Hi Bill,

        Thanks for your insightful comments on my book Image Grammar.
Let me clarify a few items. With nonfiction, I did try to balance
examples from novelists like Hemingway with those from nonfiction
writers like Eiseley. In fact, I devoted an entire chapter to a
nonfiction form used in magazine articles and attempted in another
chapter to show how Pulitzer Prize Winner Jon Franklin used image
clusters of grammatical structures to develop his news features. When
I've taught these concepts to students, I've used chapters from the
book Cosmos by Carl Sagan and PBS documentaries to show how image
grammar applies in a variety of genres. But perhaps the nonfiction
concepts need more clarification as you suggest.

        As for a top down approach, in the chapter entitled "Toward a
Grammar of Passages" I try to make a case for extending the
definition of grammar to include what Mina Shaughnessy once described
as "a grammar of passages." This was my rationale for including
sections on the "shapes of fiction and nonfiction" and my comments on
the classic Aristotelian forms of paragraph and theme development. In
my view the writer like the artist, rarely makes decisions of form,
style, content, and convention in isolation, but views words,
sentences, paragraphs, and passages as whole, each indispensably
interconnected.

        Also, while my primary job for 30 years was teaching eighth
grade English at a middle school, I also taught Freshman English and
Technical Writing (for 20 years) at the University of Akron. So I
have used these techniques with college students as well--- even
though all the examples in the book are taken from my eighth graders.
My thought with examples was to show how these techniques worked at
the lowest level.

        Anyway, I appreciated hearing your perspective.

Thanks again,

Harry Noden


PS: Incidentally, I might add a comment to the discussion about the
relationship between language and thought. The work of most general
semanticists--- S.I. Hayakawa, Korzybski, Weinberg, Bois, etc.---
supports the notion that the way we use language influences the way
we think. The work of Benjamin Whorf, while disputed by some,
provided evidence that the language of the Hopi Indians shaped
perceptions of reality that differed from those outside their
culture. Furthermore, the whole field of psychology called "rational
emotive therapy," pioneered by Albert Ellis, is based on the notion
that language influences thought. So I think Johanna was on target
with her comments.







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