Chapter 10 is a love/hate chapter for me. As a teacher, I love reading about figurative language and its origins. On the other hand, I’d hate to have a vocabulary test on all those terms! Even Robert J. Marzano might struggle to come up with strategies to remember them all! Love/hate aside, I found this to be an interesting chapter. Parts of it were confusing, particularly the section on sentence composition, mainly due to the fact that the ancients had different meanings for words we use to teach grammar. For example, a colon as a clause, a comma as a set of words set apart by pauses, etc. But for the most part, the whole concept of style and the ways to manipulate language through style are fascinating. In fourth grade, style is one of the domains on our writing rubric, and is probably the most difficult to teach. It’s one thing to teach a student how to form complete sentences, effective paragraphs, etc., but it’s quite another to teach them how to use voice and word choice effectively. This point leads to a part of the chapter that really caught my attention!

Given that I am working on Penn State’s Writing Specialist Certification, it really hit home when Crowley and Hawhee cited Linda Brodkey’s use of allegory, comparing the marking off of public smoking spaces to the marking off of writing spaces in American universities (p. 363). For purposes of “blogging space” I refer you to the second part of the example at the bottom of p. 363 and continuing onto p. 364, specifically, “While it seems to take longer in some cases than in others, composition instruction appears to have succeeded best at establishing in most people a lifelong aversion to writing.” Ouch! It’s painful, but unfortunately true. What a shame that students equate such an open avenue of emotional outlet to a punishment. I think this a big part of this is because teachers are not comfortable with their own ability to write, let alone their ability to teach students how to write. Idealistically, I believe there must be some way to encourage students to embrace writing while at the same time teaching them how to write effectively for purposes of academic assessment. In fact, since endeavoring to work on this certification, I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on to figure out how to come up with a plan that will work for my school district. Whether or not they will share my enthusiasm remains to be seen.

Sorry – personal tangent…back to the text. As usual, I find myself thinking on a much deeper level about various aspects of language as a whole. (I guess the course is working...) While some aspects of the chapter seemed almost too deep, I really enjoyed the overall idea of breaking down style into meaningful “chunks” and analyzing how they work in everyday life. Politics and advertising top the list, as usual, but I’m looking forward to tonight’s discussion to make additional relevant connections.