I really want to track down that Alexie article (coming from someone who
also read Superman and feel that comics add more to literacy education
than we might think).
Here are few of old (except for Duncan) but relevant articles on
questioning what a paragraph is, though I imagine they're well known to
many on the list. The Stern article has one of my all-time favorite
titles for a scholarly essay. It alone makes you question how we
traditionally define a paragraph by making it a matter of timing, rather
than textual cohesion per se.
Larry Beason
Braddock, Richard. "The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in
Expository Prose." Research in the Teaching of English 8 (1974):
287-31.
Duncan, Mike. “Whatever Happened to the Paragraph?” College
English 69 (May 2007): 470-95.
D'Angelo, Frank. "The Topic Sentence Revisited." CCC 37 (Dec. 1986):
431-42.
Stern, Arthur A. "When is a Paragraph?" CCC 27 (1976): 253-57.
____________________________
Larry Beason, Associate Professor
Director of Composition
University of South Alabama
Mobile, AL 36688-0002
Office: 251-460-7861
FAX: 251-461-1517
>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 9/28/2010 11:04 AM >>>
Michael,
Have you read Sherman Alexie's "The Joy of Reading and Writing:
Superman and Me"? He says he learned to read from a Superman comic book,
even developing the idea of a paragraph early on as "a fence that held
words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common
purpose. They had some reason for being inside the same fence." He then
begins to think of "everything" in terms of paragraphs. "Our reservation
was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a
paragraph..." In the superman comic book (before he could read the
words) "Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue, and narrative was a
three dimensional paragraph." Every time I have taught that essay,
including in my current semester, it has engendered a very rich
discussion, sometimes freeing students up from too narrow an idea of
what a paragraph is supposed to be. Words in a paragraph have "common
purpose." Paragraphing (blocking parts of the whole into component
sections) is being presented as natural to the workings of the human
mind. An essay is a unity of parts, or ought to be, in part because the
human mind maps the world that way.
What I like about the SFL metafunctions--representing the world,
interacting with other people, and constructing texts--is that they work
at all levels. These larger purposes are being carried out in and
through the clause structure. That's where the rubber meets the road.
As someone who plays/writes music, I am especially interested in
what you are doing with music. I like to listen to how good singers
(our best ) play with phrasing, often working within a tension between
music and speech. I think the open form poem often does that as well.
We fulfill or delay or deny expectations. I'm not sure I have the right
words for it yet. I also have a friend very conscious of how some
students, especially those in tech fields, are more visually oriented
than the typical English major. Too often, our ideas of literacy are
tied to "literary" texts.
These seem like very rich and interesting approaches. Do you have
anything written up yet?
Craig
R. Michael Medley (ck) wrote:
Craig,
Having done a study of paragraph components in a variety of real-world
texts as part of a graduate seminar on English prose style, I couldn't
agree more with you that not all paragraphs fit the "topic sentence +
supporting sentences" pattern. However, it is a basic pattern, and
the
students I am working with at the moment cannot tell a paragraph from
a
list of sentences.
The point I was making with the post was that visual metaphors can be
helpful devices in getting students to understand such concepts as
focus,
details, general statement, etc. I am in the midst of a research
project
that explores how grammar structures can be presented to second
language
learners and practiced through visual, musical, kinesthetic,
interpersonal, and intrapersonal pathways.
I have read some of the cautions about this kind of project from
Howard
Gardner and others, but I think that the correlations below, represent
reasonable attempts at integrating grammar instruction with the theory
of
multiple intelligences:
Musical – rhythm, stress, pitch, intonation contours that go with
particular grammatical structures; elements of the grammar that permit
us
to talk about music, e.g. mental & verbal processes
Visual/Spatial – gestures, body language, facial expressions
[kinesics],
and distance/orientation in relations to particular grammar
structures;
elements of the grammar that permit us to talk about space, line,
color,
arrangement, e.g. existential & relational processes
Kinesthetic – kinesics (above) and pronunciation – i.e. fine motor
control
of the pronunciation of all grammatical elements; the differentiation
of
stressed content words and unstressed function words; elements of the
grammar that permit us to talk about the body and movement, e.g.
material
processes
Interpersonal – all the elements of grammar that participate
prominently
in realizing Halliday’s interpersonal functions-e.g. mood, modality,
pronoun system, verbal & mental processes, epistemic phrases, etc.
Intrapersonal – all elements of the grammar that allow us to reflect
on
what’s going on inside of us; self-regulation of what we speak/write
through monitoring and evaluation based on our internal sense of the
standards; elements of grammar that permit us to talk about our
interior
(e.g. mental & verbal processes)
I would welcome comments and insights from readers on these
correlations
and the role of each of the mentioned intelligences in creating a
full-bodied understanding of grammar-in-use.
R. Michael Medley, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Eastern Mennonite University
I think that topic and support (your previous post) is a very useful
distinction when it is happening within a text, but I'm not sure it
fits all--or even most--texts. One of the things I find in looking at
real world paragraphs is that they don't fit the prescriptive patterns
that show up in traditional writing books, topic and support being one
of them. Whatever utility they have for writing doesn't carry over to
much real world reading. I also think we do harm when we don't offer
these as ONE way to write. SFL patterns would be a very different
lens.
R. Michael Medley, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Eastern Mennonite University
1200 Park Road Harrisonburg, VA 22802
Ph: 540-432-4051 Fax: 540-432-4444
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