Monday, April 5, 2010

The Person on the Page

“The fun’s in how you say a thing.” Robert Frost

Probably because they assume I know a good deal more than I do, instructors often write asking me what I think are the most important aspects of critical thinking or reading. I usually answer by identifying two elements of critical reading I have focused on as both a teacher and a writer of textbooks: (1) the analysis of arguments, not just their reasons and conclusions but also their underlying premises and (2) the recognition of an implicit bias that reveals itself through imagery, allusion and what’s left unsaid.

For the record, I still think those are two of the most important topics to cover in a critical reading course. But lately, I’m inclined to add a third element to my admittedly brief list of absolutely critical topics, the notion of the “implied author,” a term used by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth. In the simplest terms, Booth’s “implied author” is not the actual author of the text. It’s the person conjured up by the words on the page. It’s the imaginary author the readers feel they know because they've read the author’s work.

I’ve been thinking about Booth’s concept because of a little book I recently read called “The Sound on the Page” by Ben Yagoda. I really liked the book and agree with Yagoda’s claim that “no truly transparent or anonymous style can exist: the many choices the act of writing requires will sooner or later betray a stance, an attitude, a tone.” In other words, a personality will come through in the writing, sometimes the personality is colorless, tedious, and earnest, as it all too often is in far too many textbooks (In a future post, I’d like to introduce a list of textbooks like Joseph Conlin’s American history text, "The American Past," which manages to be both informative and delightful to read. Textbooks like this one make teaching so much easier). But one way or another, a sense of the person behind the prose is there on the page, even if the writer did his or her best to appear totally objective and totally impersonal (although why anyone would even want to do that is not clear to me).

I think this idea of a personality emanating from the page is a valuable concept for students to consider because it could make them do what both Booth and Yagoda do: Look very closely at a text and pay attention to the many different devices writers use to create the personality they want readers to respond to. Among those things are word choice, use of formal and informal language, alliteration, references (or lack of them) to the self, sentence length, punctuation, imagery, anecdote, choice of simile or metaphor, presence (or absence) of example.

The list is very long, longer than the one I created here. To a large degree—obviously content plays no small role—these are the things that make the writer sound like a particular person, to sound, for instance, like an implied Harold Bloom or Maureen Dowd, to link two writers who couldn’t be more different. Bloom sounds passionately serious as if he emerged from the womb quoting Milton, and Dowd, in print at least, always seems to long for another life as a stand up comic.

What Yagoda also points out, with the help of lots of revealing comments from famous writers, is how writers struggle to evoke and even sometimes override the author they summon with their words. The essayist and novelist Anna Quindlen apparently thinks that she developed her written style from her battle with stuttering, “I think there’s clearly a link between trying to create a charming, erudite and coherent ‘voice’ on the page and being unable to use your voice easily in real life.” The novelist Juno Diaz talks about his ongoing battle with the person who turns up when he starts writing “I have problems saying what I need to say. That’s odd, because my personality tends to be blunt, straight-forward, outspoken. My written personality is nowhere near as dynamic. I have a hundred failed stories in my drawer, and they all have the mark of the writerly person I for some reason need to be.”

I think Booth’s concept and illustrations like those from Yagoda’s book could combine to make students better readers and writers. Students could, for instance, answer the question, “Whom do you want to evoke in the mind of readers when they see your words on the page.” As a group, students could analyze several pieces of writing by writers with a strong style or voice—I think Calvin Trillin is a good choice, Amy Bloom another-- and make a list of the kinds of devices they see these writers using. Trillin likes comic exaggeration, for instance, while Bloom often injects short, direct, personal commnets into her essays and reviews. Once the list is compiled, students could think about how they want to sound on the page and write a paragraph or two that calls up the person they want to be in print.
About this blog: For years now, whenever I wanted to test out a new exercise or figure out how I’d like to address a new topic,I’ve been sending out an SOS to teachers I’ve worked with or met at conferences and online and asking them what they thought of my approach or if they had another way of addressing say improving students ability to stay focused while reading on the Web.

Probably later than it should have, it’s now occurred to me that a blog might be a good way to bring others into these online discussions, which, for me anyway, have been incredibly valuable. So every week or so, I’m going to post my thoughts on a topic that I consider really central to the teaching of reading and writing. In every post, I’ll include practical strategies for addressing the topic discussed.

My hope is that other instructors will respond with their thoughts and, over time, we can come up with a repository of teaching methods geared to specific objectives like teaching coherence in writing or using linguistic cues in reading and a host of others.