You can, too

Forbearing and long-suffering reader (I’m using the singular advisedly here, as just the one person has rebuked me for the gaping hiatus in blog postings), I apologise.

The last time I checked in, GCSE English exams were looming, and all that grammar and literature stuff was coming to a head. Of course, I should have let you know how it went. Of course, I should have shared with you handy exam technique hints. Of course, I should have repaid your patience and indulgence.

But I didn’t. In fact, I forgot all about anything remotely Englishy, and what a relief that naturally was.

However, nearly ten years later, I suddenly remembered this unfinished business. It all reads like a quaint period piece now – just who was Ed Miliband? – but loose ends do need tying up.

So let me update you (as well as updating image attributions and so forth – I’ve been on a course).

I passed the exam quite well, thanks for asking, and so did most of my adult education classmates. Yes, I moaned a lot at the time, but it was fun (sometimes) and it was productive. I got my qualification. And of course, you can too. Give it a go; why not?

Then, after a decent rest, I did an OU degree course. I really moaned about that – but I got qualified. And (of course I have to say this) you can, too.

You’ll want to know what happened to the Clever Bloke, my comrade-in-adversity Denis. As anticipated, he knocked the exam out of the park, coming away with an A*. This got him the promotion he was after. A couple of years later, though, he jacked it all in and became a digital nomad. I believe he’s doing really well.

Perhaps more surprising is that our teacher also changed direction soon after the exams. She literally ran away to join the circus.

And you can too!

Ethos Logos and Pathos for persuasive success

Manifestness

I don’t know which is more sickening – the thought of the forthcoming GCSE English exam, now a mere 46 days away, or the build-up to that other significant date. Happily, however, after both the election and the exam the incessant hectoring, be it self-generated or via the media, will be put to rest, for a while at least.

In an unexpected inversion of the usual write-me-an-essay task, our teacher wants us to suck the persuasive juice out of any campaigning codswallop that is making us especially queasy.

Not much left, is there?

Ed Miliband – Foreword to Labour Party Manifesto, minus the emotive use of language.

We are a country. Some of the people in it could be described as great, or otherwise.

In the last five years some people have told me some things that make them hopeful or cross. Some are an unspecified number of people who are working but who don’t always have more than enough money to pay bills. Some are young people who are both ambitious and worried about the future. Some are NHS staff who are conscientious and are worried about the future. Some are retired people who wonder about the future.

Consideration of some of the potential effects on some British people has influenced some of what I say may happen (if my party wins the election and everything goes strictly according to my party’s plans). I am presenting a simplistic view: we are a country, and we have the potential to improve in unspecified ways. One view is that Britain will succeed in certain ways when working people succeed in certain ways. This is one of a number views that I talk about.

Check the real thing at

http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/BritainCanBeBetter-TheLabourPartyManifesto2015.pdf

The other side is as bad…

David Cameron– Foreword to the Conservative Party Manifesto, minus the emotive use of language.

Over the last five year the government has done some things.

According to some statistics, Britain’s economy is growing faster than that of certain other countries, and slower than that of different ones. The government is handling the economy in a different way from the previous government. Some statistics can be interpreted to show that more people are in some unspecified sort of employment than earlier statistical results show. Some things are different in unspecified ways.

Some of this could be shown to be the result of some government plans. People in Britain have been affected by government policy.

People are at liberty to feel whatever they want about the country and government policy. Certain methods of presenting figures to describe the current state of the NHS suggest there are more doctors and nurses than there were at an unspecified time in the past. The State Pension has gone up an unspecified amount.

There are lots of things wrong with the country. There are no assurances that anyone knows how to avoid more things going wrong.

https://www.conservatives.com/manifesto

Spinning Class

Think crooked, seems to be the advice for completing the “writing to argue and persuade” question in AQA’s English/English Language GCSE paper.

The assessment criteria, to be strictly accurate, only demand that a candidate “communicates in a way which is convincing, and increasingly compelling”; “writes in a formal way, employing a tone that is appropriately serious but also manipulative, subtle and increasingly abstract” and “uses linguistic devices, such as the rhetorical question, hyperbole, irony and satire, in a consciously crafted way”.

But what this seems to boil down to is modelling ourselves on many a high-profile politician and cynically crafting language to gain our ends. Tricks include cherry-picking selected instances to prove one’s point, pseudo-technical jargon, deliberate repetition, and playing the emotional card.

Sure, these techniques address the “communication” criterion and tick the “linguistic devices” box. But for R. H. Thouless, author of Straight and Crooked Thinking (first published 1930), it’s a pretty shameless way of communicating.

Of course, we need to be aware of these tricks, in order to guard against them. But perhaps a more wholesome lesson – and one which is more urgently needed? – might be how to use language “in an honest way to describe the world and how we feel about it” (to quote the latest edition of the book). Wouldn’t this be better than fostering shoddy, broad-brush demagoguery?

But if you need the marks, you’ll work the shtick. Fill your boots with these two examples concerning the NHS:

“Four years ago this month, Andrew Lansley published his ‘Liberating the NHS’ White Paper. I can remember the shock I felt when I turned through its pages.

Just weeks before, I had spoken alongside Lansley at many hustings events and heard him promise no top-down re-organisation. And then this – the biggest bombshell ever to land on the NHS. He had clearly been drawing up these plans in Opposition, with the help of the private health care company which funded his office, but chose not to tell the voters.

When they hit the light of day, the problem wasn’t just the danger of a distracting reorganisation when the NHS should have been focusing on the financial challenge – and all the inherent risks to patient care. What was more breathtaking was the sheer audacity of the plan to treat the NHS as another utility to be broken up and privatised.”

“This morning the Prime Minister announced plans to make it easier for millions of people to get 8 till 8 and weekend appointments with their GPs.

And I want to start today by celebrating that and some of the other successes of our NHS, doing so well despite huge pressure.

Take cancer, our biggest killer. Every family in the country has lost a friend or loved-one to cancer – I lost my own father last year. It is a ruthlessly indiscriminate killer – whether it targets someone who has just retired after a life of hard work or a child with a life stretching out in front of them. In 2010 this country had amongst the lowest cancer survival rates in Western Europe. So we set up the cancer drugs fund. We’ve transformed cancer diagnosis so the NHS now tests 1000 more people for cancer every single day. And so far this parliament we have treated nearly three quarters of a million more people for cancer than the last one – that’s thousands of lives saved, thousands of families kept together, thousands of tragedies averted. So let’s hear it for our brilliant cancer doctors and nurses.”

Thank you to Andy Burnham and Jeremy Hunt. Compelling and manipulative. Top marks.

[Image of The Crooked Chimney pub sign by Adrian Cable]

Being affronted

[Mrs Tabitha Twitchit being affronted in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten]

Exposing oneself to schooly stuff at this – let’s face it – advanced stage of the game seems to generate an unexpected amount of sighing and wincing, as the realisation of youthful opportunities missed repeatedly hits home.

One example of this arose from our discussion of the convention, in playscripts, of stage directions indicating aspects of a character’s portrayal with the use of adverbs, e.g.

Jack. [Very seriously.] Yes, Lady Bracknell. I was in a hand-bag— a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it— an ordinary hand-bag in fact.

A fellow-student then happened to remark that her granddaughter was being taught fronted adverbials. “You what?” we all naturally said. Well, it seems a fronted adverbial is an adverb or adverbial phrase used to set the scene at the beginning of a sentence. Dismayingly, none of us could remember being taught this at school (though now I’ve grasped it, I just popped one in there. Way to go!). This led to a self-chastisement session in which a shocking range of ungrasped academic skills was disclosed. Even more dismaying was the fact that the granddaughter is six.

Still, a useful lesson emerged. It’s vital in your GCSE English Language writing to start strong; the odd fronted adverbial at least demonstrates you have more than one tool in your bag. But, as with all techniques, don’t overdo it. (My own fondness for the rhetorical question led to the needlessly harsh feedback that reading my essay was like being under interrogation.)

Anyway. Homework was to find examples of effective opening words. What works well for the pros? Hmm. Despite my rhetorical questions being considered ham-fisted, Dickens gets away with it in the opening to The Mystery of Edwin Drood:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower?

Another potentially arresting opening technique is the high-handed command, e.g. Kipling’s bold assumption in ‘Bubbling Well Road’ that we’ll rush to get out our Kashmir district half-inch-to-a-mile:

Look out on a large scale map the place where the Chenab river falls into the Indus fifteen miles or so above the hamlet of Chachuran.

Or the more refined jussive subjunctive of Trollope in The Way We Live Now –

Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have

– which also uses the technique, beloved by examiners, so we are told, of overtly acknowledging the reader. You can also make explicit reference to your writing process, as Doyle’s Watson often does:

When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and ’90

Or, like Hilary Mantel at the beginning of Bring up the Bodies, you can be downright disorientating:

His children are falling from the sky.

So – it seems you can do what you damn well like.

My own preferred method of waking an examiner up is to use the neologism, a concept thoughtfully defined by a member of Urban Dictionary‘s community as “The promotion of which is the sole purpose of urbandictionary’s existence.”

If it’s good enough for Thomas Hardy (“illimited”, “betumble”), e e cummings (“onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat”), S J Perelman (“goodylicious” – which he came up with back in 1958) and of course Shakespeare (“dwindle”, “gnarled”, “lacklustre”), it’s surely an acceptable way to please the examiners and show “artful and self-conscious use of language for impact”, as the mark scheme says.

A simple method is to stick the letter ‘y’ onto pretty much anything you like, to create a word that’s the perfect fit. For example, this is a very Englishy blog. Comedian Rich Hall in “Stabby Bits” (Things Snowball, 2002) describes the technique as both “succinct” and “judicious”. And as the populariser of the sniglet, he should know.

This is a risky gambit, however, and one all too likely to fall foul of the exam board’s hair-trigger pouncing on anything resembling a spelling mistake. And after all, if it’s brand new, is it English?

At home with the Brutuses

In the boggled patchwork of non-sequiturs that is our GCSE English class, we are now obliged to unpick Shakespeare’s presentation of Brutus. Was he hero or villain?

Well, despite the besotted testimonial from Ebenezer Charlton Black in the 1908 Hudson Shakespeare (Brutus’ character is “full of beauty and sweetness”; he’s a geeky “bookworm”, “upright, gentle and pure”), I’m finding it hard to look beyond the deluded busybody. He won’t act without an overtly public-spirited motive, but he doesn’t flinch at having to “fashion” his motivation because his reasons won’t bear scrutiny without some heavily Biblical serpent-themed spin.

Where Brutus does score marks, however, is in his personal life. I’m not talking about the treatment of his servant Lucius, which some seem to think argues a humane attitude, though to my mind his constant harrying of the boy in the middle of the night must have been pretty annoying.

It’s his married life that reveals someone more peaceable. The first thing Portia does in Act 2 Scene 1 is to get in a sly dig about his all-important sense of “honour” by accusing him of “ungently” (I.e. not like a gentleman) leaving her bed; his facial expression, too, she says, was harsh and ungentlemanly. When he begs her not to kneel before him, again she accuses him of ill manners. Below the belt, from your wife?

She holds up a much more honest mirror than the one Cassius uses on Brutus in Act 1, but her husband takes it on the chin, though it must have been galling to be accused of not doing what he’s just counselled his new co-conspirators to do, i.e. hide their shameful purposes in “affability”.

Whether or not Shakespeare has given us, in Portia, an example of a “strong” woman, what he has done is to give Brutus a chance to shine as a team player, after his overbearing behaviour with the conspirators. Whatever the guys say regarding an oath, the involvement of Cicero, and any effective strategy regarding Antony, he pooh-poohs it. But in the face of Portia’s increasingly frantic anxiety, his only wish is to calm her and get the two halves of the Brutus team working as one again.

In reflecting on his love for his wife, he has shown himself pliant. But how he lets himself down by forgetting he’s also said of Caesar “I love him well.”

More heroic is my colleague Denis, who did wonders with his dictionary of quotations in tackling the homework, which was to create for classmates a Shakespeare “game”; we are to have “fun.”

Thank you, Denis.

Here, have fun.

ambition beard bibble-babble bonfire citizens

conscience end fish flesh girl kidney

lunatic name offence porridge salad

Use these words to fill the gaps in the Shakespeare quotations below:

1. __________should be made of sterner stuff	Julius Caesar
2. A man of my __________	The Merry Wives of Windsor
3. A very ancient and __________-like smell	The Tempest
4. He receives comfort like cold __________	The Tempest
5. I have more ___________than another man, and therefore more frailty	Henry IV, part 2
6. Leave thy vain __________	Twelfth Night
7. My __________ days when I was green in judgement	Antony and Cleopatra
8. O! My __________is rank, it smells to heaven	Hamlet
9. Sweep on, you fat and greasy __________	As You Like It
10. The __________, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact	A Midsummer Night’s Dream
11. The king’s __________ is a tower of strength	Richard III
12. The primrose path to the everlasting_________	Macbeth
13. They say he made a very good __________	Hamlet
14. Thus __________ does make cowards of us all	Hamlet
15. You speak like a green __________	Hamlet
16. You will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s __________	Twelfth Night

Sharing navels

Newly aware of the swanky jargon associated with our subject, my fellow-GCSE English students and I found it easy to spot Nikki Giovanni’s off-the-wall use of the terminology of literature essays in her “Kidnap Poem”:

Ever been kidnapped

by a poet

if i were a poet

i’d kidnap you

put you in my phrases and meter

you to jones beach

or maybe coney island

or maybe just to my house

lyric you in lilacs

dash you in the rain

blend into the beach

to complement my see

play the lyre for you

ode you with my love song

anything to win you

wrap you in the red Black green

show you off to mama

yeah if i were a poet i’d kid

nap you

How sinister, for example, is the use of the word ‘dash’ – a twist from simple punctuation mark to violent verb. The threats, whatever they mean, need to be taken seriously – after all she self-evidently is a poet. Perhaps she is marshalling her professional weapons in the campaign to seize her love-hostage in order to demonstrate the overwhelming power of love poetry; of language. But perhaps there’s another reason too, one that leaves me slightly dismayed. When writers write about writing there starts to be a dreary exclusivity to the activity, despite it being understandable that they might simply be following the “Write what you know” advice often attributed to Mark Twain.

So when faced with any hero or heroine who is writing a book, or working for a publishing company, or trying out poetry, I feel I’m being invited to gaze at someone else’s navel. To me this isn’t the power of the written word; it’s more an admission of self-doubt. These hands, the novelist is saying; look at these hands. Are they really up to the job?

I’m sure they are. But it’s OK to move away from the navel.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreWriters

And don’t forget, there are poems for kids HERE!

Just don’t

Harried, hounded, hen-pecked – yes, and any other animal references I can enlist to express how badgered (bullied?) I’m feeling.

Having discovered imperative verbs, and explored their effects in several poems in our latest class, I now understand why I feel so brow-beaten when faced with the popular press.

Dylan Thomas, with his precise choice of language, can make a powerful point by flinging imperative verbs at us in his attempt to influence his dying father:

Do not go gentle into that good night

he says;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

(http://allpoetry.com/Do-Not-Go-Gentle-Into-That-Good-Night)

But the sincere and complex connotations implied by the urgent act of command in this villanelle – how many of us are brassy enough to give orders to an elderly parent? – are one thing; I’m not sure we need to be nagged in so many other contexts.

Homework was to find and explore the implications of imperative verbs in the texts around us, and this is where the wagging finger becomes insulting. We are used to seeing the technique in advertisements, which fire endless imperatives at us in an attempt to cash in on their sneaky function: a self-evident demonstration that the user wants the command to be obeyed, which therefore acts as its own inducement. Whether we want to or not, we feel the power of ‘must’ and ’ought’; we feel guilt for disobeying.

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We expect these tired and tiresome tricks: the advertisers are in the business of competing for our money. But why should lifestyle articles, whose text aims to be informative or entertaining, be dressed up as something crucial with all these self-important imperative verbs? Live like this. Do it that way. Adopt my ideas. No, adopt mine.

It may be that Christmas brings out the busybody in some feature writers, but articles have been just thick with Advent haranguing:

Add a little trifle to the festive mix

Take a break from Christmas cake

Take the pain out of a perfect Christmas

Dress your ham with pride

Learn to love the great indoors

Shimmer your way through the party season

Zing up your outfit

Forget turkey, sprouts and a stuffy lunch with relatives

Focus on playthings that encourage creativity

And in a chilling command worthy of Loki, who, in Avengers Assemble, declares that humanity craves subjugation, a headline that pretty much amounts to menace.

The big brow. It’s here to stay, so do it right

Or else.

The doggerel ate my homework

Researching sonnets for homework, I found this offering on http://www.haikuheaven.com

Sonnets sing of love;

My yearning won’t be measured

In fourteen tight lines.

All well and good and slightly show-offy, but to my mind haiku love smacks rather of petrol-station flowers, as opposed to the hand-tied complete-with-personalised-chocolate-lollipop Interflora bouquets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning & co.

Our latest task is to try to write, Robert Frost-like, a few iambic pentameters that sound like natural speech – and if genius really burns, to produce a complete sonnet. As if.

We’re told the iambic metrical unit (represented in print variously as di-dum, da-DUM, duh DUH, Ta-TUM and ka BOOM), mimicks a human heartbeat. Put five together, and you have the iambic pentameter – a “breathful of heartbeats” (http://www.mrbauld.com/rhythm.html). This insidiously driving rhythm is said to reflect the natural conversational flow of English – so it shouldn’t be hard to find an example in any old prose I happen to lay my hands on, surely. And with The Hound of the Baskervilles continuing to loom large in the classroom, this of course is the first candidate. It does not disappoint.

See, for example, Dr. Watson’s first meeting with Beryl:

“Her eyes were on her brother as I turned”

or when Holmes deploys the troops:

“Yes, we shall make our little ambush here”

or when Beryl shops Jack:

“There is but one place where he can have fled”

E. V. Knox, cited in Vincent Starrett’s 1948 Chicago Tribune ‘Books Alive’ column, compiled and annotated by Karen Murdoch, found enough rhymes and couplets to have fun with the idea that The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally written in verse, and may even have been intended for grand opera (we know Holmes was a buff). Perhaps Doyle had in mind a drama in verse, pre-empting by a few years Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, but opted instead for the safe money-spinner. He certainly uses the iambic pentameter (we’re learning to call it IP) at moments of high emotion.

“God bless you, Sir, and thank you from my heart” exclaims Barrymore, oddly leaving out the usual complement “the bottom of” from the phrase.

Doyle mixes it up with an initial spondee (let’s call these two syllables BOOM-BOOM) to show Watson’s anguished bafflement:

“Please, please, be frank with me, Miss Stapleton”

And there is surely a clear example of the final –ed of the past participle being sounded in “ ‘The brute! The brute!’ I cried with clenchèd hands.” Pure Shakespeare. And pure ka BOOM, too, come to that.

My contribution is less lofty. I’m sure I’ve heard this in class:

The homework that you gave us was too hard.

I didn’t really understand the point.

These examples perhaps demonstrate the soothing nature of the metre, but also that uniformly predictable iambic rhythm can be monotonous. A perfectly regular heartbeat would surely indicate a life with no thrills, no surprises, no passion.

Already bored. How did Frost keep it up?

Wrestling with Peppa Pig

“So, why don’t they rhyme?” was our initial knee-jerk bleat the other week, revealing the Philistine in some of us (OK – not you, Denis), during our first poetry lesson.

Having then been persuaded by means of PowerPoint cosh not to expect rhyming in even the desirable column of a poem’s job description, let alone the essential one, we started pondering why we would have expected a rhyme at all.

I found answers to this at, among others, http://www.kenneymyers.com/blog/10-reasons-every-poem-should-rhyme-and-how-it-could-limit-you-big-time/ and http://creativegibberish.org/56/why-do-poems-rhyme/. Here there were references to the oral tradition, the need to be memorable, the challenge of established form and structure and, if I read it right, mind manipulation by the capitalist hegemony.

Our lazy brains clearly prefer coasting via the prompts, reminders and memory-joggers of repetition to forever negotiating novelty and surprises. (If you want to get the kiddos on board with all this, check out these POEMS FOR KIDS.)

In the poems we studied we were guided, however, to admire a particular kind of repeated sound. This is one that, owing to repeated red-pennings in my essays, I now have trouble taking seriously: the ubiquitous alliteration.

Although national media outlets have mostly moved on from alliterative headlines in favour of puns (for example the Huffington Post’s “Chewy Luis and the Blues” which, as BBC Sport comments, takes some beating http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/28015683), regional papers still sometimes feel the need for the easy option: “Mavis’s memories of Ramsden’s record-breaking day”; “Brave Barnsley bobbies confronted gunman.”

Important stories to some local people, but trivialised by a technique suitable for children, or used against gullible punters hooked by the insidious names of such baffling consumables as the Hedgehog Hottie or the Penguin Popper.

Another perspective, though, is provided by Tennyson, who might have written his lovable poem “Move Eastward, Happy Earth” as an illustration of the apt use of alliteration especially for beginners still wrestling with Peppa Pig (image by Brian Robert Marshall CC BY-SA 2.0).

Move eastward, happy earth, and leave

Your orange sunset waning slow;

From fringes of the faded eve,

O, happy planet, eastward go;

Till over thy dark shoulder glow

Thy silver sister-world, and rise

To glass herself in dewy eyes

That watch me from the glen below.

Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly born,

Dip forward under starry light,

And move me to my marriage-morn,

And round again to happy night.

This poem first came to my attention as a track on the album Birds by North Sea Radio Orchestra, and, oddly enough, its charming musical setting by Craig Fortnam largely masks the formal rhyme scheme. What’s not lost is the appreciative yet anticipatory sound suggested by all the m- words in the penultimate line, as the repeated consonants emphasise the key word “marriage”. We can almost hear a prospective bridegroom smack his lips as he looks forward to not only his wedding day, but also his first night (presumably: this is 1842) with his bride. Mmm, indeed.

Wacky

After being dazzled by the gem-like Beryl Stapleton in The Hound of the Baskervilles, it is interesting to speculate on Conan Doyle’s thought-processes when he was naming Laura Lyons. The jingly alliteration makes her sound a bit like a cartoon character (a friend of Penelope Pitstop?), but it also requires a lot of sensual tongue-waggling, in keeping with her “other woman” status; and Doyle’s precise references to her glowing hazel colouring, and pink nails turning white, suggests he had in mind something wild, with claws.

(Image by Tim Green, CC BY 2.0)

………………………………….

Thanks are owing to readers who kindly sent constructive criticism regarding my stab at sensory writing last time. For Unit12664B my description of autumn leaves “smacked of Ann Summers on Valentine’s Day,” while the counsel l particularly appreciated (i.e. was most nettled by) was that from wurdgurl, whose words were chock-full of scorn regarding my failure to “show” and not “tell”. Sadly, these comments came too late for me to amend accordingly. Next time, though, I’ll get the sheep to actually do something scornful: make jokes about my name, refuse to buy any of my products, or perhaps spit on my shoes.

According to a class-mate, The Clever Bloke (who is happy for me to identify him as Denis), I’m also bottom of the class for writing anything useful regarding being a mature student in this blog. I have therefore invited him to be a guest contributor this time round to enable him to remedy this, and I leave you in his business-like hands. Keep it polite, Clever Bloke.

Thank you to Mrs Ramsbottom.

I have taken her up on her offer because I felt this blog would be good opportunity to spread the word about the benefits of going back to education, which is a message that has not perhaps shone through. Or perhaps it is only now, after half a term, that I am really starting to recognise the benefits. These are, for me:

You feel smug and self-righteous.
You set a good example to your children.
You get to meet some very interesting people, from different walks of life.
You get to meet some strange people, but you only have to spend 2 ½ hours a week with them.
You shed the responsibilities of decision-making for those 2 ½ hours – someone tells you what to do.
And of course you may end up learning something new and getting a longed-for qualification.

Yes, you feel scared that you will make a fool of yourself in front of strangers, often people younger than yourself. And yes, you do make a fool of yourself. But so does everybody in the class. Especially the teacher.

This was not as easy to write as I’d thought it would be. That does not bode well for the exam.

Denis