Application
Use this while reading any work of literary merit as part of your makerspace learning. You can also use this protocol to replace an assigned text with a text of your own, when and if you are given permission to do so. The replacement must enable all three focuses outlined below.
Load a printable, two-side PDF of these criteria here:
The sources for all adapted materials are here, plus more on the reading process:
Anyone with a BCSD account can access the textbook chapter used to generate questions for the tertiary focus below by clicking here.
For more about an emulation-through-analysis approach to literature, click here.
1⁰ Focus: How You Read
Your primary focus in reading should always be on how you read. Keep a copy of the universal skills and traits of learning in mind, and analyze your habits — more specifically, your habits around interacting with the text. Then answer these questions:
- Do you read online, offline, or a combination of both? Do you listen to the audiobook? How does that seem to affect the experience?
- Do you annotate the text, take notes in a separate space, or write in a double-entry journal? (Some of the benefits of these methods are discussed here. You’ll need a BCSD account to view the textbook). How has that changed your interaction with the work?
- To what extent do you discuss the text with others as you read, whether they are reading the same thing or not? How does that seem to affect your experience?
This all gets at one of the central ideas of our space: The most important thing we learn is always something about how we learn.
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
Your secondary focus should always be on the way that literature and, to a very large extent, nonfiction, help us build better versions of ourselves. We are using a short video to guide us:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
There are four main ways literature acts as this sort of tool. For each reason listed below, ask this: To what extent is this happening?
- It saves you time: It might appear to be a time-waster, but literature lets you access and experience a range of emotions and events that would take countless lifetimes to encounter.
- It makes you nicer: Literature gives you the chance to see things from someone else’s point of view, which is the best way to develop empathy for others.
- It’s a cure for loneliness: Through books, writers are able to help us reflect on who we are. We’re all a little weird—and sometimes you can feel like no one else is—but literature opens your eyes up to the truth everyone is a strange and interesting person.
- It prepares you for failure: Fear of failure can be within everyone, but when you read stories of the ups and downs of different characters, you can help show yourself that it’s okay to fail. You can see that failure is a part of life.
Four more ways that literature makes us better are below. These come from one of the highest-rated comments on the article. For each, ask the same question: To what extent is this happening?
- It makes you a faster reader: Reading is a skill. The more you do it, the faster you get. That, and improved reading comprehension, is an asset in almost every white-collar job.
- It makes you wiser: Just like reading can virtually confer emotional and other experiences, it can virtually offer experience in dealing with people and situations. Reading can give you have a base of experience on which to make other decisions.
- It makes you appear smarter: In most places, “upper management” is old enough that they were drilled on the classics. You don’t want to be only person in the room that doesn’t get some literary reference. And who knows, maybe dropping a literary reference might convince someone you are wise beyond your years. Even if you don’t believe that, reading the classics will improve your vocabulary and (hopefully) your spelling. That doesn’t hurt your credibility either.
- It may actually make you smarter: Reading takes a little more intellectual wherewithal than turning on the TV. You read a book, but your mind still has to fill in the gaps to create an immersive experience, and that is a more interactive experience than watching a screen. You also have to interpret from context. All of those things actually use your brain. Like your muscles, using your brain is a good thing.
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis
Your tertiary focus should always be on how literature makes you a better writer. You can always analyze the general, modular elements of writing — use of detail, arrangement, central meaning — but is will be more helpful and actionable to look at diction (the choice of words) and syntax (the arrangement of words), which are present wherever words are present.
Remember that the technical term for something is relatively unimportant. (One of the better explanations of this is on the main page for The Forest of Rhetoric.) Focus on being able to describe what the technique does. Your goal is emulation — using what you’ve noticed.
From The Language of Composition:
When we talk about diction, we might look for interesting or powerful vocabulary, but we also consider figures of speech like metaphors, similes, personification, and hyperbole. When we consider syntax, we want to notice interesting constructions like parallelism, juxtaposition, and antithesis, along with sentence types such as compound, complex, periodic, cumulative, and imperative, among others. We also might look at the pacing of a piece of work: Does the writer reveal details quickly or slowly? How does he or she build suspense?
Works of literary merit will provide examples of all of these elements. The bolded terms in that paragraph, by the way, likely are worth knowing, because they are the easiest to identify and emulate.
Use the following questions to further analyze diction:
- What type of words draw your attention? Do they tend to be a particular part of speech, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs? Is the language general and abstract or specific and concrete?
- Is the language formal, informal, colloquial, or slang?
- Are some words nonliteral or figurative, creating figures of speech such as metaphors?
- Are there words with strong connotations? Words with a particular emotional punch?
Use the following questions to further analyze syntax:
- What is the order of the parts of a sentence? Is it the usual order (subject-verb-object), or is it inverted (object-subject-verb, or any other pattern that is out of the ordinary)?
- What are the sentences like? Are they periodic (moving toward something important at the end) or cumulative (beginning with an important idea and then adding details)?
- Are many of the sentences simple? Complex? Compound? Are the sentences on the long side, or are they short?
- How does the writer connect words, phrases, and clauses?
Students who read the entire textbook chapter will note that the fourth question in the second set (“Does the writer ask questions?”) has been dropped. It’s a good question for certain texts, but it doesn’t have universal usefulness across different modes of writing. It could certainly be added back, though.
Say you write with a similar structure, but with word, like if every sentence started with the same word. Would you analyze writing like that using diction analysis or syntax analysis?
It depends on what is repeated, but I’d place it under syntax if you’re talking about similar structure. You’re describing anaphora (here is one site’s definition), for instance, which emphasizes the start of sentences or clauses. That usually builds momentum or highlights a main idea. The words matter, of course, but the repeated structure matters more, like in this famous poem. The words chosen are simple and straightforward, probably to convey the ease with which the speaker avoids standing up for what’s right. The structure repeats in order to highlight the escalation of events. In your own writing, repeated structure will do something similar.