Radio radio. A fine example of a small story told well, from This American Life--a four-year-old grows very interested in Jesus and what he taught, and then she sees a connection to a new person she learns about, Martin Luther King. Go to Kid Logic (Episode 188) and skip ahead to 13:10 in the audio.

What takes this from a story to a good story? Well, there is something at stake: the father says that he is telling his daughter important things that she's never heard before, and you can tell that he's trying to be true to the richness of the teachings of Jesus and King without overwhelming the child. And the child is hungry for information about Jesus. So, something at stake.

And the people are not static. Their life together is unfolding through the child's growing understanding of the values taught by their two leaders. She's not quite the same at the end as she is at the start, and the father might not be the same either. The people move in their lives.

And there is suspense, maybe two ways. How will the father teach these complex things to his young daughter? How will she take them up? And further: once she figures out one thing about the example of their lives, will she figure out the second thing that is lurking there, that we as listeners know? And if she figures it out, how will she respond? This suspense ties into the stakes.

And an insight into human experience will be lightly stated or implied, as a result.

I remember a writer diagnosing a faulty draft of another writer's short story largely based on the idea of something being at stake. If someone stands to gain or lose, and the progress of the story depends on how that is worked out, that's a good sign about the draft of a story. If a writer has trouble saying in a sentence or two (to another writer or friend) what is at stake, then the story probably isn't clear about it either. Then the story isn't done. The story may have been told, but it hasn't been shaped, crafted, polished. It's not artful. (Source? I'll have to go find it.)

So there are formal elements that you can start to recognize in a good radio narrative. Having done so, maybe the chances of writing a better story improve. Or when you listen to a story, do you notice more about the people and our common humanity because you understand this aspect of story-telling? Maybe so.





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Moving day. It's official, I guess. I'm moving on over to a little more modern blogging software. The new site is:

akaKenSmith.com (...also known as...)

pMachine, you've been a gem. [0 & P]

Pirates and social media. Innovative collaborations? Movement of information across the world via new technology? Exchanges between groups previously unable to work together? New jobs created by access to new information? Disruptions of market values due to new forces and actors? Sure, but are we talking about pirates here? Yes. See the later paragraphs of Chana Joffe-Walt's 5/22/09 story, "After A Pirate Negotiation, A Personal Connection," on the All Things Considered series called Planet Money. [0 & P]

Pages (academic) never meant to be read. The epigraph from a new book on Shakespeare by Clinton Heylin:

The greatest advantage of Shakespearean studies seems to be that questions may be asked over and over again, and that almost nobody pays attention to the answers — unless he borrows them for his own use in an article or a book. — HYDER E. ROLLINS, 1944 [0 & P]

Working with your hands (your mind). "A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world," says Matthew B.Crawford in his essay on "The Case for Working With Your Hands." Students and faculty might enjoy his essay for the strong writing as well as for the clues he gives about why academic work sometimes becomes arid and the careers college trains us for sometimes do too. What are the essential elements of a lively, satisfying life of the mind? Crawford has a good list, and the former academic illustrates his list from his current work as a motorcycle mechanic.

It seems to me that this essay gives some ways of talking about personal power and agency beyond the obvious aspects of rank and authority earned by position in society or workplace. (NY Times, 5/24/09) [0 & P]

What students love. The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:

Students love it when faculty 'own up' to not knowing something. (R. duC)

I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:

I don't know how you will apply this [thing we are studying] in your life. (Source lost)

Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It's respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you've witnessed such a thing in your own school.

Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must ventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don't want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:

No, you can have this stuff later. You know, it's the good stuff, so we can't let you try it out just yet. While you're waiting, could you memorize this other stuff here for a quiz? [0 & P]

Silencing the stakeholders. One way to make clear the power of social media is to identify the thing that is broken without it. Clay Shirky, I'm guessing, might speak about creating the opportunity to coordinate a group that can't easily act in concert, or to call to the microphone a group that usually can't speak on its own behalf. I noticed in a 5/11 letter to the NY Times from Celina Su a classic circumstance where a group is ordinarily silenced even when they are central figures in a social structure.

Su is responding to a David Books column that sets up a particular school as a model for reform. He concludes one thing about the meaning of the example the school provides, and Su asks him to slow down and reconsider a wider body of evidence. She talks about listening to the students themselves, who are in one way the most expert of anyone involved in the schools. Midway through the letter, Su says:

It’s startling that urban youth remain hypervisible symbols of the “culture of failure” but are never quoted as the ultimate stakeholders in education policy debates.

Once we get numbers [indicating success] like those Mr. Brooks trumpets, we need to ask the students themselves about the causal links. The students my colleagues and I spoke with simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning.

There is the classic social structure that can be challenged by enlightened practices among bureaucrats or careful work by researchers or by grass-roots organizing or by engaging with social media: "...never quoted...the ultimate stakeholders...simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning."

Silenced. Knowledge ignored. Activity toward goals thwarted. Then what? Rage? Alienation? Indifference? Cynicism? And so forth.

I recall having been invited to help review my own high school's programs when I was 16 or so, and in many ways this was the most powerful part of my education in those years. It was a chance to speak on something that mattered and that was close to my experience. It was a challenge for me to formulate useful ideas about the swirl of experience, too. It felt respectful to have been asked and to have been given a seat at the table, along with some of my classmates. It felt great, and I learned a lot. In other areas, those years were pretty standard times of alienation and waiting for life to open up.

The school's review created a structure for engagement, just as social media do now for some people. Su's letter clarifies the circumstances that mark the problem, all too common, and hint at some different kinds of solution.
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Thinking about paragraphs. For the course on writing "small essays for large audiences" -- a course on op-ed and radio essays -- I've been looking around for striking sentences and paragraphs. This passage from Chapter 30 of Vanity Fair caught my eye:

On Sundays, and at periods of a solemn nature, Mrs. O'Dowd used to read with great gravity out of a large volume of her uncle the Dean's sermons. It had been of great comfort to her on board the transport as they were coming home, and were very nearly wrecked, on their return from the West Indies. After the regiment's departure she betook herself to this volume for meditation; perhaps she did not understand much of what she was reading, and her thoughts were elsewhere: but the sleep project, with poor Mick's nightcap there on the pillow, was quite a vain one. So it is in the world. Jack or Donald marches away to glory with his knapsack on his shoulder, stepping out briskly to the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." It is she who remains and suffers--and has the leisure to think, and brood, and remember.

On one level, how does it work? Let's give it a try:

Sentence 1. A pattern of repeated actions by a particular person, fairly neutrally presented.
Sentence 2. A particular example of the person and the pattern with its power to comfort.
Sentence 3. A second particular example, more fully characterized but failing to provide calm.
Sentence 4. Asserting that this latest element is a broader pattern among human beings, or a turn in the paragraph.
Sentence 5. The first half of a two-sentence conclusion: the element of causation in the pattern.
Sentence 6. The second half of the two-sentence conclusion: the consequence, the burden, which is not assuaged by the pattern of action that launched the paragraph.

So it's a curious paragraph, not what you'd expect from a composition book about writing, I imagine. It announces a theme, turns it to ashes, and asserts a second theme implied by the destruction of the first. The paragraph isn't a unity in any ordinary sense, but a progression, guided by a realistic sense of human experience.

I'd like to see if we can look closely at good examples and work up a more subtle understanding of how sentences work with the sentences they follow and how they build, variously, into paragraphs and passages. Underneath it all, the claim that writers have a wealth of interesting choices that support inquiry and invention and defeat writer's block.

Then there is the final stanza of "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen -- not exactly a paragraph, though perhaps Don Justice would have called it a verse paragraph.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This passage has a very tight structure, full of parallelism and familiar logical progressions:

If you could do X, which I will amplify descriptively,
[and]
if you could do Y, which I will also amplify descriptively,
[then]
[direct address]you
would not do Z, also amplified descriptively and capped with stark contrast.

Both of these should make workable exercises in formal imitation. I'd ask students to write a passage of the same form but completely different subject matter, hoping that they'd find the structure serving as an aid to invention and a reason to pay attention freshly to the creative work they are doing in sentences, even when those sentences are presented as nonfiction. [0 & P]

Clues about social media, a collection. 1. From a 2008 talk by Clay Shirky:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. (Gin, Television, and Social Surplus," 4/26/08)

2. This has been remarked upon elsewhere, but we're seeing it in the teens we know. They are over email. For them, email is completely over. Some aren't even using the phone. They arrange events on Facebook through its chat screens, ad libbing to a degree that can madden their drivers, that is, parents. What? Don't have the event arranged yet and it starts in 45 minutes? No problem, I'll check Facebook.

3. And even Facebook is too fixed a center of gravity for their social orbits, now that so many are texting. They are always together everywhere, texting. [0 & P]

Sentences and paragraphs. I'm starting to gather samples for a class I'm teaching this summer, and here is one I just ran across from the C. S. Forester novel, The African Queen, which later became a movie with Bogart and Hepburn in the starring roles. Early on in the book, the two of them are mostly getting on each other's nerves, in ways that are full of old-fashioned gender codes, and each one struggling to have the upper hand in their journey, as in this paragraph:

A woman sewing has a powerful weapon at her disposition when engaged in a duel with a man. Her bent head enables her to conceal her expression without apparently trying; it is the easiest matter in the world for her to simulate complete absorbtion in the work at hand when actually she is listening attentively; and if even then she feels disconcerted or needs a moment to think, she can always play for time by reaching for her scissors. And some men -- Allnutt was an example -- are irritated effectively by the attention paid to trifles of sewing instead of to their fascinating selves. (91)

We could talk about semi-colons helping to make a larger picture whole here; we could talk about sentences linked clearly through phrases like "without apparently trying" and "the easiest matter in the world..."; and about a progression built through linked sentences (her indifference, her engagement, her disconcertment).

But what caught my eye was the presence of a character's perspective quietly presented in a passing word of the narrator, who stands apart from the two characters. In the last sentence, surely men's "fascinating selves" is Allnutt's view, implicitly, and is mocked, implicitly, by the narrator; surely "irritated effectively" is Rosie's perspective, on behalf of her sisterhood of beset women. The reader knows that the narrator knows, and they all know more than the characters do. [0 & P]