Post by thetriangle on Sept 12, 2008 16:13:49 GMT 9.5
A little look at language
Being bemusedly bored, and as you can see I quite blatantly am, I have decided to put down some thoughts on certain aspects of writing. I would first like to say that any characteristic of writing I might talk about as a negative here I am probably as guilty of perpetrating as any (using confusing sentences for example) but that in no way invalidates what I say.
My main purpose with this is really to get anyone on the forum who hasn’t had much experience with writing to start thinking more about how they write, and how they use different aspects of writing and language to convey meaning.
Onward then!
Metaphor. A metaphor is saying something is something else when clearly it is not (example: metaphors are a good tool to keep in your writing cabinet). Included under this are similes (metaphors are like a good tool to keep in your writing cabinet) and personifications, where a concept, event or inanimate object is given human qualities. (metaphors are a tool for siting in your stories and telling the reader how to think about something.)
A metaphor is used to get the reader to look at an event, object, person or concept in a different way. An example from the short story “Racine and the Tablecloth” by A.S.Byatt may be useful here. Emily (the protagonist) visualises her education as a “tunnel,” at the end of which would be “light and a rational world.” By not simply referring to Emily’s schooling as ‘Schooling’ we now look at it in the same way we would look at a tunnel, an enclosed line, taking us somewhere, a single path, confining. The metaphor makes it possible for us to see all this in an apparently simple thing.
What you have to be careful of is using metaphors when they have absolutely no purpose whatsoever. You can use as many metaphors as you like to describe a sunset, but unless each is giving the reader a new way of looking at the sunset, or establishing a new connection between the sunset and another element of the story, it may as well be as much empty space.
Metaphors are a very important tool in a writer’s cache of literary devices, but a tool that isn’t being used for anything only clutters up the bench.
I think that metaphor worked out quite well at the end.
Alliteration/Assonance.
Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant sound, most often at the start of a word, but not necessarily so (example: Ten tin toys attack at eight tonight)
Notice in my example that the repetition of the ‘t’ sound is used in ‘attack at eight’ as well as the words ‘ten, tin, toys, tonight’ even though the sound does not appear at the start of the words. Another thing to notice is that when it is said out loud ‘eight tonight’ only has two ‘t’ sounds, one at the end of ‘tonight’ and one that works for both the end of ‘eight’ and the start of ‘tonight.’ Whilst it’s not really relevant when it’s within such a thicket of the ‘t’ sound it is worth thinking about and noticing these things in your writing.
Assonance is similar, but with vowels instead of consonants creating the repeated sound. It is also a lot harder, for me at least, to come up with an example that effectively demonstrates it, but I feel obligated to try anyway. ‘I try, by eye, to guide my file’ seems to do it, and it did take me a while to come up with a sentence that didn’t just end up in an endless stream of rhymes. What you should notice is that assonance is very difficult to pick up on unless you’re reading out loud. It’s very easy to see an alliterative sentence, but much harder to spot a sequence of assonance. In my example, for example, the ‘eye’ sound is spelt in a number of different ways, ‘I’ ‘–y’ ‘eye’ and ‘ui’ all make the same vowel sound. Assonance is used more in poetry than prose, but it still has its place as a very subtle alternative to alliteration.
As for their purpose in writing, lets take a look at my last sentence, ‘Assonance is used more in poetry than prose, but it still has its place as a very subtle alternative to alliteration.’ This sentence has (and by chance, too!) an example of both alliteration and assonance, and in a very good example of how they are used. Firstly, lets look at the alliteration. It’s quite easy to spot it with ‘poetry’ and ‘prose,’ but a subtle addition to this is the word ‘place’ a few words down. What this does, and you may be aware of this while you read it or you may not, is draw your brains attention to the connection between these words. Subconsciously or consciously, you are thinking about ‘place’ in regards to ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. How your brain chooses to make the connection between those words is its own affair, but mine is encouraged to think more seriously on how assonance and alliteration are placed or used in different ways in poetry and prose.
Now for the assonance, which takes the form of the ‘a’ sound at the beginnings of the words ‘assonance,’ ‘alternative’ and ‘alliteration,’ as well as in the middle of the word ‘place’ and a few other sentence fillers. This has the same effect as the alliteration does, only in, as I said, a much subtler way. In this instance I am made curious as to how alliteration can be an alternative to assonance, and the other way round as well.
I find creating alliterative sentences a useful way for investigating new ways to arrange a sentence, and for exercising the vocabulary muscles (that’s a personification, as well as a metaphor, if we remember back to our first topic). While it may be amusing to use these sentences in informal writings such as this (my first sentence, for example), in a story where maintaining a mood is important a highly noticeable alliterative sentence can be quite jarring.
In other instance, however, alliteration or assonance can be quite useful for setting a mood. Try using different sounds for different effects. Try using alliterative ‘c’ or ‘k’ sounds in a battle, perhaps interspaced with a few ‘s’ sounds to break it up a bit.
Compare the following, reading out loud -
‘The battle raged for hours unabated, the sounds of the fighting bombarding the ears of those who were beginning to fear that they would be the ones die there.’
‘They still fought hours later, their steal stabbing and slashing in the cacophonous sounds of battle, and each one of them began to suspect that they would be they next one killed that day.’
The first uses ‘b’ and ‘f’ sounds more, while the second uses ‘s’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ sounds. The first is more sober in tone, but also seems to have a larger scale, the b is like a drum in the distance, the ‘f’ like the sound of feet dragging on the ground. The emphasis is placed on words like ‘unabated’ ‘bombarding’ ‘beginning,’ which suggest a pounding on the moral of the troops. Emphasis is also given to ‘fighting’ and ‘fear’ which again show a general feeling amongst all the people in the battle.
The second places you in the battle, the ‘s’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ emulating the sounds of fighting around you. Your attention is drawn to words like ‘steal,’ ‘stabbing’ ‘slashing’ and ‘sounds.’ Your attention is focused on these words, they are the nuts and bolts of the fight, and the things you see, do and hear around you when you actually are in a battle. The ‘k’ sound appears in ‘cacophonous, ‘suspect’ and ‘killed,’ suspect and killed both are things that generally happen to individuals, instead of groups, and the cacophonous sounds of battle are an influence on the individuals mood.
Ok, my examples weren’t that well written, but it may help, so I wrote them.
Now for an exercise, I think. Read out and look at the alliterative sounds in the following excerpt from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’ and write down what you think the effects are.
“To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbit’s wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”
(A sloe is a type of berry and anything that seems ungrammatical was in the original text.)
You don’t have to tell me what you think about the excerpt, but it is important for understanding the concepts that you write them down somewhere. Also, if you should decide to do this, read the passage out loud, slowly, don’t rush it, and don’t think your reading it out in your head. The same applies if you ever read poetry.
Well, I’m afraid that’s all I have time for at the moment, despite wanting to talk about some uses of syntax to convey meaning, the use of metre in prose, the use of repetition, the importance of choosing and developing your lexicon, some stuff about metalanguage and metafiction (it is a word, despite what my spell checker says) and a whole lot of things I left out about both metaphor and assonance/alliteration.
Everything I’ve said here is basically my own observations on the uses of language, and my views on such things are as likely to change as the wind should a better option present itself, so feel free to correct me on anything I say here, but if you do that please give an example or some sort of evidence, otherwise what you say is just opinion and there is no way I can answer to that, or be persuaded by it.
Most of what I have written is more relevant to the writing and reading of poetry than it is to prose, but it is certainly still applicable. Some of you may be thinking, ‘do writers really think about all that stuff when they peck a sentence out on their keyboard?’ I honestly don’t know and frankly I suspect that they don’t. I doubt if there is any writer alive who, before writing every sentence in their book, asks themselves, ‘what am I going to alliterate today?’ but certainly all good writers know this stuff (very important here to note that I say ‘good’ writers and not ‘successful’ ones.) and they know a hell of a lot more about these things besides.
And as for poets, they do think about this stuff for every sentence, or even every word. Poetry is not written, it is forged out of language. The word derives from the Greek word ‘poein’ meaning ‘to make.’
Well. That was fun. If I have made anyone who reads this think a little bit more about what and how they write, then I think I have done well. In fact, since nothing much seems to be happening at the moment, why don’t some of you drop a small sample of something here and we’ll see what we can see in regards to all this stuff. Or not. Whatever.
So, my short conclusion has, like everything else I wrote, become embarrassingly longwinded and off topic, so I think I’ll just wrap up by saying that I am well aware that I don’t practice all that I preach, and I am not ordering anyone else to take any of this into consideration when writing. Its just some stuff that I thought it might be worth for you, O anonymous reader, to know. With that being said, I hope that all your writing may be bright, brilliant, and if all besides fails, may it basically just be.
- The Triangle
Being bemusedly bored, and as you can see I quite blatantly am, I have decided to put down some thoughts on certain aspects of writing. I would first like to say that any characteristic of writing I might talk about as a negative here I am probably as guilty of perpetrating as any (using confusing sentences for example) but that in no way invalidates what I say.
My main purpose with this is really to get anyone on the forum who hasn’t had much experience with writing to start thinking more about how they write, and how they use different aspects of writing and language to convey meaning.
Onward then!
Metaphor. A metaphor is saying something is something else when clearly it is not (example: metaphors are a good tool to keep in your writing cabinet). Included under this are similes (metaphors are like a good tool to keep in your writing cabinet) and personifications, where a concept, event or inanimate object is given human qualities. (metaphors are a tool for siting in your stories and telling the reader how to think about something.)
A metaphor is used to get the reader to look at an event, object, person or concept in a different way. An example from the short story “Racine and the Tablecloth” by A.S.Byatt may be useful here. Emily (the protagonist) visualises her education as a “tunnel,” at the end of which would be “light and a rational world.” By not simply referring to Emily’s schooling as ‘Schooling’ we now look at it in the same way we would look at a tunnel, an enclosed line, taking us somewhere, a single path, confining. The metaphor makes it possible for us to see all this in an apparently simple thing.
What you have to be careful of is using metaphors when they have absolutely no purpose whatsoever. You can use as many metaphors as you like to describe a sunset, but unless each is giving the reader a new way of looking at the sunset, or establishing a new connection between the sunset and another element of the story, it may as well be as much empty space.
Metaphors are a very important tool in a writer’s cache of literary devices, but a tool that isn’t being used for anything only clutters up the bench.
I think that metaphor worked out quite well at the end.
Alliteration/Assonance.
Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant sound, most often at the start of a word, but not necessarily so (example: Ten tin toys attack at eight tonight)
Notice in my example that the repetition of the ‘t’ sound is used in ‘attack at eight’ as well as the words ‘ten, tin, toys, tonight’ even though the sound does not appear at the start of the words. Another thing to notice is that when it is said out loud ‘eight tonight’ only has two ‘t’ sounds, one at the end of ‘tonight’ and one that works for both the end of ‘eight’ and the start of ‘tonight.’ Whilst it’s not really relevant when it’s within such a thicket of the ‘t’ sound it is worth thinking about and noticing these things in your writing.
Assonance is similar, but with vowels instead of consonants creating the repeated sound. It is also a lot harder, for me at least, to come up with an example that effectively demonstrates it, but I feel obligated to try anyway. ‘I try, by eye, to guide my file’ seems to do it, and it did take me a while to come up with a sentence that didn’t just end up in an endless stream of rhymes. What you should notice is that assonance is very difficult to pick up on unless you’re reading out loud. It’s very easy to see an alliterative sentence, but much harder to spot a sequence of assonance. In my example, for example, the ‘eye’ sound is spelt in a number of different ways, ‘I’ ‘–y’ ‘eye’ and ‘ui’ all make the same vowel sound. Assonance is used more in poetry than prose, but it still has its place as a very subtle alternative to alliteration.
As for their purpose in writing, lets take a look at my last sentence, ‘Assonance is used more in poetry than prose, but it still has its place as a very subtle alternative to alliteration.’ This sentence has (and by chance, too!) an example of both alliteration and assonance, and in a very good example of how they are used. Firstly, lets look at the alliteration. It’s quite easy to spot it with ‘poetry’ and ‘prose,’ but a subtle addition to this is the word ‘place’ a few words down. What this does, and you may be aware of this while you read it or you may not, is draw your brains attention to the connection between these words. Subconsciously or consciously, you are thinking about ‘place’ in regards to ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. How your brain chooses to make the connection between those words is its own affair, but mine is encouraged to think more seriously on how assonance and alliteration are placed or used in different ways in poetry and prose.
Now for the assonance, which takes the form of the ‘a’ sound at the beginnings of the words ‘assonance,’ ‘alternative’ and ‘alliteration,’ as well as in the middle of the word ‘place’ and a few other sentence fillers. This has the same effect as the alliteration does, only in, as I said, a much subtler way. In this instance I am made curious as to how alliteration can be an alternative to assonance, and the other way round as well.
I find creating alliterative sentences a useful way for investigating new ways to arrange a sentence, and for exercising the vocabulary muscles (that’s a personification, as well as a metaphor, if we remember back to our first topic). While it may be amusing to use these sentences in informal writings such as this (my first sentence, for example), in a story where maintaining a mood is important a highly noticeable alliterative sentence can be quite jarring.
In other instance, however, alliteration or assonance can be quite useful for setting a mood. Try using different sounds for different effects. Try using alliterative ‘c’ or ‘k’ sounds in a battle, perhaps interspaced with a few ‘s’ sounds to break it up a bit.
Compare the following, reading out loud -
‘The battle raged for hours unabated, the sounds of the fighting bombarding the ears of those who were beginning to fear that they would be the ones die there.’
‘They still fought hours later, their steal stabbing and slashing in the cacophonous sounds of battle, and each one of them began to suspect that they would be they next one killed that day.’
The first uses ‘b’ and ‘f’ sounds more, while the second uses ‘s’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ sounds. The first is more sober in tone, but also seems to have a larger scale, the b is like a drum in the distance, the ‘f’ like the sound of feet dragging on the ground. The emphasis is placed on words like ‘unabated’ ‘bombarding’ ‘beginning,’ which suggest a pounding on the moral of the troops. Emphasis is also given to ‘fighting’ and ‘fear’ which again show a general feeling amongst all the people in the battle.
The second places you in the battle, the ‘s’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ emulating the sounds of fighting around you. Your attention is drawn to words like ‘steal,’ ‘stabbing’ ‘slashing’ and ‘sounds.’ Your attention is focused on these words, they are the nuts and bolts of the fight, and the things you see, do and hear around you when you actually are in a battle. The ‘k’ sound appears in ‘cacophonous, ‘suspect’ and ‘killed,’ suspect and killed both are things that generally happen to individuals, instead of groups, and the cacophonous sounds of battle are an influence on the individuals mood.
Ok, my examples weren’t that well written, but it may help, so I wrote them.
Now for an exercise, I think. Read out and look at the alliterative sounds in the following excerpt from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’ and write down what you think the effects are.
“To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbit’s wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”
(A sloe is a type of berry and anything that seems ungrammatical was in the original text.)
You don’t have to tell me what you think about the excerpt, but it is important for understanding the concepts that you write them down somewhere. Also, if you should decide to do this, read the passage out loud, slowly, don’t rush it, and don’t think your reading it out in your head. The same applies if you ever read poetry.
Well, I’m afraid that’s all I have time for at the moment, despite wanting to talk about some uses of syntax to convey meaning, the use of metre in prose, the use of repetition, the importance of choosing and developing your lexicon, some stuff about metalanguage and metafiction (it is a word, despite what my spell checker says) and a whole lot of things I left out about both metaphor and assonance/alliteration.
Everything I’ve said here is basically my own observations on the uses of language, and my views on such things are as likely to change as the wind should a better option present itself, so feel free to correct me on anything I say here, but if you do that please give an example or some sort of evidence, otherwise what you say is just opinion and there is no way I can answer to that, or be persuaded by it.
Most of what I have written is more relevant to the writing and reading of poetry than it is to prose, but it is certainly still applicable. Some of you may be thinking, ‘do writers really think about all that stuff when they peck a sentence out on their keyboard?’ I honestly don’t know and frankly I suspect that they don’t. I doubt if there is any writer alive who, before writing every sentence in their book, asks themselves, ‘what am I going to alliterate today?’ but certainly all good writers know this stuff (very important here to note that I say ‘good’ writers and not ‘successful’ ones.) and they know a hell of a lot more about these things besides.
And as for poets, they do think about this stuff for every sentence, or even every word. Poetry is not written, it is forged out of language. The word derives from the Greek word ‘poein’ meaning ‘to make.’
Well. That was fun. If I have made anyone who reads this think a little bit more about what and how they write, then I think I have done well. In fact, since nothing much seems to be happening at the moment, why don’t some of you drop a small sample of something here and we’ll see what we can see in regards to all this stuff. Or not. Whatever.
So, my short conclusion has, like everything else I wrote, become embarrassingly longwinded and off topic, so I think I’ll just wrap up by saying that I am well aware that I don’t practice all that I preach, and I am not ordering anyone else to take any of this into consideration when writing. Its just some stuff that I thought it might be worth for you, O anonymous reader, to know. With that being said, I hope that all your writing may be bright, brilliant, and if all besides fails, may it basically just be.
- The Triangle