Finding poetic devices in prose connects students to prior learning

This week's Frank Bruni "For the Love of Sentences" featured a number of examples of using those terms we had to memorize in English classes in middle school (or earlier).

Let's take a look at four. 

Alliteration
New York Times obituary writer Margalit Fox noted: “Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comic who for almost seven decades brought that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney.” 

The Dame Edna character will not be familiar to today's students, but there are additional challenges here, mostly due to students not knowing some of the key vocabulary. Two terms that will need some background: "doyenne" and "Dadaist." But even young readers will be able to hear the repetition of the d sounds.

Margalit further defined Dame Edna as “a stiletto-heeled, stiletto-tongued persona who might well have been the spawn of a ménage à quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame and Miss Piggy.”

Here the writer shifts to repeats s-sounds, and then ends with allusions to four famous people from history or entertainment. Students won't know Wilde or Dali, but may recognize Mame or the Muppets. The inclusion of a French phrase will likely need to be explained. But I hope students would grasp how repeating "stiletto" combines a descriptive use of the word with a metaphorical use. Bottom line: it's quite a complex sentence.


Allusion
New Yorker writer Louis Menand examined the creative impulse: “You need to have a pretty informed idea of what the box is before you can think outside it.”

This is a version of some common advice we often give students about them needing to learn the basics and understand underlying principals before they can unleash their creative urges. It could be fun to start discussion on this sentence by talking about various "boxes" students may be encountering (and perhaps being confined by).  


Metaphor
The Wall Street Journal sportswriter Jason Gay marveled at the price under discussion for the Washington Commanders football team: “Six billion. It’s far and away an all-time U.S. record for a sports franchise — all for a jalopy of sadness coasting on the fumes of decades-old accomplishments.” 

The metaphor is comparing an NFL team to a jalopy, and students may or may not have encountered that term for an old, dilapidated car. The second half of the sentence just begs for support to follow, and that is another great discussion point. This is where we can work on creating questions, whether the students know much about the team or not.


Hyperbole
In The Washington Post, Carl Hoffman reviewed “The Wager,” a new book by David Grann about a maritime voyage gone disastrously wrong: “Reading it is like living one of those anxiety nightmares in which you’re just trying to get to that job interview, but you’re lost and your teeth are falling out and, wait, when your car dies you realize you’re naked, and then you’re attacked by flesh-eating zombies.”

The exaggeration comes from piling on standard nightmares... eventually four misfortunes, and each misfortune becomes more dire for the dreamer. Building to the most "out there" example is a classic tactic for creating a series of examples that maintain momentum.

As we get near the end of the semester, it occurs to me that I need to go back through past blog posts that comment on Frank Bruni's collection of fine writing and find some ways to incorporate the best of them into some sort of lesson... or perhaps a series of short readings.

With only two weeks to go, and lots of important assignments still to come, maybe I should not be spending much time thinking about revisions to my writing courses... but that's where I am right now. More about potential changes next Friday.