Dear Uncle Andy,
Nice talkin’ to ya again on the
phone (dude you gotta to learn to Skype so we can save money on phone
calls.) Anyway, I thought for a
bit about what you said you were doing with your English 10 class. I did okay with poetry in high school,
so I thought i’d write a letter --
you know, a letter to your class about how to write one of these literary
paragraphs. Maybe it’ll help
coming from me and not some stupid textbook (not that you wouldn’t do an
EXCELLENT job, Uncle Andy, just that . . . oh, I dunno. Here’s the letter. Use it if you want. You just read “I am a Rock” right?)
Dennis
Dude!
Hey guys. My uncle Andy and I
were chattin’ the other night .
Anyway, he called and mentioned, among other things, that he’d like to
start his grade 10 class by teaching how to write a literary paragraph. BTW I hope he hasn’t been too mean to
you. My dad and him are brothers
but they’re nothing alike: my dad
Mike is a badass construction superintendent and, I imagine, my uncle is a suit
and tie kinda guy. Anyway, let’s
get on with it.
Now I know there’s a lot of important lessons to be learned in life: how to make your room look clean enough
that your parents let you go out this weekend; how to get out of mowing the
lawn on a Friday night; and how to pass my uncle’s English class. Here’s a lesson on how to write a
good literary paragraph (a paragraph about literature you are
studying). Knowing how to do this,
helped me a bunch when I was in school a couple years ago. Check it.
Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!
Let’s begin by lookin’ at a question Andy might ask:
Discuss the use of imagery in the poem “I Am
a Rock.”
Don’t Start at the Beginning;
Start Before That
Well, there’s the topic there -- right above . . . so you can just start writing,
right? Wrong. Writing a literary paragraph is a
little more detailed than that. So
what do you do first? Easy.
Here is Your Brain - Here is
Your Brain on English
The first thing you do (when my favourite uncle gives you a literary
paragraph to write) is this: think
and write down your ideas. You
will always get a better mark if you
organize and plan out your ideas before you write them (at least that’s what I found in
high school in Calgary).
Storm the Brain
Start by underlining the main word or point in the topic.
Imagery
So let’s see . . . imagery in the poem “I am a Rock”
Let’s start by listing the images and what feeling they mean to the
reader. Don’t worry about full sentences or anything like that just yet.
Image 1
“winter’s day/In a deep and dark December” -- a sense of quiet and cold
detachment is established -- no spring lovers in this poem! Darkness reinforces that image. Lots of
dark Decembers in Revy, I bet!
Image 2
“freshly-fallen, silent shroud of snow” -- this CAN be a beautiful image
but not here. In this poem the
snow covers and isolates things.
The snow mutes the things or people it covers. The word shroud is kinda cool -- that’s the name for the
cloth they used to wrap dead people in.
Image 3
“Fortress Steep and mighty” -- this image of a castle is there to show, not
his power, but the dude in the poem’s isolation. He’s cut himself off from others -- purposefully, put
himself in his own emotional fortress.
Remember, this image is a metaphor. Buddy here in this poem, isn’t actually in a castle -- well
maybe an emotional castle you could say.
Image 4
“I am a rock” -- the title of the poem and a central image. A rock can suggest someone who is
steadfast (that means someone who doesn’t change their mind much). Maybe the speaker thinks that himself,
but you and I know the REAL idea this image conveys. It shows that the speaker is an emotionless person, without
many feelings at all. He’s not
vulnerable -- nobody’s gonna be able to smack this fella around, true, but
sadly that means he doesn’t have the you know what’s to fall in love. Ouch.
Nuff ideas, don’tcha think?
Anyway, there’s a bunch of images and what they mean. Now how the heck do you write a
literary paragraph for Uncle Andy and not sound like a boring old list?
Slap on the Adhesive Thesis
Here’s my first big tip: pick a unifying idea (a theme or something) that can weave
its way through your paragraph and sorta be the glue that holds your ideas
together. Uncle Andy. . . would
call this the thesis statement (just a fancy word for topic sentence).
Don’t Start this Way
Here’s a topic sentence that sucks: images are important in the poem (too general -- ask
yourself why are they important).
Saying something is ‘important’, btw, is mostly a bad idea in a literary
essay. Mr. Pfeiffer’ll recognize
the BS right away.
This is Better
To try and get a unifying idea or thesis statement, think about the
whole theme of the poem (or message).
In this poem the dude’s all like, “I’m cool ‘cuz I’m not gonna be hurt
again and I’m like okay with the fact that I’m all emotionally cold.” He’s really messed up, huh? We know, though, that the message is
that when a person shuts themselves up, and withdraws from those around them,
that that only crushes them and doesn’t begin to help heal any wounds. Sure it sucks to get dumped by a hot
guy (or girl) or to get hurt by your friends, but you’ll ruin your life if you
don’t deal, learn from it, and move on.
The Lightbulb Just Turned On
Hey, there’s an idea (a theme) right there! The guy thinks he’s okay with everything, but really he’s
just avoiding problems.
Cool! Listen to this: all the images I mentioned are like
that too -- the images CAN be taken in positive or beautiful ways (that’s how
the guy would take them), but you and I know that the images are actually
negative images showing how cold this guy is.
Okay, cool. We’ve got
something here. We’re going to
discuss imagery and link it to the
idea that the images reflect the attitude of the speaker (and his attitudes
are that he’s fine with everything -- but we know that he’s in bad shape).
So I think we can start.
Finally!
Oh, yeah, another thing. If my
uncle is like any of my teachers in Calgary, he gets all excited about writing
all formally and stuff. So
don’t use words like ‘kinda’ or ‘sorta.’ And you can’t use ‘dude’ either. Actually, even words like ‘guy’ and ‘okay’ should be
replaced with more correct Englishy words. Just pretend you’re from England, that’s what I do then,
I can write all formal and stuff.
A Good Start
Here let me see if I can crank out an opening sentence:
· “In the poem “I am a
Rock” by Paul Simon, the author has a lot of images that show everybody that he
needs help but at the same time they are images that he thinks make him look
good.”
Check it! Not bad, eh? Actually, now that i look at it, it’s
okay and all, but I think I can change a few things. ‘Authors’ write books -- this dude’s a poet. The word ‘good’ is waaaay too simple of
a word to use in any ‘good’ writing (lol). I also don’t like the word ‘everybody’. Also, the word ‘show’ is a bit too
visual -- I’ll use the word ‘prove’ or ‘convey’. The words “a lot” sucks pretty
bad too.
A Better Start
Let me take another stab at it:
“In
the poem ‘I am a Rock” by Paul Simon, the poet uses images effectively to
convey his troubled state of mind, but at the same time those same images are
used by the speaker of the poem to prove to himself that he is a strong,
steadfast person.”
NICE! I’ve got a fairly decent
okay first sentence or thesis statement.
Gotta go, Breaking Bad is on. . . .
HOLY COW! That show’s INSANE (I can’t believe how
Walter White has become some psychopathic Meth dealer!)
Okay, I’m back. Man that
show’s messed! I can’t believe
what Jessie Pinkman just did . . . Anyway, where were we.
Oh, yeah, the paragraph.
Here’s the rest of my paragraph.
· In the poem ‘I am a Rock” by Paul Simon, the poet uses
images effectively to convey the speaker’s troubled state of mind. At the same time, though, those same
images are used by the speaker of the poem to prove to himself that he is a
strong, steadfast person. In the
very fist lines of the poem the image of a “winter’s day/In a deep and dark
December” is presented which quickly gives the impression of the somber and even
sorrowful mood to the poem.
Specific describing words like ‘dark’ and ‘deep’ set the tone of despair
and anguish. Further imagery in
the poem helps to convey the reader’s isolation: “On a freshly-fallen, silent shroud of snow.” With words such as ‘silent’ and
‘shroud’ used to describe the
snow, once again the speaker of the poem reveals that he is living a quiet,
lonely life all because of his choice to be an emotional “fortress steep and
mighty” rather than being the type of person who allowed themselves to be
vulnerable. Interestingly enough,
the speaker believes that what he is doing is fine and one could argue that all
of the above images, the winter, the snow, the fortress, are images that
speaker believes represent that he is, in fact, not a person who needs
help. He refers to himself as “a
rock” which he believes proves that he is strong and steadfast. As readers, though, we know he must be
a bit delusional to think that what he is doing is fine. It is clear that the
imagery in the poem is used to effectively convey the speaker’s self-imposed
emotional exile: he is a rock,
just not the kind of rock that anybody should want to be.
Did You Notice. . .
· I referred to the dude IN
the poem as “the speaker.” Make
sure you remember that “the speaker” is different from “the poet.” Paul Simon, the poet, isn’t the guy he
describes in the poem.
· I introduced my
quotations two different ways:
once with a colon, and the other times I made the quotation flow right
into the sentence. Proper
punctuation, here, and making the quotation FLOW into your sentence will get
Uncle Andy all excited.
· I tried to sound like a
dude from England, avoiding words like ‘a lot’ and ‘sorta’.
· I tried not to use deadly, simple words that you should NEVER
use in your writing
(well almost never). . . words like big, small, sad, little, happy, glad, nice,
large, huge, mean, mad, good, ‘like’.
I know that’s only thirteen; the other ones are the two simple words
you, yourself, use too much so you’ll have to decide which ones they are.
Well, anyway, there you go. I
hope that helped. I don’t even
know if my uncle will show this to you but if he does, I hope this helped. Someone once explained it to me in this
same sorta way and it helped. Good
luck, Go Flames Go (My girlfriend and I just had a son. Named him Roy JAROME Pfeiffer – YEAH!)
Dennis Pfeiffer (Mr. Pfeiffer’s nephew)
