The Point of a Story
In a Humanities makerspace, you often write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that analytical writing has a practical purpose, not just a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”
That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which is part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. That is essential reading. There is also a three-part guide on how to read:
All of this centralizes literature as the best way to develop the most important skills and traits. Analytical writing, however, is usually best suited to emulation. It is only when emulation is the goal that analysis does not break the magic.
Most literature fits the broad category of narrative writing, a mode of discourse in which a sequence or series of events, real or fictional, is relayed or described. More simply, narrative writing tells a story.
For a piece of writing to be considered a complete narrative, it must fit the criteria outlined above, which it does through certain literary elements. Some of the basic elements of writing, like syntax and diction, apply not just to narratives but all literature; everything else falls on a list students are given every year in every English classes. That’s why we all recognize the contents of this article1:
Makerspace note: We are using that particular article for two reasons. First, it’s a solid list of common literary devices for analysis or emulation. Second, it’s a site full of ads, which lets us use Snap and Read, one of our district’s most useful browser extensions, to eliminate distractions. Use Snap and Read to “[r]emove distractions,” and that website goes from this:
To this:
Literary Analysis
Any work of literary merit can be run through the protocol for works of literary merit. Those three layers of interaction cover just about every kind of assignment in English, too, Here is a template that uses those three focuses:
It’s easy enough to make a copy of that, fill in each box, and then seek feedback from a teacher on the three most important kinds of responses to literature. Those focuses are outlined below for reference. The guiding questions and notes below are pitched as student directions.
1⁰ Focus: How You Read
Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect?
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
Use the ideas gleaned from this central video to ask yourself what each text teaches you. Is it giving you wisdom and insight? Into what aspects of yourself or your world? When in doubt, remember the video’s final quotation:
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.
Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For longer works of literary merit or nonfiction, those questions are usually provided in class; for everything else, it’s a straightforward (but never simple) matter of wondering what truth has come from the reading.
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis
The post on how to read covers diction, syntax, and other universal elements of writing. You can emulate those aspects in any writing response, applying sentence-level strategies to everything from poetry to fiction to analytical essays.
The emulation of literature is rare, though, and most works of literary merit are written about. Most of that writing is analytical, and most analysis is derived from various state and national exams.
That’s why the best way to approach this third focus, whether you are emulating the work or analyzing it, is to adapt the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts:
Closely read the text provided and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device (characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text.
That becomes a universal prompt that can be used to analyze and/or to emulate to any poem, story, novel, etc., with the advantage of also preparing you for any ELA tests.
Emulation
With luck and a bit of effort, you might be inspired by what you read enough to write your own version of it. Poetry and short stories are relatively easy to attempt; novels, of course, take more time. Emulation is an important goal to consider, however. Analysis can increase your enjoyment of a text, but there’s a limit:
Emulation, on the other hand, is all about creating something of your own. It borrows from others, as all art does. It takes the form you want it to take. And it becomes a piece that might be shared with others. Refer to this post:
Which is just one of many such documents available to us. The most cursory search on Google leads to hundreds more, and that’s without using the textbooks, handouts, etc., that fill the shelves of every English classroom. ↩
When I think of emulation, I think of reading a piece of text and writing your own piece using it as a model and the same concepts. My freshmen year when we did emulations we were in our satirical unit and we emulated satirical poems and other pieces and I felt like those were easy to emulate because we had a set goal of what we had to do. This post says that we can emulate in any responsive writing, and that usually writings about a piece of text are analytical. When I used to reflect on a piece, to me it meant analyzing it. In this class, the metacognitions have been more about what we learned and how. I don’t think of emulation when I respond to a piece of writing, rather I am focused on answering the prompt and not thinking about using the author’s strategies in my own writing. How can we make our responsive writing emulative while still answering the prompts? Would it be worth my while to analyze the text first and then write a response to it, or should a responsive writing being a collaboration of both?
Good questions. I’m glad you’re putting these thoughts in writing here.
To answer your last question: It depends on the prompt. Most of your responses in any English class will be focused on a particular kind of writing. In here, you can often choose what that focus is. You’d most often analyze a particularly effective essay in order to use those techniques in your own writing, but every high schooler must do literary or rhetorical analysis on a high-stakes test.
Think of your writing — your authentic writing — as part of a larger discourse. The culture talks to itself. When you enter that discussion, whatever the subject, you are going to analyze what other people are saying while getting your own ideas out there. The problem with a lot of contemporary discourse, I think, is that it doesn’t acknowledge what other people are saying in an intellectually honest way. Analysis isn’t argument. It isn’t hostile. It’s an intelligent consideration of how other people think, talk, and write. It works for art and literature and music as much as for the essays and articles that dominate Internet discourse.
Another piece to highlight is this paragraph in the post:
That’s the idea of a makerspace. We’re trying to avoid the “three steps removed” problem Paul Graham identifies in “The Age of the Essay.” So you want to create what you see through analysis and emulation.