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Kellsterik posted:[...] is it a concern as a dramaturg that your general audience won't pick up on the wordplay in the script, or certain lines will lose their impact to an unfamiliar listener? How do you keep your audience from getting lost in Shakesperean English? [...] or are festivals of this type pretty much geared toward audiences familiar with the text? Some Shakespeare festivals (think Stratford) can afford to assume that an audience is familiar with whichever play. I think that's a bad assumption, though, and it's certainly not one that I can make with the festival I'm working in. We're really closer to a Renaissance Faire, but with plays instead of jousting. Hopefully fewer furries and centaur costumes, and more of anything (anything) else. So if you think plays, turkey legs, beer and wine vendors, and craft vendors (who aren't selling chainmail bras and pewter dragons), you're probably close to the mark. So accessibility is really important for us. Accessibility is always really important, though. In Romeo and Juliet, for instance, it's easy to define an old/young generational divide -- the dialogue does that pretty well, and people familiar with the play are going to know about this generational divide going in. But if you want to send the message that Tybalt, Mercutio, and Benvolio are slightly older than Romeo, Juliet, and Paris, you really need to think through accessibility. The dialogue doesn't do this, and if you're hoping your casting choices will make it work, you're relying too much on your audience's ability to spot the differences between a teenager and a twenty year old from the back of the house. And most productions of R&J don't treat this matter with any significance, so your audience is either not going to be aware of this age distinction, or may even think it doesn't exist. So we end up making the kinds of PoMo costuming decisions that drive people nuts -- student clothing for the youngest generation and work clothes for Tybalt, Mercutio, and Benvolio (to communicate the age difference), and then everyone ends up carrying knives. So there's that. And along with the cuts to the scripts (to keep things around two hours), there's the usual process of substituting comprehensible words and phrases for baffling ones. Marcello's "should I strike at it with my partisan?" becomes "should I strike at it with my spear?," the quibbles on Tybalt being Prince of Cats mostly get cut, and Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech gets squeezed down to about ten lines (after all, he's giving Romeo poo poo about how insufferably boring it is to hear people talk about dreams by going on and on and on, so ten lines of shaggy dog story does the job as well as forty). And there are likewise other expository bits that can get cut. Shakespeare was generally written for long-distance viewing, so there are lots of lines that amount to "I am picking up this book," "here comes a messenger," or "we are on a ship." And if your staging communicates those things well enough, the lines seem really out of place. Also, any complex plot point (especially in the early plays) gets described a few times -- presumably because the performance venue was such that the audience could be expected to miss any individual line or set of lines. So when Friar Lawrence describes his sleeping potion plan, he does it basically three times (back to back to back). That makes sense at the Globe, but gets irritating in a modern playhouse where actors' lines ought not be inaudible.
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Apr 23, 2014 15:21
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Brainworm, I just wanted to say thank you for this thread. I started reading it my first semester of grad school (Fall 2011) and it was a life preserver in a sea of English jargon, pedagogical theory, and grad-student neuroses I almost drowned in. I graduate next week and have an agent lined up for my novel, and a fair amount of my success was because your writing brought things down to earth. Practical, too. I still use your implication game in my creative writing courses, and I ended up mimicking your writing style for articles the way I mimicked novelists in order to learn fiction. It was a huge, huge help.
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May 8, 2014 03:11
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3Romeo posted:Brainworm, I just wanted to say thank you for this thread. I started reading it my first semester of grad school (Fall 2011) and it was a life preserver in a sea of English jargon, pedagogical theory, and grad-student neuroses I almost drowned in. I graduate next week and have an agent lined up for my novel, and a fair amount of my success was because your writing brought things down to earth. Practical, too. I still use your implication game in my creative writing courses, and I ended up mimicking your writing style for articles the way I mimicked novelists in order to learn fiction. It was a huge, huge help. So that gets a holy poo poo on two counts. First: Thanks. Second: You're finished? That's great, and congratulations, but it's also a time-catching-up-with-me moment. I've gotten married and divorced since this thread started, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But I am.
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May 9, 2014 15:20
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As someone who is bent on doing an MFA in Creative Writing or, at the very least, an online certificate to do more formal studying at some point in the next few years, I've heard that English literature classes (which, apart from one ENG103 core plan college requirement, I haven't really taken any besides cross-listed classes like Modern Chinese Autobiography [think Spider Eaters] and such) are beneficial and encouraged to be taken at least once or twice in addition to all my other workshop classes. That being said, as someone who is pretty much a total newbie to college and grad-level English, where should I start? Are there books I can get off of Amazon that would offer a similar pedagogy to college/grad school kind of English coursework? I mainly want to focus on fiction and screenwriting, but I've dabbled with poetry through my girlfriend (she loves poetry) and a local workshop/stage performance downtown.
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May 9, 2014 18:55
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I just finished an MFA in CW, as it happens. And, frankly, this thread was the most useful book I read in regards to writing, grad school, grad school culture, literature, analysis, theory, and teaching. Edit: By its nature, it's pretty disorganized, but I found that a huge benefit. Getting little chunks of information at a time kept it from being overwhelming. And as a bonus, I know more about Milton than most people I've ever met. It really is a book, too. The thread, I mean. I cut and pasted all of Brainworm's replies from this thread (and his earlier one) into a notepad document and sent it to my Kindle and read it whenever I could. According to my the dots on my Paperwhite, it's almost as long as The Shining. Edit: Twice as long as The Shining, it turns out, and about 90,000 words shy of the uncircumcised Stand. Asbury fucked around with this message at 21:44 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 21:36
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3Romeo posted:It really is a book, too. The thread, I mean. I cut and pasted all of Brainworm's replies from this thread (and his earlier one) into a notepad document and sent it to my Kindle and read it whenever I could. According to my the dots on my Paperwhite, it's almost as long as The Shining. Can I have it?
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May 11, 2014 12:34
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TheRamblingSoul posted:[...] That being said, as someone who is pretty much a total newbie to college and grad-level English, where should I start? Are there books I can get off of Amazon that would offer a similar pedagogy to college/grad school kind of English coursework? I mainly want to focus on fiction and screenwriting, but I've dabbled with poetry through my girlfriend (she loves poetry) and a local workshop/stage performance downtown. I think this question's come up before, and I think the short answer is that while there are some books that might be useful reads there's no specific book or set of books that really meet this need. One reason for this is that a lot of graduate coursework is really indistinguishable from advanced undergrad. coursework, and so a lot of what you'd do at the Lit. end would be a slightly different version of the usual grind (say, picking up every Norton Anthology of X and reading it cover to cover with a special focus on the introductory and overview material). The thing is, good discussion and guidance are what help you develop your own connections between the things you're reading, which is a huge part of what I think lets learning happen. You can't memorize your way through the canon of English Lit. for the same basic reasons you can't memorize your way through Organic Chemistry. There's just too much stuff. But some understanding of how a given piece of literature is systematically similar to and different from other pieces, well, that'll get you where you need to go. But so far as I know, there's no book that attempts to outline this in any comprehensive way -- you know, say a pile of things like "Shakespeare's early villains are very like Marlowe's until about 1600, when Hamlet adds to that type of villain an introspective element that makes him a compelling, if enigmatic, hero." Anthologies (such as the Norton or Broadview) are probably where this should happen, but they usually substitute short biographical or historical essays for properly critical ones. Some critics (like Bloom and Kristeva) touch the matter implicitly by laying out broad theories about how texts relate to one another, but that's not much use if what you're looking for are actual connections rather than a system for either making or analyzing them. Anyway. If you're interested in poetry, I think the thing to do is pick up a cheap and portable anthology -- I've used Dover's 100 Best Loved Poems for this, but a (used) Norton works really well too -- and read the poems in something like a random order. When one poem reminds you of another, compare the two, see what's up, and try to make some kind of hypothesis out of the relationship. Maybe that's "all sonnets are love poems," and maybe it's "Shelly's sonnets are about relationships to ideas, while Shakespeare's are about relationships between people." Whatever. Keep track of these and refine them as you go, and you'll eventually you'll get something like the system you need. You can do the same thing with novels, scripts, and stories, but short form poetry allows you to quickly read with tremendous breadth. So when I help students develop this skill, we generally start with sonnets and transfer to novels, plays, and long-form poems.
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May 12, 2014 01:46
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FightingMongoose posted:Can I have it? What I should do is compile and sort that stuff, rewrite it, and try to eat Thomas Foster's lunch. Because Flint needs one less thing going for it. Also, I've backed myself into a writing corner such that I've got nothing to work on until September unless I want to start something from scratch. So if you can share that notepad file, go for it. If you don't mind my hacking on it I'll start a rewrite, post it here for anyone who wants it, and shop it around.
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May 12, 2014 02:08
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Good God, please do that.
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May 12, 2014 05:26
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Newer version couple years further on down the thread
Asbury fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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May 12, 2014 14:27
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Brainworm posted:What I should do is compile and sort that stuff, rewrite it, and try to eat Thomas Foster's lunch. Because Flint needs one less thing going for it. Also, I've backed myself into a writing corner such that I've got nothing to work on until September unless I want to start something from scratch. Are you going to leave in the stuff about departmental politics? Because when I was reading recent posts just now I thought that I would have been endlessly amused if I had a professor use the phrase "Vag-slamming tour of Europe" in class. Incidentally, that story is pretty much porn plot bingo.
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May 12, 2014 14:48
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3Romeo posted:Brainworm, I just wanted to say thank you for this thread. I started reading it my first semester of grad school (Fall 2011) and it was a life preserver in a sea of English jargon, pedagogical theory, and grad-student neuroses I almost drowned in. I graduate next week and have an agent lined up for my novel, and a fair amount of my success was because your writing brought things down to earth. Practical, too. I still use your implication game in my creative writing courses, and I ended up mimicking your writing style for articles the way I mimicked novelists in order to learn fiction. It was a huge, huge help. This is amazing. 
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May 12, 2014 16:05
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Thanks, 3Romeo!
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May 12, 2014 16:06
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I also followed this thread with great interest as I finished my own PhD in another humanities discipline and struggled through the brutal job market. I think I'm going to be working pretty close to where you went to grad school, Brainworm. I'll be at a small college that claims one of the nation's founders as one of its titular founders. Sorry to by cryptic, but you'll know the place I mean. I'm really excited about it.
striking-wolf fucked around with this message at 19:01 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 18:53
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FightingMongoose posted:Thanks, 3Romeo! No problem. I updated it to the last response on this page. I've had a (sightly outdated) copy for a while but I didn't want to share it without Brainworm's okay. It isn't always easy to read (the quote/reply structure, without proper formatting, is sometimes difficult to parse), but it certainly isn't terrible. Part One is the old thread (from 2008) and Part Two is this one. 2008. I think the digital world is loving with my sense of time. And not in a cool way. Asbury fucked around with this message at 22:03 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 21:58
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3Romeo posted:No problem. I updated it to the last response on this page. I've had a (sightly outdated) copy for a while but I didn't want to share it without Brainworm's okay. It isn't always easy to read (the quote/reply structure, without proper formatting, is sometimes difficult to parse), but it certainly isn't terrible. Part One is the old thread (from 2008) and Part Two is this one. Again, thanks. Putting this together saves (saved?) me a ton of work, and that you took the time to do it because it was useful, I don't know. I'm touched someplace I can't describe, since I'm the kind of person who gives a compliment and immediately takes back half of it. Anyway. Turns out, 374K words is about 850 single-spaced pages. I'd bet my wisdom teeth that's more than I've written for books and articles since 2008, and I'm not totally sure what to make of that.
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May 12, 2014 22:46
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Brainworm posted:Again, thanks. Putting this together saves (saved?) me a ton of work, and that you took the time to do it because it was useful, I don't know. I'm touched someplace I can't describe, since I'm the kind of person who gives a compliment and immediately takes back half of it. I'm not sure what venue would let you write the equivalent of what goes on in this thread, but there should be one to get it more widely disseminated. Apart from your thoughts on literature, which are great, you are really good, in my opinion, at clear and novel conceptual explanations of just any general aspect of life. Your forums posting also makes me wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice by writing like poo poo on the forums and only really trying in my academic/published work. Actually I'd be curious to know your thoughts on what you think about how one should think about writing when not doing it for publication but just in venues like forums or (to an extent I guess) emails. Do you revise a bunch? Do you take a lot of care with emails or fall into traps like the ones I'm demonstrating of being overly verbose + careless?
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May 13, 2014 00:05
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Skeesix posted:Are you going to leave in the stuff about departmental politics? Because when I was reading recent posts just now I thought that I would have been endlessly amused if I had a professor use the phrase "Vag-slamming tour of Europe" in class. [...] I don't know. And at this point I'm not sure what "leaving something in" means. Here's what I mean: Right now, I have ~850 pages of what amounts to short essays written for a general audience on a whole range of topics, and the only things those essays or topics have in common is that they somehow relate to my day-to-day life. That's not any coherent basis for a book. It's not a coherent basis for anything except a self-indulgent memoir. So the job in front of me is something like this: 1) Read through all this stuff, and decide what might be useful later and what belongs in the junkpile. 2) Look for some ideas or topics common to the non-junkpile stuff. 3) Take all the stuff relating to one topic or idea, re-read it, and ask myself what I should have written. 4) Write that. And lather, rinse, repeat until I think I'm done, I'm forced to quit, or the process fails irrecoverably.* I guess what I'm saying is that this stuff is all a first draft of something, but I don't know what yet. That's typical of my first drafts. So working with it is more like mining than refining. There might be something in here that upcycles to, I don't know, part of an introduction to Hamlet or a guide for prospective graduate students. But my experience has been that wholesale rewrites are the best way to work with anything that looks like a draft. quote:Incidentally, that story is pretty much porn plot bingo. I was going to fake speechlessness at that. What actually happened is that I thought about a dozen things at once. They were: Brainworm Thought posted:Porn has plots? Wait. It used to. But if I say anything about that people might think I'm either obtuse about or overly conversant with pornography. Better not say anything. This coffee is loving terrible. Brainworm Thought posted:Have you ever met someone who would have been an incredible trophy wife, like, fifteen years ago? Because this was that woman. Had she been from the San Fernando Valley instead of Quebec, she could have spent two afternoons acting her way through a movie that was actually her alternate life as a Canadian academic. Brainworm Thought posted:Life imitates art, and art includes pornography. Incidentally, I own a blindingly white sectional that smells like a freshly-mulched garden. Brainworm Thought posted:Horrible. Have you been around academics? Film that, and you're going to see a galaxy of moles just screaming for biopsy. Brainworm Thought posted:I'm going to write that. Brainworm Thought posted:I'm going to write that right after I finish my erotic musical adaptation of The Giant Claw.** Which will be right after I start writing it. Which will be right after I figure out how much Diana's joking when she says she'd co-star in it with me as long as it's a five minute clip of cellphone-camera porn. I don't want her to be joking. I don't want her to not be joking. What I'm saying is, this has been an occasion for serious introspection. * If you're on the spectrum, it's a lot like sex. ** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAUhX6lLl_Q
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May 14, 2014 16:00
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semicolonsrock posted:I'm not sure what venue would let you write the equivalent of what goes on in this thread, but there should be one to get it more widely disseminated. Apart from your thoughts on literature, which are great, you are really good, in my opinion, at clear and novel conceptual explanations of just any general aspect of life. A blog. Have an area where people can submit questions (and probably a healthy discussion area, whether that's comments on individual articles or a forum independent of the posts, ala SA), and respond to one or three (or write about some current event, whatever) with a blog post every week or so. Daily posts would be murder on the author unless they were mostly throwaway comments/updates, 2-3 times/week might be ideal from the POV of the reader, weekly is probably the best way to balance the effort of composing a weighty, useful article on a subject with the attention span of the audience (if something takes much more than a week to update I tend to forget about it entirely in the intervening period). The best way to keep a user-input-focused blog healthy is to have a large enough user base: this forum should provide enough of a base to start with, at least, and as with any community you always want that to grow organically. (As opposed to a situation like a business, where advertising is both necessary and useful.) There's even the option to set up a Patreon or similar system if you want, I don't know how important that would be for you personally. Brainworm, I remember you started a blog a long time ago, and abandoned it soon after. It might be worth returning to that idea? Whether it was the topic of 'how to write' or 'how to academia ' or 'how to English Lit' or just English everything in general as in this thread, I think your insights would be appreciated by a lot of people, and having a more regular venue and focus for writing might be a useful exercise for you in itself.
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May 14, 2014 16:25
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semicolonsrock posted:I'm not sure what venue would let you write the equivalent of what goes on in this thread, but there should be one to get it more widely disseminated. Apart from your thoughts on literature, which are great, you are really good, in my opinion, at clear and novel conceptual explanations of just any general aspect of life. Thanks, brah. quote:Actually I'd be curious to know your thoughts on what you think about how one should think about writing when not doing it for publication but just in venues like forums or (to an extent I guess) emails. Do you revise a bunch? Do you take a lot of care with emails or fall into traps like the ones I'm demonstrating of being overly verbose + careless? I don't know. Writing should always be concise and memorable, so what I want to say is that I always revise and that you should always do the same. But I don't, always. At the same time, revision's a practical necessity. I'm not so handsome that I automatically have everyone's attention, and not so perceptive or hardworking that groups applaud my inclusion. So investing time in writing and speaking pays some kind of dividend. Some students want to come to class, and some faculty want to read my memos about piddling, day-to-day administrative problems. Also, writing's most fun for me when I think I've nailed something. Like, I really enjoy pretentious, self-satisfied chuckling. So I'd rather spend too much time having fun with something than do it quickly, have less fun, and move on to actual work.
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May 14, 2014 16:28
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Brainworm posted:I don't know. And at this point I'm not sure what "leaving something in" means. Here's what I mean: You should do a Chautauqua, ala Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I love that book, but "self-indulgent memoir" is a particularly apt description of it.
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May 14, 2014 20:58
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I don't know if you use Evernote, but you should categorize your posts/thoughts from there. You can use tags, organize them, and endlessly rearrange/format them. Just the Hamlet-tagged notes alone would make a small book. (P.S. I also have used this thread a ton from my early-ish undergrad days, completing a humanities graduate degree, to now working with all of those writing/analysis skills in a for-profit organization)
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May 15, 2014 03:14
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vegaji posted:I don't know if you use Evernote, but you should categorize your posts/thoughts from there. You can use tags, organize them, and endlessly rearrange/format them. Just the Hamlet-tagged notes alone would make a small book. I've tried on Evernote a few times -- it always seems like a good idea, and then I drop away from it. I think that's because it's a good tool for a lot of different jobs, but rarely the best for any single job. That, and the desktop clients are just slow and buggy enough to be a hassle. But Evernote might be exactly the thing for organizing all of this.
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May 16, 2014 20:34
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Any serious progress on the document yet? Don't mean to be pushy--I can only speak for myself, but I usually take everything in May after the end of the semester as a break, and kick back into high gear with my writing in June--but I'm curious as to how much you've decided was worth keeping.
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May 29, 2014 02:49
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3Romeo posted:Any serious progress on the document yet? Don't mean to be pushy--I can only speak for myself, but I usually take everything in May after the end of the semester as a break, and kick back into high gear with my writing in June--but I'm curious as to how much you've decided was worth keeping. I managed to read over about the first third before I moved, but I haven't made much progress in the last two weeks of prime writing time. I have all kinds of excuses.* But based on what I've read so far, I think there are three worthwhile discussion categories: 1) The process of becoming a graduate student or professor -- you know, choosing and applying to programs and jobs, and balancing your life once you're in them. 2) Teaching and classroom management -- think discussion exercises, working with problem students, giving feedback, and so on. 3) Literature, and how to read it -- this is mostly Shakespeare and Milton, plus a bunch of stuff on relationships between texts (like Red Badge and Slaughterhouse-Five). That third is far and away the largest and most diverse, so I'm sure it'll need some splitting out. There's also some amount of stuff on writing that I'm not sure what to make of. The Shakespeare festival runs until mid-June, which gives me about forty days to work on this before (a) the reviewers finish with my current set of chapters and (b) I head to Spain for a couple weeks to walk the Camino De Santiago. That should be enough to put together a first draft (or set of first drafts) of whatever this ends up being, keeping in mind that I'm the crown prince of the quick and lovely rough cut. * I just moved into the kind of fixer-upper-in-a-neighborhood-of-historic-mansions that amateur house flippers get a semis over, and I'm trying to get it up to scratch as quickly as I can. I just laid down like 500 linear feet of quarter round, so at least the floors are done. Also, that Shakespeare festival I've been working with opens on the 6th, so I've been putting six or eight hours a day into coaching actors, fabricating props, and building a 350-seat auditorium in an abandoned piano factory.
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May 29, 2014 13:00
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I wasn't sure whether to post this, but I think it ends up being a nice illustration of what it means to work at a small liberal arts college with a community mission (as opposed to an R1). About six months ago, I got together with about ten other people to start a local Shakespeare festival (now in its final weekend). This is a community project rather than a college production, and so involved doing everything -- fundraising, casting, and so on -- from scratch. For a bunch of reasons, we chose to set up in an abandoned factory that was some time ago deeded to the local park district. In late March, it looked like this:   And here it is from the outside: .jpg) I originally signed on as the dramaturg for our festival productions, but as things fell out I also ended up being something like chief carpenter -- really the only full-time carpenter, with huge assists from the set and lighting designers, a couple dedicated volunteers, our artistic director, and the festival president (who's also a college trustee). There was a lot of work. Think running wiring and fixing roof leaks along with actually building the stage, set, and structure for the lights and curtains. It took four of us (me, the two designers, and the AD) working full time, plus another three or four part-timers, about two full weeks to get everything together. We started rehearsals on site as soon as the stage was structurally sound. Here's Mercutio and Tybalt at an early fight call:   And here's a rehearsal of Much Ado a couple days later:  This gives some idea of what the lighting looks like after sunset:  A dress rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet: And here's the theater's final form. There are about 350 seats, just for a sense of scale.  This was a community project, not a college one. But at the same time, there's no way it would have made professional sense to contribute to it if I were in an English department at an R1 -- it's so far outside either my job description or expertise that I'd have a hard time justifying the time away from writing. But at a liberal arts college, this is worthwhile for no reason other than the opportunities it opens up for students. Now that we've had a season, we can offer some credible internships, practical courses (in theater, marketing, and of course Shakespeare), and bring the professionals we hire to campus for one-off sessions on everything from stage management to web design. So that's a win.
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Jun 14, 2014 04:34
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Really digging the work you put into that. Even though I'm done teaching for just now (most of my job applications these days are aimed toward technical writing or copy-editing, because adjuncting my way to a living isn't really feasible, and it seems like tenure-track positions in Comp and CW are an endangered species) I still sometimes think about different approaches to teaching that take it out of the classroom, and it's cool to see something like your project come to life. On a related note: I'm actually doing a thing right now with the National Writing Project--which is mostly teachers talking teaching to other teachers--and I'm happily surprised at how often my colleagues try to break the mold of the five-paragraph essay. Out of all of them, I'm the only one who taught (or who wants to teach) at a college level, and it frankly amazes me how much freedom I have compared to high school/middle school/elementary school teachers who find themselves bound by SOLs and models of teaching that change annually. Pretty sure if I did what they do I'd go totally loving nuts.
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Jul 3, 2014 23:16
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Quick grammar/linguistics questions, for what you call this formation. And I'm asking in terms of descriptive linguistics (not prescriptive "that's ungrammatical"). I just don't know the word for this formation. An example:quote:That German girl who's friends with Tom, I was talking to her at the party and she was really cool. The bolded part, I understand that's basically creating an equivalent to the "her" later on in the sentence. But since the "her" is an object, is that little introductory bit a "objectival clause", or what would the word for that be? I just found myself using a similar phrase a minute ago, and was wondering what the structural definition of that would be. Though I guess I'm asking for prescriptive grammar too: is that technically ungrammatical by whatever Standard Business English rules?
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Jul 15, 2014 05:22
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3Romeo posted:[...] it frankly amazes me how much freedom I have compared to high school/middle school/elementary school teachers who find themselves bound by SOLs and models of teaching that change annually. Pretty sure if I did what they do I'd go totally loving nuts. I hear you on that one. I'm not great at taking orders and start chafing when they're anything more specific than "solve this problem." Teaching high school, I'd be a slowly-blowing fuse with daytime DTs and a basement-sized collection of antique PEZ dispensers.* * As opposed to someone who just re-read Mucedorus and used a screwdriver to open a can of coconut water.
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Jul 15, 2014 16:58
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Quick grammar/linguistics questions, for what you call this formation. [...] Grammar's a wobbly bit for me, but here's what I can tell you: "That German girl who's friends with Tom" is a noun phrase (that is, a group of words that can work as they subject or object of a sentence). Here, that phrase is the direct object (like "squirrel" in "I added the taxidermied squirrel to my pornographic rodeo diorama") as well as (as you pointed out) the antecedent to the pronoun "her." My knee-jerk response was that "that German girl..." and "her" were also in apposition, but that's not right -- appositives are always next to each other, like conjoined twins. But that the thought even crossed my mind tells you how dull my grammar senses are. Anyway. I don't think there's anything grammatically wrong with this construction (Chuck Palahniuk uses it when he's imitating casual speech in e.g. Fight Club, and I use it when I'm trying to act casual e.g. here), but it runs afoul of a few Strunk and White-isms that are sound practice in any kind of writing where clarity is a virtue. First, I'm not sure whether this sentence is in the passive voice in the most narrow, technical sense. But you've got object before subject (and them again, after the subject), which ought be avoided unless you've some clear reason to think it's necessary. Second, the sentence doesn't need the pronoun "her" at all. There, you're into "Omit Needless Words" (17) as well as "Keep Related Words Together" (20) -- after all, your direct object has the subject between it and the verb. It's an easy fix, right? "I was talking to that German girl who's friends with Tom, and she was really cool." So if the question behind your question is whether, say, this kind of construction would warrant correction if you were e.g. editing a piece, I think that's a yes. I also think you could rightly fault someone for writing it in the first place, for the same basic reasons you'd fault him or her for using "affect" instead of "effect" or putting a word like "fucktarded" where it doesn't belong: a competent writer ought to know better. That probably sounds a little high-horse from someone who flirted with the idea of appositives earlier, but using a thing right and knowing its technical particulars are two different things -- I don't need to tell whether a butt plug is neoprene or silicone to say it shouldn't be in my cereal.
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Jul 15, 2014 17:45
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Thanks, good analysis; I hadn't known the term "apposition" so that one's interesting even if technically these equivalents (the noun-phrase and "her") are separated by other words. Agree that it doesn't appear to be smooth Business English, as I expected, but given that it is a phrase a native speaker would say, I was just curious how to diagram it. I just downloaded the newest Weird Al album that dropped today, and there's a kinda cute song about (prescriptive) grammar called Word Crimes (a parody of Blurred Lines). The song's catchy and cute, and the video is surprisingly eyecandy for a song about language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc 
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Jul 15, 2014 22:39
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That's really a question for a linguistics person rather than an English-department anything. Isn't there a linguistics thread somewhere around here? I'm definitely not a linguistics pro, but I'm a professional editor and I was the martinet of seventh-grade sentence diagramming. It isn't grammatically correct from a prescriptive point of view, but obviously native speakers totally talk that way. I see it as a reordered sentence, and that initial clause as an appositive. To me it's the same as "I was talking to her (that German girl etc.) blah blah blah," but you just -- ungrammatically, but naturally -- frontloaded the clause describing her to make sure your listener's on the same page. In no way is the sentence in passive voice; object before subject isn't even a good litmus test. The tl;dr of this sentence is "I was talking to her," and "was talking" here is just simple past progressive/continuous.
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Jul 15, 2014 23:36
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:In no way is the sentence in passive voice; object before subject isn't even a good litmus test. The tl;dr of this sentence is "I was talking to her," and "was talking" here is just simple past progressive/continuous. Agreed, and I should have been clearer there. PV's got nother to do with object before subject (and everything to do with whether the grammatical subject is the actor), but sentences that lead with an object have the same kinds of problems sentences in the passive do. So the fix is the same for both: make the subject the actor, and lead with it. And I'ma ask a linguist on this one. "That German girl..." definitely works like it's in apposition to "her," but everything I've heard or read about apposition says that appositive phrases are always next to one another. Could be that a linguist would approach things differently -- maybe make "That German girl who's friends with Tom, I was talking to" a appositional unit, since "I was talking to" is restrictive and might therefore be part of the noun phrase. I dunno. I spent most of the day installing a dishwasher and so had plenty of time to overthink. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 00:48
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:I just downloaded the newest Weird Al album that dropped today [...] Goddamn. I didn't know Weird Al was still releasing albums. And that he's had a longer (successful) career than everyone he's parodied makes me wonder whether that's typical either of parodists or of serial parodies like The Simpsons or Saturday Night Live.
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Jul 17, 2014 01:17
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FoiledAgain posted:I think it might count as "topicalization". I'd never heard of this, but it seems exactly right. Or at least useful.
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Jul 17, 2014 03:32
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This might be better asked in a philosophy thread but the English 102 class I took a few years back was titled "Argument & Persuasion" and we covered stuff like this so I figured I'd ask here. I know there are a lot of formal and informal fallacies, like appeal to antiquity and the like. My question is, is there one based on "Well, this great/genius famous person that everyone loved (ex: MLK, Einstein, Gandhi) agreed with me and/or was a republican/democrat/communist/christian/whatever, so that supports my argument." It seems like it could be grouped in with appeal to antiquity but I hear it used so often by people of varying political affiliations that it should be probably have it's own name if it doesn't already. -Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 22:35
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It sounds like you're just describing "argument from authority," but if there's a nuance I'm missing that makes it different I apologize.
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Jul 28, 2014 22:48
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Stagger_Lee posted:It sounds like you're just describing "argument from authority," but if there's a nuance I'm missing that makes it different I apologize. No, I think you're correct. Argument from authority sounds about right, if not close enough. Some classic examples of what I'm talking about are: - MLK was a Republican (therefore you should be a Republican) (this one isn't even true, not that it matters for the sake of the argument fallacy) - Einstein believed in God (therefore you should believe in God) (this one is also a bit misconstrued)
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Jul 28, 2014 22:57
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-Blackadder- posted:No, I think you're correct. Argument from authority sounds about right, if not close enough. Yeah, that's pretty much textbook Argument from Authority. It's not necessarily a fallacy, but can be when misused. quote:A says P about subject matter S. It's quite famously misused by people who don't understand context and/or that expertise in one field does not necessarily constitute expertise in all fields. (i.e. "Famous sexhaver Jenny McCarthy says that she prefers circumcised penises, therefore if you want your kid to get laid a lot by beautiful American women, get him circumcised." and "Famous sexhaver Jenny McCarthy says that vaccinations cause autism, so if you love your child and care about their future, don't trust your doctor, instead buy her book and enroll him in this course designed to help unlock your crystal child's full potential...")
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Jul 29, 2014 01:51
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Spoilers Below posted:[...] Not that you all need my help on this one, but I'd refine this a little further. "Argument from authority" is basically ad hominem turned inside out. That's another way of saying that bringing a person's positive or negative qualities (including expertise) to bear on the validity of an idea is always a fallacy. Experts -- individually and collectively -- are wrong about things in their field pretty often. One overused example is that Einstein went for a static (rather than expanding) universe, but another one is that every physicist before Einstein was essentially and fundamentally wrong about basic relationships between gravity, space, and motion.* The global climate change "debate" is a good example of where this gets sticky: a claim like "100% of peer-reviewed journal articles about global climate change support the conclusion that GCC is an actual phenomenon to which human activity substantially contributes" is an argument from authority. In fact, any body of complex evidence makes argument by authority almost inevitable. Put differently, complex, real-world issues are not generally amenable to the kinds of deductive reasoning for which terms like "fallacy" are appropriate -- at least if we're dealing with something other than cases of absolute, baffling retardation (like an anti-vaxxer being persuaded by Jenny McCarthy). I mean, pointing (for instance) anti-vaxxers to the "argument from authority" fallacy is unlikely to change their minds, even if what convinced them to be anti-vaxxers in the first place was, in fact, an argument from authority. Being able to analyze evidence is a useful skill if you're discovering the truth, but changing people's minds is all about gaining their trust. And that usually means small gestures over time rather than rational debate. So just get them a couple tiny coffins that say "I told you so," keep their typhoid Marys out of public schools, and use gradual, non confrontational, friendly tactics to bring them around to your way of thinking. This, incidentally, is one reasons I've moved away from teaching critical thinking as a "spot the fallacy" exercise. Too much of that leaves students paralyzed by totally idiotic forms of relativism (that is, in the middle or "quasi-reflective" stages of King and Kitchener's Reflective Judgment" model). * At least if "wrong" means "using a method of approximation that is entirely accurate for any practical purpose a human being is likely to experience."
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Jul 30, 2014 16:02
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