Tag Archives: Fish

Class, Wed, 3/28

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x8: Subordinating and Additive Styles

  • Becca Gil, “Subordinate, or Hypotactic, vs. Additive and Conversational Writing”
  • Anna Lamb, “The Greeks Had Style”
  • Ben Schwab, “Plan the Structured . . . and the Spontaneous?”

Questions

  1. How well does the writer understand and apply the lessons taught by (a) Stanley Fish, and (b) the sentences they quote and analyze?
  2. Where does the writer make interesting use of hypotaxis or parataxis in her or his own prose?
  3. Point to some interesting sentences that are neither hypotactic or paratactic, or that are both.
  4. Point to a passage that you’d say is characteristic of the writer’s—Becca, Anna, Ben—own style. How would you describe that style?

x9: Gender and Style

To Do

  1. Mon, 4/02, class: Read Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, chapters 1–3
  2. Wed, 4/04, class: Finish Woolf
  3. Fri, 4/06, 9:00 am: Post x9 to Dropbox

 

 

Class, Mon, 3/26

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Thinking about style

  • Subordinating and additive
  • Hypotactic and paratactic
  • Writerly and conversational

Examples

  • Fish, Dickens, Salinger, Freud
  • x8 sentences

English 212: Creative Nonfiction, Fall 2012

  • Section 1, Mon: 6–8:30
  • Section 2, Tues: 6–8:30

This is a course for people who want to work more on their writing. I have two aims in teaching it. One is to help you make your prose more clear, stylish, and engaging. The other is to introduce you to the working habits of professional writers.

You are required to draft and revise three substantive pieces of nonfiction for this course—one of which you will submit for publication. We will read a wide range of nonfiction books and essays, but our real work will center on the writing of the people in this class. Much of that work will go in small writing groups. If you are interested in a profession that involves a lot of writing—law, teaching, journalism, public policy—this will be a good course for you.

To Do

  1. Tues, 3/27, 9:00 am: Post x8 to Dropbox
  2. Wed, 3/28, class: Read Winston Weathers, An Alternate Style, pp. 1–58 (in Class Readings)
  3. Mon, 4/02, class: Read Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

 

Class, Wed, 3/21

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Continue discussion of Kate’s x7

Fish, How to Write a Sentence

  • Chapter 1: What is the argument for the sentence as the unit of composition? What does such a focus reveal? What does it obscure?
  • Chapter 2: Sentences as embodying “basic logical structure . . . doer, doing, done to.” Plus words that “give information” about these “main components” (18). Test case: “Fish likes sentences.”
  • Chapter 3: Form generates meaning. Test case: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (26-27).
  • Chapter 4: What makes a sentence good? Return to chapter 1 for example: “It was in the books while it was still in the sky” (9).

x8: Additive and subordinating styles

To Do

  1. Mon, 3/26, class: Reread Fish, chapters 5 and 6. Find strong examples of subordinating and additive sentences.
  2. Tues, 3/27, 9:00 am: Post x8 to Dropbox
  3. Wed, 3/28, class: Read Winston Weathers, An Alternate Style, pp. 1–58 (in Class Readings)

x8: Go Fish

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For this exercise, I’d like you to play with what Stanley Fish calls the subordinating and additive styles. I’d like you to do three things in your piece:

  1. Find strong examples of sentences written in both styles. Both sentences must be at least 30 words long, and each must be drawn from a work on nonfiction prose.
  2. Analyze the structure of each sentence. With reference to Fish, show what features make the one subordinating and the other additive.
  3. Imitate those structures as exactly as you can in two sentences of your own composition. Explain how your sentences follow the lead of your examples.

You don’t have to do these things—find, analyze, imitate—in any particular order. You just have to accomplish all three, for both examples, by the end of your piece.

Think about how you want to format your document to support your analysis. You may want, for instance, to set your examples in a different font, or to block them off with a different line-spacing or margins than the rest of your text. And please make it clear, through citations and/or links, where your examples come from.

Please post your x8 to Dropbox by 9:00 am on Tues, 3/27. I look forward to seeing how you extend Fish’s work!