Hidden meaning

This is one of those phrases that makes most literature teachers cringe: the "hidden meaning" of the piece. It's as if we were in an episode of Indiana Jones. The straightforward meaning of the story or poem might be about romantic love, but there's a "hidden meaning" (only available to the high priests who have gone through certain rituals) that has to do with something totally different.

The whole idea makes me a bit ill, but when I think of it, I've got to admit that the "hidden meaning" idea makes a bit of sense.

We look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "I like to see it lap the miles," and ask, "What is IT?" Students say "racing car" or "river." I point out that racing cars hadn't been invented when Dickinson was alive. I guess that's hidden meaning because I looked up her dates on Wikipedia. I ask whether rivers are "punctual" or "peer in shanties" and the students think I'm making something up.

There is a kind of student paper that says, "What the author was trying to say is ..."

Take it as a fact: most of these authors were actually pretty good at saying stuff. That's how they made it into the textbooks. And the stuff they were saying isn't something that's only for the high priests. It's for everyone. Everyone who will read carefully and look at a dictionary, that is.

Response to Bananas

Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."

Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.

Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.

Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.

I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.

One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.

Carver intro rough

Beginning rough draft of an introduction:

I once asked a choreographer to explain a dance she had just performed. "What? Would you like me to do it again for you?" she asked. Raymond Carver's short stories are a bit like that. They are something close to poetry, and any attempt to analyze, summarize, or dissect seems to somehow fall short of the whole. Bedford refers to Carver's style as "brief and minimalist in style, plot, and setting" (288), so it seems that any trace of non-minimal description that makes its way into a Carver story must be there for a very good reason. That's the point of this little essay, to examine "Popular Mechanics," and pay particular attention to setting details and, most specifically, to light.

Poetic line endings

When we read poetry, we're tempted to come to a sudden, complete stop at the end of every line. Sometimes that really destroys the meaning of the thing, though. Consider this traditional hymn:

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

If you sing or recite it with a total stop at the end of the first line, you get "Take me life and then leave me alone" (which is pretty far from the teaching of most churches). Then the second line is simply gibberish. If you simply consider it as a sentence, it's far different, and much better:

Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

Apply the principle to all poetry. Yes, there's bound to be a slight pause at the end of a poetic line (especially if there's a rhyme), but the thing is bound to make more sense if you read the punctuation, not the line endings. Here's how Shelly's "Ozymandias" reads if we print it like prose:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed."

Makes much more sense, doesn't it?

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.
  

Fiction paper prewrite

You rarely get to look over the shoulder of a writer during the writing process, so I'm going to talk my way through the writing of this paper.

I'm working on Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics." I began with the whole minimalist idea, and took some notes (mainly from my memory, because I've read the story several times, and I assume that things I remember well will be important in some way).

Non-minimalist things

The story is so minimal (and Bedford's editor uses the "minimalist" label) that non minimal things might be pretty important, so I listed them:

• Cars "slushing" by
• All the description of the first few lines, with the dirty water, etc.
• The fascination with light: getting dark on the inside, turning off the light in the bedroom, the kitchen nearly dark
• Flowerpot crashing to the floor

Minimalist things

It's sort of an "argument from absence," but the whole story is very flat, lacking in even ordinary conversation conventions:

• No dialog blurbs
• Not even quotation marks
• No emotion words during the early part of the argument
• Lots more indications of "minimalist" writing

Little stuff with deep indications

• "getting dark on the inside too"
• "it" (this baby) not "he" or "George"
• grabbed an arm (how many does a baby have? doesn't even matter if it's left or right)
• the darkest time physically is the darkest time emotionally
  

Tension: The changing English language

Nobody likes stability more than I do. Emotionally, I'd love to be on the side of the Grammar Nazis who seem to think that Moses brought the comma rules of English down the mountain along with the Ten Commandments. I cringed when "alright" began showing up in dictionaries as an acceptable spelling. I grit my teeth that "hopefully" has come to mean "I hope it will happen."

Inconveniently, living languages change all the time, sometimes very quickly. English is probably the most living (and changing) language out there. We writers just have to accept that and attempt to keep up with current acceptable usage.

Here's a little item I wrote to a young friend in 2004. He was a high school student, taking a freshman English college course through an Ohio program called PSEO (Post Secondary Education Option). He had written a paper about PSEO students and pluralized the abbreviation as PSEOs. The teacher thought it needed an apostrophe: PSEO's. Because he used this PSEOs construction all through the paper, the teacher marked each one wrong and called the paper a failure. (Never mind the question whether doing the same small grammatical error repeatedly is one error or many—and the question whether a lot of PSEOs make a piece of writing a total failure.) He asked my opinion, and I wrote this response:

---

Jon:

In answer to your question about using an apostrophe for pluralizing abbreviations (as, for example in pluralizing PSEO), I've done a bit of research:

• The Blair Handbook (3rd edition, 2000) is adamant: form the plural with apostrophe + s.


• The Little, Brown Handbook (8th edition, 2001) says the apostrophe is often optional when the abbreviations are unpunctuated, i.e. without the periods.


• Rules for Writers (5th edition, 2004) points out that either use is correct, but that you should be consistent.


• Keys for Writers (4th edition, 2005) [sic] says the apostrophe is "commonly used" and that MLA and APA prefer no apostrophe—but that it's acceptable if you are consistent.

I'd say we're in an evolutionary stage with this one. We seem to be moving away from the apostrophe, but either usage is acceptable if you are consistent. This is one of those style book issues. If your course style book is the Blair Handbook, I'd say you should use the apostrophe without fail. Otherwise, it appears to be writer's choice. If you are submitting a paper to a carefully-edited professional journal, however, I'd suggest leaving the apostrophe out.

Curt Allen

---

Latest Development

Remember that Rules for Writers said in 2004 that either use was correct? By the 6th edition (2008), the book had changed its tune: "Do not use an apostrophe to pluralize an abbreviation" (page 301). Their example is "We collected only four IOUs out of forty." The Quick Access handbook (2007) doesn't even mention the possibility. Its only comment is that we use the apostrophe to pluralize single letters: "Printing w's is hard for some first graders" (page 483). (I'll bet that rule will vanish in the next decade too.)

What's a writer to do?

The French have something called the French Academy. This body decides what's correct French and what's not. When I was in high school, the Academy had been working for several years to decide the grammatical gender for "grapefruit," so I guess we just couldn't write about them until the decision came down. Things are sloppier but easier for English writers. You have to be aware of the usage of good writers and editors (the New Yorker magazine, for example), and keep a current dictionary at hand. And stay kind of loose in the saddle.

Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.

Those Grade Appeals

It's time again for the grade appeals. They always fascinate me because the student often does everything possible to guarantee that I won't be receptive. Here's an example of a last-ditch appeal:

mr. allen i missed class on wensday due to my job i had to fill out these papers and turn them in be wensday or eles i would not have a job yes bad excuse but the truth and then i had to work from 4 till 10 and was unable to email you from work sorry. i had the paper done the final porfolio just wondering if you wanted me to email it to you or to drop it off in your mail box i am trully sorry for the inconvinis and i did not mean for this to happen came up at the last min and i have to have this joe other wise no school next year. i was wondering if too you could send me the topic for the inclass wrighting so i could make that up if i am alowed i really can not afford to miss this i can not get lower then a B in this class for i will lose my exceptince into usf next year im very sorry that i missed class and will do anything to get this B pleas email me back and tell me what to do i will do anything email you paper or drop off right extra papers
thanks

Ethos

In classic argumentation, we discuss whether the writer is believable. That's ethos. Is this the sort of person who should be believed? Or, to look at that sample above, should this student get the "B" he requested? (Keeping in mind that this student had just finished his second semester of college English.) By his own admission, he has fouled up his schedule and not fulfilled the requirements. If this is his best work (keeping in mind that he's asking a superior for a favor, so he should be trying his hardest), I really don't feel that he's nailed down the content of the course.

Logos

This is the part of an argument where the writer gives reasons for the argument. It's the "show, don't just tell" part. This would be the place for a student who has done well in previous work to point out that he's a great student and just needs a final small favor. This student hadn't done very well at all in previous work. In class (when he attended) his behavior was disruptive, and his writing had terrible grammar and an obnoxious in-your-face assertiveness that didn't win it any friends. The student really has no factual argument to fall back on.

Pathos

This is the emotional side of the argument. The student makes a real try to get the reader's emotions on his side, with apologies and an appeal to the student's dire situation. Unfortunately, pathos will not carry an argument such as this one. When you're asking a teacher to change a policy, you need to bring everything good that you have—this should be the best writing you do in the semester.

Tension: Word Count versus Creativity

I'm not too thrilled with arbitrary rules, especially in writing. One reason, of course, is that when I make a rule, I have to enforce it. Another is that poor teachers love rules so much that students become convinced that rules are the only point to English class.

So why have a rule about minimum length of an essay? If I ask for, say, a 1000-word narrative about a turning point in your life, what do you do if you only have 500 words in your head? Can't 500 words be good? Isn't there a danger that the student will write 500 words of quality stuff surrounded by 500 words of trash?

Well, yes. And you'll notice that the really good professional writers seem to get things done very efficiently, concisely, and briefly.

In spite of all this, I've got a couple of reasons for the word count.

Developing an Idea
Five hundred words, for many people, is just about enough to say the obvious material that everyone knew anyhow. It's the sort of essay you can throw together in one draft, taking perhaps an hour. You don't learn to explore an idea deeply in one page. You don't learn to answer the question, "What else?" There's no room for examples, for discussion of the other side, for developing details. There's no room for "Show, don't just tell."

Learning Structure
A really short essay doesn't need much structure. Sure, in high school you wrote five-paragraph essays that were 500 words, but they really didn't need an introduction or a conclusion very much. You often got by with a single-sentence lead and a single-sentence wrap. If the teacher hadn't told you how many paragraphs to write, you would have done the whole thing in a single paragraph. At 1000 words, you can't make the whole thing a single block—the reader gets mired down. You must have a structure.

Learning Correctness
If you really don't know how to form sentences, you might squeak by writing a page and a half. Three pages, though, gives you enough space to demonstrate that you really don't know grammar. Or that you do.

The abuses

I always know who wants to write and who is simply laying down words in hope of getting out of this class. The tricks are so obvious: large type, enormous margins, 2½ line spacing, two inch indents for paragraph beginnings (with an extra line skipped between paragraphs), and a full four-line MLA header on each page instead of just the first one. Is that writing? Why is that good? It only profits the paper company. When I receive a paper like that, I sigh because the student assumed I was too stupid to see the tricks, then I run the whole thing through the scanner.
Last semester I received several really undersized papers. The final assignment was a five to seven page research paper. One student gave me less than three. Was his work a model of brilliant concision? Did it resemble the writing of the best newspaper feature writer? Nope. It was obviously thrown together in less than an hour. It said nothing of any value and the student learned nothing from it.

Help

So what do you do when you realize that you aren't going to fulfill the minimum length requirements? If you aren't too arrogant to accept help, it's available. Every school has some form of writing lab. The textbook is usually full of advice on developing a topic. All writing teachers keep office hours. You just have to get up the humility (or courage) to ask.