when they are broken? I think our discussion about my sentence regarding "by the scarecrow competition" might be a moment of that, but I'm not sure. Indeed. Let us take a closer look at that sentence together with the ones that immediately follow it: Professor Boatwright had wandered into the thickest part of the crowd by the scarecrow competition. From across a swath festival goers and straw men, a head of green hair turned toward another; a hooded figure stood with her. Lorelei’s lips moved. The young woman moved to go, but the figure grabbed at her. Boatwright pushed through the crowd towards them. Before we proceed, some definitions are in order, beginning with "cohesion," which Holcomb and Killingsworth write in their book, Performing Prose. They write on page 40 The passage already has some cohesion, but it is dispersed a bit. Boatwright is there at the beginning of the sentence, but not at the end, and perhaps he ought to be emphasized at the end of the sentence so that the reader gets what he notices there at the beginning of the next sentence. I will start with revising this first simple sentence with a bit of an afterthought into a compound/complex sentence with a couple of afterthoughts: A small multitude of bodies thronged together to witness the scarecrow competition, and after having wandered into the thickest part of the crowd, Professor Boatwright stood still, frozen, with squinted eyes. From across a swath festival goers and straw men, a head of green hair turned toward another; a hooded figure stood with her. Lorelei’s lips moved. The young woman moved to go, but the figure grabbed at her. Boatwright pushed through the crowd towards them. So, what I've done here is put Boatwright at the end of the sentence, emphasizing just a part of him (this is called synechdoche), which then adds cohesion to the prose because the reader can more readily connect the "eyes" to the event happening "across a swath of festival goes." Issues of coherence begin to emerge as you bring cohesion to your sentences. Here is an excellent way to distinguish coherence from cohesion that Joseph Williams provides in Lesson five of his wonderful little book, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (some of these lessons are available in the dropbox folder: recommended readings--look for "Williams"). He writes: Coherence is how all the sentences work together in a wonderful exchange between emphasis and de-emphasis. If every moment is emphasized, nothing is. So, Laura will more than likely discover that with revising this sentence, she must also enact new and unexpected, but necessary, changes to the rest of her sentences to articulate a greater experience of coherence.
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A student asked "if there are other practice exercises you wanted us to make note of in addition to reading?”
Here’s what I say is the best practice to make a part of your everyday writing life: Practice each kind of sentence over and over and over again, and most importantly, practice writing the sentence type in real writing situations you do everyday. So, for instance, the next time you write a text to someone or a Facebook status update or whatever, write a periodic sentence like the one we worked on today. Practice speaking the sentence type. Also, as we will do in Unit 2: be on the lookout for awesome sentences, extraordinary sentences, sentences that make your heart sing and your head swim, sentences that take your breathe away along with all the silly reasons that keep you from growing as a writer. Find those sentences, copy them over and over until you’ve memorized every nuance, and then emulate them. Wash. Rise. Repeat. In a way, we already do this, except that we do it with a handful of sentence types that together we call "you," wherein "you" emerge as a kind of reflection, or shadow, a product of the repeating practices. And so we often resist at all costs straying from the protective warmth those practices grant us. Some questions to ask then, include: "What if who I am is a product of the sentences I speak and write? What if the world I experience is given to me by the sentences in which I speak and write? What might become possible if I fundamentally altered the collection of sentence types I speak and write with, in essence, expanding my repertoire? What kind of being might I become? What would happen to the old me?" I successfully avoided finishing a book this evening, called The Science of Qualitative Research by Martin Packer, which I need to finish by tomorrow evening to write something up for a reading group I belong to. One of the many things I did instead was reflect on the maxim we examined in class today. To wit: We promise according to our hopes This was written by the great French stylist and writer of maxims Francois de La Rochefoucauld, who crafted and built amazing palaces of sentences within which to house his piercing insights into human conduct. I want to revisit the controlling values we started to articulate in this statement. I hear in this statement a "conditional," and as a conditional statement, there must be some effect, and so: When Why? Well, what is the antithesis of hope? Despair? Or is it rather hopelessness? Hopelessness and despair are quite different. When we hope, we leave ourselves open to the hope getting crushed. Hope needs despair and despair hope. Indeed, the more high the hope, the more deep the despair one is likely to fall into. If there is no hope, there is no disappointment, no despair. This is the meaning of what the ancient Greeks called the Stoic philosophy. What I have just done here is walk through the scheme, the figural structure, of the antithesis that Rochefoucauld gave us the hint of with his maxim. He only gave us a fragment: just the context. Here is a scene from the wonderful musical The Man of La Mancha, where Miguel de Cervantes seems to be speaking back to Rochefoucauld: |
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