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?"
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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: |
Drew KoppProfessor of Writing Arts ArchivesCategories |