19.2 Onomatopoeic Verbs - Writing a Sensory Detail Set

A sensory detail set should refrain from using linking verbs - is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been. Action verbs - leaped, struck, tripped, sounded, cursed - appeal to the sense because they should action in the reader's brain.

However, there is a special subset of action verbs that provide an extra frisson of sensory experience - onomatopoeic verbs. These are action verbs that both name sounds and mimic the sounds that they name.

Don't confuse these words with the onomatopoeic that you learned as fourth graders - "Brriinng!" went the alarm clock. These were fine for fourth grade, but they rapidly expire. At this point, they make your writing seem kind of child-like. These are regular action verbs that people already use and know, they simply have been coined to mimic the sound that they name.

Examples of Onomatopoeic Action Verbs
click, cough, sputter, crack, crackle, sizzle, buzz, gurgle, rattle, clatter, scratch, flutter, hack, thunk, clack, snapped, spurt, ripple, rifle, tramp, stomp, stamp, scrape . . . 

There are scores more, I'm sure. 

19.1 Sensory Detail Set - Example

Let's say that someone asked me which elective I was most interesting in taking at the high school, and I was going to write an explanatory essay on the topic.

I prewrite and come up with the following thesis:
"The class I am most eagerly anticipating in high school is auto shop: the students learn by doing, the skills that you learn are of immediate practical use, and the subject seems different and exciting compared with 'normal' school classes."

I write the rest of the essay and then for my conclusion, I follow the POSITION - SENSORY DETAIL SET - FINAL THOUGHT conclusion pattern.

"In conclusion, auto shop is one of the reasons I am most eager to move up to the high school. I can close my eyes and visualize it now: the soft, purring murmur of a well-tuned six-cylinder engine; the satisfying weight of the gleaming, gray wrench in my hands; and the delighted surprise of my parents' raised eyebrows as they peer out the fogged car windows at me confidently changing their blown tire. Auto shop will give me a chance to explore all this."

Things to notice:
1. "murmur" is personification.
2. "gleaming, gray" are two equal adjectives, so I have separated them with a comma.
3. I have three things, but did not find a way to naturally work smell into the set, the weight of the wrench introduces the tactile (touch) sense, though, so I'm still okay with it. I thought about putting in the smell of gasoline or rubber from the tire, but didn't that it would fit naturally.
4. I have written the sensory detail set as one long sentence, but that's not necessary. I only need the semi-colons in there because there are other, non-list commas.

19.1 Writing Sensory Details

Writing effective sensory details is difficult. When you are a little kid, you live in a world full of concrete objects and simple colors - "truck," "blue." One of the big projects of your parents and teachers is to think you to think in the abstract - to think of your destination, not the road itself.

Children learn this so well, and so rapidly their conversation become simply a catalogue of abstract ideas about experiences, culture, and relationships that eventually, their strength, the ability to think carefully about a bee sting or an ice cream cone or a doll becomes a weakness. Their talent for simply describing what they see, hear, and smell atrophies from neglect.

Effective concrete, specific, sensory details mark the good writer from a person who is merely intelligent and holding a pencil. A writer who carefully describes the sky recognizes how writing is fundamentally different from speaking, that the reader is not there with you.

So, we must relearn the concrete:

When describing something, we will write what I call a sensory detail set. This set includes the following:

Three sentences that each appeal to one of the five senses -- the recommended ones are sight, sound, and smell (note recommended, not required).

• Appeals to three senses.
• At least one comma-separated pair of equal adjectives.
• At least one onomatopoeic verb.
• No linking verbs, only action verbs. 
• One instance of figurative language - I recommend personification.

However, the most important criteria is the same as it always is - the sensory details set, like all your sentences, must support the central idea of your writing (the thesis for an essay, the WHO+WHAT+WHY) for a story.

18.3 On Figurative Language

In our essays and stories, we can add elements of writerly creativity through the use of figurative language, which is just the fancy school way of saying "language that doesn't mean exactly what its words mean."

Figurative language is a big category, because people are constantly using language in this way, often without being aware of it.

"She did that? That's so cold of her!"
"I am starving, I haven't eaten in, like, six hours!"
"He works 24/7."
"The Ravens destroyed the Patriots in the second half."

Slang is usually (but not always) figurative use of existing language.

People tend to describe every experience that they have in the most extreme way available to them, so people say "awesome/starving/idiotic" when they mean "good/hungry/foolish." This exaggeration to make a point stronger is hyperbole, and not creative. These words wear out, and so language have to keep coming up with new words that mean these things.

Some people think that most language started as metaphor, and the process of using a metaphor again and again until people can't recognize it as a metaphor is a common word to create new words. A word that people can't tell is figurative language any more is called a "dead metaphor" (which is itself one). I dislike using the phrase "a lot" in essays because it is a dead metaphor, and so I think it should not be used in formal writing, but my students don't recognize it as a metaphor ("a lot" is an area of ground full of something, you can't literally have "a lot of time," so we disagree.

However, using figurative in personal essays (like the ones in our class) and narratives is a strong positive if you do it in a creative, original way. If you are unoriginal about it, though, it becomes a negative, still worse if you are unaware that you are using informal English. Kids use the word "versed" to me "competed against," as in, "We versed Long Valley last night." This a very useful slang word, since there's no transitive English verb that says quite the same thing. The formal English word would be "played," but "to play" someone in a game has connotations of friendship and lightheartedness. In a competitive game between two teams, people want to connote aggressiveness and intense competition, so they have created the new slang term "versed." One day, "versed" will probably be a legitimate English word, usable in adult conversation. However, it isn't yet, so you don't use it in essays. Also, a kid using "versed" or "swag" isn't being creative, since they have learned the word from the culture.

Maybe Creative in Speech, Not Creative in Writing
Using Slang "Don't sweat it" for "Don't worry about it."
Dead Metaphors/Hyperbole "She's a monster on the tennis court"
Hackneyed Similes  or "He blew in like a hurricane" or "She's as fast as a cheetah and smart as Einstein."
Phrasal Verbs "speed up" for "accelerate"

Creative Figurative Language
Inventing Your Own Slang
Metaphors/Hyperbole That You Have Never Heard Before "There were more broken pencils in my junk draw than maggots in a Wendy's dumpster." "He's a toilet plunger -- you don't notice him until you need him, then, if he's not there, you realize how important he is."
Original Similes "My brother talks so fast, it's like trying to understand a DVD stuck on fast-forward."
Personifying Verbs "The old car belched out a thank you and then wandered drunkenly out of the gas station parking lot."

18.2. Trying to Escape the Past

One of the frustrating parts of trying to become yourself, to find your real self, is that so much of who you are was shaped during a period for which you have no memories. The first memory that I have that I can date accurately was from when I was four years old. Before then, I was taught things, watched television, heard things, and did things that shaped me now, determined what I liked, showed me how people are "supposed" to live. However, I think that "being yourself," if it is possible, means that the beliefs that you hold because someone told you to believe them need to be re-examined.

I think that most people understand that when it comes to things like racism. If you were taught as a child to be prejudiced against people of different races for you, it seems obvious that your job is to root those beliefs out of your mind. However, I think that most people assume that what they want in life is an expression of their real self. If you want to eat ice cream and be a billionaire, most people assume that these are natural urges. Because school and parents aren't the ones teaching them, they must be "real" values. However, this idea is problematic.

So, the "real me" is the person that I am without any influences from the outside. Let's pretend that such a thing is possible for now, though that seems ridiculous, too (who taught me the word that I am using right now?).

Money is an invention of the adult world; it not a natural thing. You can't "naturally" want money. You have to be taught to want money. Strangely, too, when people state that they wish to be "rich," they rarely have an amount of money in mind. This kind of desire is really widely held, and must be learned. Because almost everybody I know wants to "be rich" (I certainly wouldn't turn down a big pile of money if somebody offered it to me), people think that it must be natural to want. It can't be, though, since there were thousands of years when people didn't have money (it didn't exist), and they were probably happy and miserable just like us.

Of course, it seems to me that if you learn from the world around you to want money, but not how much you are supposed to want, you can't ever know if you have enough. To have a desire that can never be filled -- that strikes me as something that would make most people unhappy, like if you were hungry constantly and could never be full.

So, what should we do? The desire to "be rich" seems to be universal, but it seems also to make most people unhappy (they don't get enough money to feel rich). I would argue that if we learned to want something, that we can unlearn to want it (or, to be more clear, learn to want something else more). So, I think that to be happy, it's important for people to unlearn their desire to be rich.

What makes this impossible for most people, I think, is their refusal to believe that they can learn to want other things from what they want now. I don't think that you should unlearn wanting natural things, like food or sunlight or the company of other humans. That seems foolish. However, wouldn't you be happier if you could unlearn your desire for things that cost a lot of money? I don't mean a better person, either -- I mean just happier.

One way to unlearn something is to unplug yourself from it. For example, I want the Mets to win, but they refuse to win enough to make me happy. I can't control how many games the Mets win, and it seems as though I am not going to get the 90+ wins that would make me happy. So, if I continue wanting this, I'll probably be unhappy. However, I could just stop watching the Mets on television, reading the sports news on the internet, and talking about the Mets with my father and my friend Clint. I would think that, then, it would be tougher for me to care about how the Mets are doing -- because I wouldn't know. If the Mets lose to the Braves and I don't hear about it, I don't have to get annoyed about it. I am free to choose to like other things.

I am not pretending that it's easy to break habits that have formed in your life -- I know that it's not. However, it's a lot easier to teach yourself not to want something that you don't need anyway than it is to get it. Even if the Mets won 90+ games this year and made the playoffs, I wouldn't be happy unless they got to the World Series. If the got to the World Series, I wouldn't be happy unless they won it. If they won the World Series, I'd be happy for about a week, and then I'd go right back to wanting them to win it the next year. Even Yankee fans find baseball to be more aggravation than pleasure. Loving a sports team is a bad idea, honestly. You generally get ten times more disappointment than joy.

Why do I love the New York Mets? One guess. My childhood. When I was seven, the 1986 Mets won one of the greatest World Series ever. I sat with my father in a basement and watched some of the games, which were among the greatest ever played (Game 6 is maybe THE greatest game ever played). My father took my to a game the next year, and I watched the Mets starter, Sid Fernandez, strike out 17 San Francisco Giants. My childhood taught me to care about whether the Mets won. They've never done as well, since. I learned it accidentally.

17.4. "It's a Good Life" from The Twilight Zone

We're going to watch this great old television episode in class.

For our assignment, we will consider the quotation:

"Power corrupts, and and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

• What does this mean?
• Do you agree with the message?
• What examples from the world (things that you learned in Social Studies, Science, or by reading informational articles or watching the news) can you use to prove/disprove it?
• What examples from your own personal life (your autobiography, the life experiences of your friends, family, and acquaintances) can you use to prove/disprove it?
• What examples from stories (movies, books, short stories, television episodes) can you use to prove/disprove it?

17.3. Writing Narratives W.3.

Today, we're going to work on our short stories, having gone through a few of our own.

Here are rules for writing a story, once your prewrite is finished. This is extremely difficult to understand before you do it, so don't worry if you only dimly understand it.

1. A story writer has three concerns - the characters, the plot, and the theme. All three things should be in the writer’s mind at all times.

2. There are three sentence types in stories - narrative (stating what is happening), dialogue (reporting what people are saying (or thinking)), or description (carefully showing how things look).

3. Every sentence in the story should deal with two of the three concerns and be one of the three types.

17.3. "To Serve Man" Technology and Power

A famous Twilight Zone retells "To Serve Man." 

"To Serve Man" by Damon Knight

Today's story is most famous as an episode of the classic science fiction television show The Twilight Zone, but started as a short story. The producers of the show made significant changes to the way that the Kanamit looked (more like Frankenstein and less piggy).

Question to be answered: Consider the following quotation from the story. Click "Read More"

17.2. "Harrison Bergeron"

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, a famous American novelist who died in 2007.
Questions to Answer: 
1. Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" is satirical. A satire exaggerates an idea to show how the idea is ridiculous (in the author's view). What idea do you think Vonnegut is criticizing? Make sure to state the idea clearly (sentence 1), explain why your choice is correct (sentences 2 and 3), and use direct reference to the story to show Vonnegut satirizing your idea (sentences 4 through the end of the paragraph).
2. How does the author use dramatic irony at the end of the story?

Things to think about --

1. We are thinking during this six week unit about how groups control and are controlled by people, how people get power and when it is okay to use power, and how technology helps people gain power over others and escape from the power of others. "Harrison Bergeron" has funny, strange things to say about all three.

2. I believe that you have just finished studying the Bill of Rights and so are pretty familiar with the process of amending the Constitution. Note that in real American, there have only been 16 in the last 200 years. In Vonnegut's futuristic nightmare, there have been 213th by 2081. Why do you think that he chose such a high number? What do you think those amendments are about?

17.2. "The Lottery Ticket," Anton Chekhov W3.

Tonight's short story, "The Lottery Ticket," is by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, who is regarded as one of the best short story writers who ever lived.

1. Question: What do you think that Chekhov is trying to say about life in this story? Remember that the "big idea about life" is the theme and has to be universally applicable - it can't be about marriages or lotteries, it has to be about desires and relationships.

17.1. Bonus Text, "The Lottery in Babylon"

Google celebrated Borges's 112th birthday with this tribute.

I am teaching writing stories this week in the classic manner. The classic manner can be summed up, I think, in three words "Show, don't tell." But it would be kind of a lie to claim that this the only way you can write great stories. Following the classic laws allows anyone to produce good writing; that's why the laws are so great. As an English teacher, I start with the assumption that you are a regular person, not an artist who constantly thinks about writing great stories.

The fact remains, though, that some writers break these rules and get away with it. There are two kinds of artists that ignore rules - bad ones and great ones.

Here's another story about a crazy lottery that totally ignores the rules of the classic short story, by the Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon." It's probably a little too challenging for most readers because of the vocabulary, but give it a try if you're interested.

It's worth thinking about why Borges gets away with not having a normal plot or characters, and no dialogue.

17.1. "The Lottery" Writing Stories W3.

For January, we're practicing writing narratives. We're going to start by writing a classic fiction short story, which is defined as a Five Finger story where a universal theme is communicated.

Generally, for a story:

1. Everything that you can express through action, you SHOULD. This means not writing sentences like, She was mad, but instead something like, She clenched her fist tightly in anger.

2. Everything that is said in your story should be in dialogue. This mean not writing sentences like, She told me I was in trouble, but instead something like, "Just wait until we get home, missy." 

3. The mood of the story and the character's desire should be accomplished through DESCRIPTION. Instead of writing, I wanted to win the championship more than anything, you write I could picture in my mind my overjoyed teammates hoisting me onto their shoulders and parading me around the court, the championship trophy gleaming in the crook of my arm.

Here's a short story that is generally considered to be an American classic.

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

Assignment:

Shirley Jackson's story is meant to move from calm small-town life to a sense of dread. Read carefully - what does Jackson do to create this unpleasant sense of tension? Write a logical (SEE) paragraph that states what you think she does to create suspense/tension. What does she do? Why does she choose to do that? Where in the text can the reading see her doing this?

16.3. Planning a Story W3.

For the next few weeks, were going to write a couple stories and see if we can create one or two a piece that are successful. A successful short story is kind of a rare thing.

Your assignment is to write a classic short story that embodies one of the themes in the Twelve Suggestions. So, first open up the link and choose one that you think would make an interesting story.

Remember, we write classic stories in our class. If you want random things happening because you think that's a funny effect (and sometimes it is), do it as a hobby.

I don't need to go over the elements of planning a story, because they are the same as the elements of reading one. You need a character with a background, personality, and desire. The desire is frustrated by a problem, preferable one that forces the protagonist to undergo an internal problem, too. The main character needs to take action to try and fix the problem, which must fail to fully fix the problem. Eventually the main character, often by realizing an important truth about life, does resolve the conflict.

It's just the five fingers.

Write a one paragraph skeleton of everything that happens in your story. All of the details I need to understand the story should be in there, but nothing else. Write no dialogue or description, just give me a summary of the Five Fingers elements. Bring it to me when you think that you're done.

I will be asking, "Why is character X like this?"
"What does the character realize that solves their problem?"
"Won't solving the problem so easily make people not enjoy your story?"
"What reason do you have for including this detail?"

16.2. "Marionettes, Inc." by Ray Bradbury RL2.

Here's an fun, unpleasant little story that concerns our unit themes - "Marionettes, Inc." by Ray Bradbury.

In a [YOURNAME] Marionettes" file, write two things -

1. Write a Five Finger summary of the story.
2. Answer the following in a SEE body paragraph:

We have spoken about the idea that power, the ability to make others do things that you choose them to do. What do you think this story argues about the idea of exercising power over other people. Make sure to use specific information from the story in your example.

16.4. "Southbound on the Freeway," May Swenson

Useful Idea for Thought Experiments - "The Anthropologist from Mars"

First, read this awesome poem by May Swenson, "Southbound on the Freeway."

Then, watch this thematically similar bit by comedian Jerry Seinfeld from the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld.



Question: How are the themes expressed by these two clips the same? How are they different?

16.2. Judging the Worth of an Essay - W5.

We'd like to see how different people think about the quality of the student essays, so I am trying to gather up some data on them. Read this essay and score it using the 2(Sentences) + Risks - Mistakes formula that our class uses.

To complete this assignment, do these steps:

1. Click on this link to open up the essay that you need to assess and score.
2. Click on "File," then "Make a Copy," to get one that you can edit, and then change the title to "[YOUR NAME] ASSESSING ESSAY 1."
2. Read it and use the 2(Sentences) + Risks - Mistakes formula to determine the grade.

• Each sentence that makes sense, supports the thesis, and isn't a repeat of a previous sentence is worth $2.
• Each compositional risk (a sophisticated vocabulary word, a sensory detail, an artful rhetorical question, etc.) gets a $1 reward.
• Each mistake incurs a $1 penalty.
• So, when you sum up the sentences, multiply them by two, add the rewards, and deduct the fines, you get the value of the essay.
• These scores coincide, roughly with NJ ASK holistic scores by rounding them ALWAYS DOWN to the nearest ten. So, if a student gets a 47 on an essay, they are likely to get a 4 for the same essay on the NJ ASK holistic rubric.

3. Write what you think the essay's value is at the top of the document like this:

2 x 28 Sentences + 8 Risks - 12 Mistakes = $52

16.1. Essay Topic: On Power

We read Tunes For Bears to Dance To over the Christmas break, and I was thinking that this book was a good opportunity to think about power. So, consider the following quotation. The first sentence is one of the most famous in English; the second sentence is almost always left out.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - Lord Acton, British historian

Do you think that this is true or not? Either way, make sure to think about examples to make your arguments. 

Write me an explanatory essay that communicates your thoughts on this. Take 30 minutes; we'll probably then have to talk about it - this is a tough concept.