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The Study of English in a Nutshell…

• Everything can be studied, considered, understood; everything is comprised of parts that themselves can be studied, considered, understood.

• People who understand the constructions they see can then make informed responses, and they can construct/control the world around them

What kind of student will you be? You have a choice:

be like Homer, looking for the path of least resistance/least effort,

thoughtlessly inhaling the world around you;

Or be like the girl who is making the efforts to understand the

world around her.

So what do you need to know?

| | Authors have a limited number of tools at their disposal. In essence, there are only 3 types of choices: |

|C | |

|H |a. stylistic choice eg. Imagery, irony, metaphor… for a list of devices refer to my website |

|O |(mmrhs.ca/resources/literary_terms.doc) |

|I | |

|C |b. structural choice eg. Chapter divisions, various sentence structures and sentence lengths, italics, rhyme scheme, |

|E |syllable count… |

|S | |

| |c. narrative choices eg. Tone of narrator (consider the words used: are they overly positive or negative? Are |

| |episodes included or excluded that would otherwise sway us positively or negatively?), |

| |reliability of narrator, consistency of narration, chronology of story-telling, pattern of events… |

| | Determine the effect(s) of an author’s choice. There are only 6 possibilities: To develop: |

| | |

|E |a. character his/her traits, motivations, attitudes, hopes, fears etc. |

|F |b. setting time, place, mood |

|F |c. tone the attitude of the speaker to the subject matter: it can be the narrator’s attitude, or any one of the |

|E |characters’ attitudes. Please note that each speaker might have a different attitude |

|C |d. theme theme is the idea about some important aspect of life. It is not a clichéd moral such as “don’t judge a |

|T |book by its cover”, because we all know that, and it is too superficial to warrant our efforts; it is also |

|S |not a word or phrase that has no specific idea attached to It such as “love” or “family” etc. |

| |I have a “theme generator” on my web site. |

| |e. plot plot is too obvious for study unless you focus on the dynamics of conflict |

| |f. reader response (Note: “reader interest” is not a particular effect because it is infinitely vague. Demonstrate instead |

| |that the effect is to amuse, to persuade, to provoke, to inform…) |

What is an Argument?

• In general, an argument is your idea that some choice(s) creates one (or more) effects.

What is a “Good” Argument?

• It is important (i.e. it adds to or changes our understanding of the text (book, painting, opinion someone else expresses…). You want to convince your audience of something they didn’t already know or believe.

• It is supported by quality evidence

i. The evidence is “direct” (i.e. quoted from the text)

ii. The evidence is part of a pattern of similar

examples (vs. random or unique examples)

iii. The evidence is brief (quotations of fewer than 10

words are preferred)

iv. The evidence is numerous (3 proofs per argument is

the “standard”)

Tips

1. Stylistic choices are often easier than are narrative or structural choices

2. When you look at a stylistic example, always try to establish that it means more than it says.

• Either it has connotative associations – The word(s) imply more than they say by tapping into the collection of shared feelings and associations that readers have.

eg. “I am going to my Calculus exam” might convey a lot more than the actual information about where the speaker is going – it conveys feelings of dread because s/he expects it to be difficult...

• Or it has symbolic ones – The words imply more than they say by tapping into those images whose connotations have become so commonly recognized/understood that they convey an almost exact idea eg. A dove symbolizes peace.

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Choice

Effect(s)

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