What is stylistics? How can it help us interpret a text?

Stylistics is a broad term to cover the 'how' texts are put together. Into this 'bag' we can put any of the following and others you might think of:

how is the text 'told' or 'narrated'. There are of course many different ways to narrate a text, some of which pretend that it's not narrated at all, some where the narration seems to have a clear narrator, the 'I' of the narrative (or poem) (sometimes called the 'persona') or the 'I' of the third person narration as with some of Roald Dahl's books. Sometimes the narrator can 'see' everything going on, sometimes the narrator can 'see' into people's minds, sometimes into just one person's mind. This matter of point of view (pov) is very important in stories because we as readers accompany the pov. It's what we as readers 'see'. This is part of what is called 'focalisation' is created. Texts at a given moment usually have a 'focaliser', the point of view of the significant protagonist at a given point. In some texts, inanimate objects or settings can be focalisers of sorts. We see the main character say, through the eyes of the landscape rather than vice versa. Thomas Hardy writes like this sometimes. (Debatable point!)

how a story is narrated also matters when it comes to time. Stories ca be 'now', can loop back in time, loop forwards and do other things with time - talk about things habitually in a certain way (ie continuous time), even adjectives about a character - a 'morose' person, is continuous time, she reacted angrily is present time. Stories and poems are made 'thicker' or 'deeper' by creating different time-frames. 

how thought is depicted varies enormously: she thought, she said to herself, or writers can dispense with these tags altogether and just go from dialogue into a narration as with 'What should he do next?' 

how texts sound ('prosody') is part of the 'how' of a text. Sentences, paragraphs, chapters and whole books set up rhythms, repetitions, patterns.

how texts 'evoke' is important - this is what we might call the 'being there' trick of writing. Broadly speaking, writers can use the senses of narrators, characters of even objects to 'get us there', ie using  what can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched. We can chart these seeing what kind of text it is- a mostly seeing text? Or a mostly hearing text? And so on.

all texts use previously used words, phrases, scenes, 'motifs', archetypes, plot lines, rhetorical forms (eg 'bathos', 'hyperbole' etc), allusions to other texts...all this comes under the heading of 'intertextuality'. 

most texts use the method of 'reveal-conceal'- there are many parts to this ie how a text appears to be 'telling' but as it does so, it invokes the possibility that not all has been told, that there is more to come, that what's coming might be mysterious, dangerous, funny, etc. The first pages of stories, plays, the first lines of poems are very interesting for this. See also the last lines of chapters. Writers are constantly filling texts up with 'hooks' that invite us to speculate what's going on, what's going to happen next, what this really means etc. Reveal-conceal is one of the most powerful 'motors' of writing and yet it is one of the least talked about. 

some texts draw attention to themselves. This has been called 'writerliness'. If the text says, 'I am telling you this...' or even a phrase like 'Later he would come to regret...' it signals that this text is a text. 

all texts involve choices to do with the 'register' of the language. In daily life we refer to these registers all the time: being eg 'slangy', or 'posh', or sounding like a lawyer, or though the use of words like 'jargon' or 'in-group lingo' and so on. We are all aware of people's different 'voices' but also how we ourselves each choose to speak one way in one situation and another way in another. These all involve 'switching'. Texts are full of these voices. We might want to categorise these 'voices' and see how texts change. Dickens is famous for one moment being 'highfaluting' and the next very down to earth. He used the highfaluting tone sometimes to mock the protagonist. 

many texts 'do' dialogue. These are stylised forms of conversation. The study of conversation is called 'pragmatics'. We can apply pragmatics to the dialogue of texts. This enables us to see for example speakers' tactics in negotiating with each other in ways that writers deliberately leave us to figure out. There is a scale for how much writers interpret the dialogue for us - a lot, a bit, not at all. This is also all part of the 'how' of a text.

another way texts 'tell' is that they create 'lexical fields'. They do this by a) usual a word (!) b) by repeating that word (repetition is a crucial part of the feel of a text, especially poetry) c) through using similar words or phrases with similar meanings. If we list these rather like Roget's Thesaurus does, we start to get a feel of what is this text's 'preoccupation'. What is it most interested in? What is it focusing on? The lexical field method also helps us summarise eg what is the lexical field for that character or that setting. It helps us 'typify' what the writer is doing to create the text. We can think of these as 'key words' or as important 'signifiers' in a text. How the lexical field is created is also important and when in the text. Are the words returned to again and again?etc. 

texts are 'stuck together' through 'cohesion'. There are many ways in which one word, one phrase, one sentence, one paragraph links to another eg through use of pronouns, through the use of 'the' (!) as opposed to 'a', use of 'this', 'that', 'there', 'here', 'his', 'her'' through repetition of sounds, images, feelings, through the contrast of images and feelings, through the juxtaposition of images, through the repeated but changed use of motifs, symbols, descriptions. These are the cohesive patterns of a text. We can find these by using my 'secret strings' method. Draw actual or imaginary lines between any part of a text that links to any other part of a text whether that be by sound, feeling, image, language, grammar, prosody - any reason at all.  This will 'unpack' the stylistics of a text. It will show how a text has been patterned in order to pass on meaning in other ways other than the fact that language 'refers' to things/feelings/ideas etc. This is the how! 

text is of course language in use. Language has thousands of different ways of referring, describing, intervening and so on. Language-users are making choices all the time about how to do this. I've referred to quite a few above, but there are other criteria or 'parameters' at work too. For example, how about looking at 'referring'. A writer's narration can refer very specifically, very plainly, very metaphorically, very vaguely..and so on. Consider for a moment the continuum of being very specific...through to very vague. In the picture book 'Where the Wild Things' are we find this operating very clearly. 

Try this experiment: go through the book, noting down 'very specific'  (vs) words or phrases, and 'very vague' (vv) ones. So from the beginning we get: 'The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of...' is vs, but then we read 'of one kind and another' which is vv. 'Wild' is vs but 'thing' is vv. 'sent to bed' is vs so is 'without eating'  but 'anything' is vv. 'That very night' is vs and so is the next passage. Then we get to some strange disjuncts with time and space: 'sailed through night and day and in and out of weeks' (how do you sail 'out of a week?!) and then 'to where the wild things are'. (where is that? pretty vague!) . Then we come to the repeat of the word 'terrible' which at first is very specific but somehow the more it is repeated the less specific it becomes! 

Following this we have quite a lot specific writing about taming the wild things and Max being made king and then we come to one of the most curious passages of all:

'And Max the king of all wild things [we know that is by now] was lonely (sufficiently vs for a story that's like fairy story] 'and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.'

Where is this? 

This invites us to wonder or interpret where this might be. We have two resources to help us - at least! One is the story so far. The other is ourselves. We can ask, where would I go to find someone who loved me best of all?' And we can ask, do I know of any other stories, songs, poems, films TV programmes ('texts') where people who were lonely went to find someone who  loved them? So there are the resources of the text, the resources of life, and the resources of other texts to help us interpret the very vague! It's a great example of reveal-conceal. 

Some might say it's obvious who the text means. Is it? Do we 'see' that person? No other human is visible in the pictures and the carer in the books 'the mother' acts in an angry way and the only thing we see her doing (so far) is to 'detach' from Max - send him to his room, and withdrawing affection from him by not giving him anything to eat. Hmmm, we might wonder, Max may well want to be where someone loved him best of all, but does he really think his mother does love him best of all? Does Max think he's getting that love? The vagueness of the text gives us room to wonder about this. (There's no definitive answer and people can argue forever about it. The interesting thing here is that it brings up issues for people of any age about 'detachment-attachment in how we bring up (or are being brought up, or were brought up) when children are perceived to be 'naughty'.) The vagueness gets right to the heart of this.

Following this crux to the story, the story goes into reverse mode, heads back home, repeating the patterns of language, till Max gets home 'where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot'. 

I've heard people explain how this is redemption. Max has resolves his anger issues (as it were) and so he is forgiven, happily ever after. Full  stop. 

But really?

'Supper' is specific but the structure of the sentence doesn't tell us who made the summer, it 'is waiting' and 'is..hot' so these are characteristics it possesses. There is no 'agent' putting it there. And no agent, giving Max a cuddle. No one visible. The supper may well be a symbol of affection but there is a gap or a vagueness for us to wonder about who brought it, why it's still hot and, why this person isn't there. Is this more 'detachment'? Is this at the heart of what this book is about?

So with this reading, the surface text is, yes, all about a boy resolving his anger and being forgiven for being beastly but that there is a sub-text about a boy not getting the attachment he wants whether he's angry or whether he's resolved his anger. And if we want to zoom out even further from this reading, we might find that in a way this 'explains' his anger. After all, what else explains his anger? The clue from the text is indeed that he doesn't see or touch his mother and the only act we are sure that she does is send him to bed without anything to eat, though,  yes, she may well have made sure he had something to eat in the end.

One reading 'shows' that 'time-out' and 'detachment' works in bringing a child to his senses (!), but another says that actually nothing has been really solves by this, because the underlying situation still prevails.

Our route to this is to look at the 'how' of the telling anyhow it veers between being very specific and very vague, giving us huge leeway with which to interpret the story. Hurrah for that. 

How to think about the structure of stories?

Stories have structures. 

We are used to talking about stories having settings, characters, plots and themes. Slightly to one side of these or incorporating these are structures. How should we describe these or study them so that young people can get hold of them easily?

One way that is ok (not perfect) is to use a metaphor: 'cogs'. Cogs as we know are the wheel-like things in gears that 'engage' and then 'disengage'. When they engage, they affect other cogs. When they're disengaged they're sitting there not being used for the time being. 

Let's apply this to stories. We might think of a character, a setting, a group of characters, a couple, as cogs. Perhaps others aspects of a story. If we take a seemingly simple story like 'Little Red Riding Hood', there first two cogs are LRR and her mother. The mother invokes two other cogs - granny and the wolf and perhaps we might  say, the cog of the forest.  LRR disengages from her mother and engages with the setting of the forest. Depending on what telling of the story, the forest either prefigures the cog of the wolf through LRR looking out for it, or the wolf cog actually engages for some threatening dialogue. Then at granny's house the wolf engages with granny and eliminates that cog and it's where we think LRR engages with the granny cog (already mentioned), she is in fact engaging with the wolf cog. Then depending on how the story is told, either a brand new cog turns up to save the say, the woodcutter, or LRR herself deals with it all, (elimination of wolf cog), LRR is reunited with granny cog and then all three reunite when mother cog turns up.

So we can see how these cogs engage, disengage, disappear or re-engage. 

Because it's a fairy story, there aren't complex cogs from before the story starts (flasbacks), or sub-plots where we go off to another gear box, as it were. 

Cogs are inanimate objects but they are moved by eg a driver. So this gives us an idea of authorship: someone who moves cogs. And when the driver moves one cog, it moves another. It's also possible for more than two cogs to be engage with each other. 

The snag with the cog metaphor is that it's not very good for describing characters' minds, ('interiority' so called). And most stories have some sense of that. Many stories are more about that than anything else. The cog metaphor is not very good for describing that.

People who write film scripts and make movies are very sensitive to something else going on: how you structure feeling through a story. They have various formulae and graphs to do with building emotion, building jeopardy, causing false alarms, creating expectations, disappointing those expectations, prefiguring the end point with mini-versions of that end point, creating sub-plots that invoke parallels with the main plot, creating 'depth' or 'thickness' to character through flashbacks, using the settings as 'harbingers' or as 'pathetic fallacy' by way of commentary on the emotion of the scene(s) and so on. 

A more useful metaphor for a lot of this are graphs. The horizontal axis is the time of the story. The vertical axis is 'amplitude' or 'volume' or 'amount'. A line on the graph might be 'sadness'. Another might be 'tension'. Another might be 'conflict'. You decide. As the story unfolds and the amount of that emotion that is 'going on' either in the story or in  yourself as the audience can be charted on the graph. It's amazing to follow the peaks and troughs. Even more amazing to see how these lines cross over: tension goes up as sadness recedes. Humour suddenly appears and then goes. And so on.

This is how 'drivers' (authors) try to structure feelings through a story. Hollywood does this by formula too. That's why we sometimes groan when we feel a good tense story is spoiled with too much sentimentality in the last ten minutes. The drivers have injected what they think is the right amount of that feeling into the feelings structure. 

Using the word 'injection' makes me think of another engine metaphor...or perhaps it's a print machine, Printing machines use colour. Depending on how they've been programmed, colour comes out of them at the moment of printing to give the printed sheet the 'right' colours. 

Perhaps we can use this for our feelings graph. The printer (driver/author) injects emotion/feeling colours into the text, as the story unfolds. 

Once we've identified that this is what's going on, we can ask how? This is less to do with structure and more to do with content and style. It's a matter of how the cogs engage. The cog metaphor is stuck with fast, medium and slow.  As we know, the driver has many more methods at their disposal than speed. Broadly speaking they have the tools of stylistics, motifs, symbolism etc. 

More on that next time. 

One way to talk about language - and research it

 Anyone reading this will have gone to a dictionary at some time another to 'get the meaning' of a word. It's what we do, and it's what dictionaries were invented for: to help us with words. So far so good. But what if this helping function has slipped into the idea that dictionaries aren't just there to help us but to tell us what is the meaning, what should be the meaning and that any other meanings are wrong? No one who puts dictionaries together really thinks this. At least I don't think so. It's just that I see people talking about dictionaries as if that's what they do: tell us what meanings should be. This is to give dictionaries a special power over us. But what is the truth of the matter?

For a start, the meaning of words lies with us. We own language, use language, share it, and we make meanings out of it through the way we use words. Meanings are held in our collective use of language. Further, language is always in use and in context: any word, phrase, sentence or longer chunk of language has the context of who has spoken or written it, who is hearing or reading it; it has the context of its subject matter; it has the context of its 'kind' or 'genre'. These contexts are not outside of language or merely influencing language, they are part of language. Every time we say 'Yes' (or any of the many variations of it) we reveal that we are saying it because of context: it may be an answer to a question, it maybe an exhortation to oneself (Yes!), it maybe part of a song or poem, 'Yes, I remember Adlestrop...', it may be on an ad as part of convincing us that we should buy what's on offer and so on. All this is not just 'in' the word 'Yes' however it is defined. We get 'yes' to work for us in context using the context to give it meaning, using 'yes' to give more meaning to the context. Even the way we say it, 'Yeah', or 'Yay' etc will depend on minute calculations we make about who I am, who am I with, who am I speaking to. We make judgements about appropriateness (or deliberate inappropriateness, (think teenagers)). So the meaning of 'yes' can be found in a dictionary and yet the actual full meanings are 'held' in the place and time of us saying it and with the people hearing it. 

This idea of language embedded in the people using it is a far cry from the way people talk about 'grammar' as directed by the National Curriculum and the like. This matter of social, interpersonal, contextual situation is of virtually no interest. And yet, this is why and how we use language! How absurd: the very reason why we humans have devised language and use language is put out the door while we study language! There's something wrong there.

Now back to 'definitions'. Let's say, we do want to have a go at defining a word. We don't have to leave it to dictionaries and this is a great fun and interesting thing to do with young people. It brings up the question of what do we mean by 'meaning'! What are the ingredients we might need for a definition?

In no particular order:

examples or 'illustrations' giving the occasion and situation for the example. 

what we think of as 'essential' to say about the word, its ingredients, perhaps?

we might ask ourselves are these essential aspects of the meaning, it's 'necessary' conditions or its 'sufficient' conditions or both? So are its essential aspects, pertaining to this object alone, do they 'define' this object and no other? Are these essential aspects enough to define it, or what do we need to add to make it enough? Are we sure that we've included the key thing(s) without which this object would not be defined? 

we might want to consider what type of word it is in its different uses.Words can be used by us in very different ways depending on where, when, with whom, what kind of social or 'genre' context. We might want to include these.

we might want to think of the limits of the word. That is, what it can't do. What situations that are near or related that this word is not useful or appropriate in? Why would that be?

we might want to write a bit about who uses the word and who is unlikely to use the word. Why is that? (This will take us into the area of register, code, slang etc)

we might want to talk about what we know of the history of the word and its uses. Does this history tell us anything important? 

words become classified as slang, colloquial, informal while others are given contextual tags like 'legal' or 'sport'. What tags might we want to attach to this word? These tags are not the same in kind. Some are about perceived layers of usage. Some are more about usage connected to professions or fields of interest. Even so they are interesting areas to discuss. 

dictionaries always use words that mean things that are 'like' the word in question. Roget's Thesaurus can help us do this. The idea of 'lexical field' is interesting here. In any passage of writing or speech, we use words that are to do with that 'field' or that 'subject matter'. They are linked, not identical but they all help each other as we try to make ourselves clear or produce imaginative writing that has different aspects of the same thing. Our definitions might be helped with additions from the 'lexical field'. (Strictly speaking, lexical field is a useful term for analysing texts - ie what words or expressions might we find in this passage that are related in the same lexical field? But the term can be adapted to fit this job too. Perhaps? 

one interesting problem: some words seem not really to have 'meaning' as with, say, 'table' or 'anger' but seem just to do stuff in sentences, words like 'to' or 'the' or even 'am'. And some words have meaning in some sentences and others seem more like the non-meaning words. A word like 'do' is like this. It can have a lot of meaning if I say, 'I did my homework' and not so much when I say, 'Do you watch TV?' 

these non-meaning words are important but very hard to 'define'. They seem to be 'operational' in that they help sentences hang together. But then all words to that to.  On the other hand they don't 'refer' as other words do. So 'table' refers to a thing (or actually several very different things!) but 'to' doesn't seem to refer to anything. It's like mortar between bricks: holding the wall together. You can have fun trying to define these or looking to see how dictionaries try to do it. 

If everyone in a group (a class) chooses a different word to define, and these words come from very different areas of use, then we will have at the end of this a mini-dictionary, a snapshot of attitudes to language from this group of people at this particular time and place. 

Of course, it's great to use dictionaries, Roget's Thesaurus, online dictionaries, to help do this. OED is available online for free through your local library. 

With so-called slang words, it may well be that there are people in the room who know more about its usage than any dictionary. This illustrates very quickly something to do with who 'owns' language, who knows implicitly about who knows about how social life tells us about meaning. 

Alfie Bass and Bernard Bresslaw

Two of the most famous Jewish actors
when I was a boy
were Alfie Bass and Bernard Bresslaw.
Every time they came on TV
my father would talk about them
as if he knew them.
He would nod, and say
'Yiddlech' (little Jewish bloke)
and say how he saw either or both of them
at the Unity Theatre
in 1938.
But then he would tut
as if they had done something terrible.
He was bothered that the two most famous
Jewish actors
in the 1950s
played parts where they were complete
idiots.
Again and again and again.
I was 10
I thought they were funny.
I think I liked to see people who
did sillier things than I did.
I wasn't as much of a nebbish
as they were.
My father was cross about it.
'They're good actors,' he said,
'very good actors,
I saw that Alfie Bass, at the Unity
in 1938.'
'Yes,' Mum said,
'you've said. No need to keep
going on about it.'

Journey into Space (in our flat)

 My brother and I listened to

Journey Into Space

on the wireless.

Each week our heroes went out into space

battled with aliens millions of miles from home.

We were there with them,

out there

facing so many dangers

saving the universe.

We were in close with Lemmy.

Poor old Lemmy

the London lad

who always got the tough stuff to do.

One time he was at the centre

of an asteroid.

Right in the middle of it

but he shouldn’t have been.

He was lost.

And a great echoing voice called out to him,

‘Go back-ack-ack-ack-ack!’

Lemmy, we thought,

get out of there, the aliens will get you.

Go back, Lemmy,

Do as the voice is telling you, Lemmy.

But Lemmy went on.

He didn’t listen,

Lemmy, Lemmy….

Then that episode ended.

And my brother and I went off round the flat

calling out,

‘Lemmy, go back-ack-ack-ack!’

‘Go back-ack-ack-ack-ack!’

We cupped our hands over our mouths

to make the echo:

‘…ack-ack-ack-ack!’

till next week.

Purim - a story of lost foods

My father would look away towards a place
that wasn't with us or near us
and say the names of foods
we had never eaten, never seen.
'Ah,' he'd say, 'my Bubbe made cholent'.
Cholent? What's cholent? We'd say.
'I loved cholent,' he'd say,
this time finding a place outside
to stare at,
out there in the suburb
he hated
as if it was the suburb's fault
that he couldn't have his Bubbe's cholent
as if the suburb had come down
to London's East End
kidnapped him
and brought him to this wicked place
where there was no cholent.
Mum said she wasn't going to stand
by a cooker for 24 hours cooking cholent.
If he wanted cholent
he could cook it himself.
Just because his Bubbe doted on him
didn't mean that she had to be his Bubbe.
'I'm not your Bubbe!' she'd say.
So I never ate cholent
I never saw cholent
I never smelled cholent.
I should say that this was going
to be all about hamantaschen
because it's Purim
and because he said
exactly the same things about
hamantaschen
and we didn't ever see hamantaschen
or eat them either.
He would sit at the table
and make a triangle with his fingers
and talk of poppy seeds
as if they were an exotic fruit
that had by luck and good fortune
landed in front of him and his sister
and poor mother
stuck in a house with
people who didn't love him or them
(apart from his Bubbe and Zeyde
who, it seems, doted on him)
(after all , said his mother's sisters,
talking of my father's mother:
she's the woman
who thought
she was so clever
such a knakke
getting with that political feller
from Poland,
thinking they were too good for us,
going to America
but it didn't last, did it?
She's back here
he's stayed there
and the five of them squashing into this tiny place
and the baby dying, please god
that such a thing should happen
So she's the knakke
and she's off to political meetings
all hours bringing back
such people as can't stop talking
who've never worn a decent suit
in their lives, such shlumps
see them wolfing down our mother's
soup...)
Ah, my father would say,
the cholent,
ah, the hamantaschen,
you know, if there was one festival
we should keep
it's Purim
but...
he looked out the window again,
not here.
Not here.
So we didn't have
hamantaschen. 

Reading for Pleasure - how does it work its magic?

I have written and spoken a great deal about Reading for Pleasure, most of which I've put in my booklet, called (handily) 'Reading for Pleasure'. In it there is a 20-point plan to put a Reading for Pleasure programme into place in schools, adapted by  teacher Ian Eagleton into an action plan. Of course I'm far from being the only person who is or has been talking about this and I've put a list of resources in the back. People will know, for example, I hope of Teresa Cremin's work at the Open University, or the work of Booktrust, the National Literacy Trust, the Reading Association, CLPE, English and Media Centre,  the former NUT (now NEU)  and many other individuals and organisations.

To recap:

Why Reading for Pleasure? - Because by every measurable method, we know that children who read widely and often do better at school, find school easier, will access more education than children who do not. One classic piece of research is 'Family scholarly culture and educational success: books and schooling in 27 nations' by M.D.R Evans et al (available through ScienceDirect).

How does Reading for Pleasure produce this seemingly magic effect without direct instruction?

To answer that question we have to look at the process of reading and how children and young people respond. I've produced a check list for teachers to discuss, adapt, argue with in whatever ways they choose.

Not in any particular order:

Reading for pleasure

creates a space for readers to interpret what's going on, figure out why characters are doing what they do, what their emotions might be, what might happen next, whether characters are behaving as we might predict they will (or not), whether people deserve what they get, what we, the readers know about in a way that is more than the characters know or understand ('dramatic irony'), how pictures do or don't relate to the written text...and much more. I believe that all reading involves us in trying to figure out things as we read and that this helps us figure out things in real life;

enables readers to experience empathy through what Philip Pullman has described as the process by which readers go through a book with characters 'holding the hand of the reader'.  Readers see what characters go through and become concerned on behalf of the characters. From the safety of being the reader we can experience something of danger, fear ('jeopardy', as film-makers call it) along with eg hope, sadness, disappointment, envy, anger, love etc etc.

enables readers to experience the mix of ideas with feelings . In education we are able to separate ideas and feelings (eg history or science might be largely about ideas but talking 'on the carpet' in primary schools might be about feelings. Fiction, poetry and drama unite these two aspects of thought so that we are drawn into a world of debate about things such as what's right and wrong but with our whole minds and bodies engaged. This is 'holistic' and has value if we want education to be ethical and moral as well as about knowledge, and the transmission of culture(s);

enables readers to make the leap from the 'oral' (conversations etc) to the written code of standard English. Most books are almost entirely written in forms of standard English. We think that enabling children to learn standard English is one of the functions or aims of education. One way for children to grab or get standard English is through 'immersion'. Books are immersive, if we read for pleasure. We are dragged through the book, being 'taught' the code of standard English as we read. If we ask children to imitate how books are written, if they read widely and often, the easier they find it. Standard English is not just a matter of 'vocabulary'. Vocabulary is part of standard English. Just as important are the structure of sentences, paragraphs, chapters: how we stick these together through almost 'invisible' means - grammar, syntax, cohesion, sequencing, structure. Reading widely and often helps us learn how to do these; 

stories and a lot of non-fiction have plots, the sequence of events and happenings that we follow. These have taken 1000s of years to develop and reading widely and often immerses us in this crucial part of culture. Think of one: the whodunnit. This kind of story in film, TV and books is part of how we view the world: who did that thing that matters- whether that's a crime, or a great contribution? Many books even for the youngest child are in effect a form of detection. They uncover slowly who might or might not be responsible for what happens. This is a powerful form of education in cause and effect, or even why or how getting cause and effect wrong is important. There are many other structures or 'genres' in stories and reading widely and often helps us learn how these work, how we can recognise what's going on as with such types as 'rags to riches', 'the lost messiah who returns', the 'lone desperado who gets revenge', the 'enabler who brings about co-operation and harmony' etc etc; 

through plot, interpretation, ideas-married-to-feelings we learn 'wisdom'. This includes 'knowledge' but wisdom is knowing how to use knowledge, or 'applied knowledge' if you like. Wisdom enables us to behave ethically, appropriately, with understanding. Most books that children read will help them acquire wisdom through watching how the characters behave, whether that's well or badly or horribly. Think 'Macbeth' where we watch someone behaving horribly and yet we learn wisdom from it. But also we can watch characters acquiring wisdom through what they have or haven't done, how they've applied what they know - or not or should have done. So books can show us directly how to think or behave, or they can do it by showing us how not to...or many variations in between;

books are full of 'devices'  that we learn as we read. If we don't read, we find it hard to get them or use them in life. By devices I mean such things as 'rhetoric', figurative language (metaphor, simile, personification), stylistic devices such as 'reveal-conceal' (where a text tells us something at the same time as suggesting there's more to come or more to figure out - mystery or vagueness as a device), changes in register between eg 'posh' and not-posh, between formal and informal, between one region and another; changes in method between eg description of setting, characters' minds, dialogue; time-shifts (flashbacks, flash-forwards etc); contrasts between settings, characters, scenes; patterns of similarity between settings, characters and scenes...and so on. We learn these networks through reading widely ad often. They are part of how books enable us to interpret;

books are full  of symbolism and representation. Take 'The Gruffalo'. At one level it is of course about a mouse meeting a big scary beast. At another level it is symbolic of a little 'me' meeting a scary 'other'. This enables the reader to be 'contained' in the story, our emotions are held safely by the 'figures' (the symbolic representation of 'big scary thing') . This idea that books have a dual meaning is a powerful part of how we get to understand the world: through symbolic thought. One thing that we hear or see represents another thing or many things at the same time. A cake might represent one day, 'desire', another day 'home', another day 'my ability to make things'. We move constantly between this way of thinking through 'association' and symbolic thought. If we read widely and often, we come across more and more examples of this and become more and more able to handle this kind of thinking;

books are full of possibility and change. In most fiction and non-fiction, characters and things change. We see that there is the possibility for the material world (the environment) to change and for us to change. This is a powerful and necessary corrective to the idea that we are stuck or that the world must be the way it is. Books take us into the way characters engage with the world. Sometimes as the characters change, so does the world; sometimes the characters change because the world changes; sometimes characters  change in response to how other characters change etc. There is a 'dynamic' situation. It's as if stories are full of cogs that can engage with each other like gears, affect each other, and then separate or come together again. Through these meetings or engagements, stuff happens - conflicts, love, anger, revenge, good luck etc. These are all possibilities for change which we can relate to in real life and ask ourselves questions like: would I do that, could I do that, should I do that, what if I was that person would I know what to do etc etc? 

as we read we make comparisons: we say to ourselves things like, 'Am I like that character?', 'Would I do things like that?', 'If I was in that situation, would I do that?' The moment we make comparisons we are on the first leg of abstract thought. We are finding commonality between feelings - the fear in the character and 'my' fear and so on. This is the first step to thinking about these abstract ideas such as fear, anger, envy etc. 

as we read we are initiated into the 'sea of texts' or intertextuality. One story is an 'echo' of another. Likewise a scene or a character. That's why we talk of archetypes. The more we read, the easier it gets to 'decode' or 'get' these echoes, archetypes and 'motifs'. 

all stories, poems, plays, scripts etc have a music in the phrasing, called prosody. We can find this in the alliteration, the assonance, the rhythms, the rhymes and repetitions,  and even in the way in which long phrases or sentences contrast with short ones. Prosody 'affects' us in mysterious and interesting ways. It's very attractive because it often feels more musical that the sound we can reproduce in our own speech. It feels special or 'heightened'. Reading widely and often initiates us into the ways of this strange use of language. Incidentally, it's used by advertising all the time.

stories - and most texts - have a pattern of pictures or imagery.  It's not always immediately obvious until you start looking for it. You start to see that characters, feelings or places are given a 'unity' through the use of the imagery used to describe them. This may be using figurative language - the metaphors used to describe a character, say. Or it may be through the lexical field: the cluster of words both literal and figurative that are attached to that place, person or feeling. Part of reading widely and often is to learn that this is part of the technique used to get us to feel character, situation and place in literature. Put another way it's part of how a writer gets us there - meaning gets us to feel what that character, place or feeling is like. 

You will be able to think of plenty of other things that reading widely and often for pleasure can do for readers. Please feel free to add. Please also feel free to fill out what I've said here with hundreds of examples from books - fiction and non-fiction to illustrate what I'm saying here, or indeed to argue against it! This is all part of how we make reading 'active'. 

In the booklet, 'Reading for Pleasure' and the booklet 'Poetry and Stories for Primary and Lower Secondary Schools' I've laid out how we can encourage children to be even more 'active' readers. The teacher James Durrant has adapted these into a matrix for teachers to use. 

There is a lot of talk in the air about how to help children 'catch up' because of the pandemic. Helping children to read widely and often for pleasure will help them find many of the positive  things that I've outlined above. This is a kind of education in a holistic way. Please feel free to make a poster of the following:

A child

A book

A read

A chat.

This is the way 

the mind grows.

Not with a test

but a tale.

Fear no more the heat o' Shakespeare...

My dad used to say parts of this poem/song from Shakespeare. It comes from the play 'Cymbeline' as sung to someone the singers think is dead. As with a lot of Shakespeare it seems to slip into a rather posh-sounding place full of high-sounding cliche until you look at it closely.


Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.


Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.


Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.


No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!


Let's ask of it, why 'wages', 'lads', 'chimney-sweepers'? Why is it the 'tyrant's stroke' that we are 'past'? Or the 'frown of the great'? Why did we 'care' about having to get clothes and things to eat? Why should we take comfort that the 'sceptre', 'learning' and 'physic' will 'come to dust'?


Is there, then a meaning going on in the song about class? And oppression? That death will relieve us of the 'fear' of poverty, hunger and tyranny? Think of writing as being 'to' someone or 'for' someone - at least two 'audiences' here - the audience within the narrative, and the audience 'at home' or in the theatre. It's hardly directed at someone who is rich or is in the ruling elite. Why would Shakespeare write this?

I've just seen a film of me in intensive care...

I’ve just watched a film of me

in intensive care.

I look dead.

My skin is grey,

My hair is limp

My eyes stare at nothing.

Then a doctor comes to me

And asks me something.

I answer.

My eyes look frightened.



I have no memory of this conversation.

It’s gone.



The camera has kept it.



I look at me.

Such a dry face.

Hospital gown.

Tubes.

I can see my father’s last days there.

A letter to my father's cousin (long gone). What did you know?

 Dear Ted

You are long gone now.

I came to see you in Manchester

Connecticut

when you were 90

and I was 50.

I asked you about your uncles in France.

What happened to them?

You didn’t know any more than

what my father (your cousin) told me:

Their names, their work

that they were in France at the beginning 

of the war

Not there at the end.

Nothing else. Nothing more, you said.

 

Your sister came over

and we talked.

She said how she used to write to the French uncles 

when she was a girl. 

But she didn’t have the letters.

She remembered the name of a road.

But that was all. 

 

I came to see you when you were a 100

and I was 60.

We talked.

This time you told me that my father

(your cousin)

had a half-brother,

You knew my father’s father

but my father didn’t know him.

Yes, you said, my father’s father

had an ‘illegitimate child’. 

But the French uncles? 

Nothing. 

 

Then your ex-wife’s brother died.

Amongst his papers were four letters.

They had been sent to your father.

They must have passed from your father

to you,  to your ex-wife, to her brother. 

 

Did you not remember these letters, Ted?

Two of them told of the plight of your uncles

In France. My father’s and your uncles.

Two of them told of the plight of your aunts

(my father’s aunts)

And your cousin 

(my father’s cousin)

In Poland.

Did you not remember those letters, Ted?

 

I found out that your French uncles

and aunts

were deported to Auschwitz

and never came back.

One Polish cousin (my father’s cousin)

survived.

As I write this, he’s 97

in a Jewish Care Home

just down the road from here

in North London.

I visited him.

He mixed English with Polish

with Yiddish. 

He thought he was in trouble.

And he thought that someone

had taken his things. 

He lives in his own little world

his son told me the other day.

 

Then you and your wife Gladys died.

Your son, went into the room where

you and I talked about these things.

The room where you said that 

you knew nothing more.

There was a locked closet

He opened it.

Inside was a sealed box,

Marked ‘family photos’.

He opened it.

Inside were black and white photos

going back to a time before the First World War.

Pictures of the French uncles

Pictures of the Polish aunts

and your cousin. 

On the backs there were messages

to your father.

Pictures of your French uncles’ wives.

One of the French uncles was in uniform

On the back it showed that he was

in a German regiment.

I remembered you or my father

telling the story of how the two uncles

fought on opposite sides in the First World War.

They could have killed each other.

Then,

later I found out that one of them

was the best man at the other’s wedding.

All this.

 

You couldn’t tell me or your son

about the photos.

Even as we sat a few feet away from them

you couldn’t open the closet and get them out.

 

But you didn’t destroy them. 

You left them there for us to find. 

 

Why did you do  these things, Ted?

Why couldn’t you tell us they were there?

 

And one more thing:

I found out that your sister

tried to get one of the French uncles

out of France and get him to the US.

Why didn’t she tell me this?

Perhaps you knew about this.

If so, why didn’t you tell me?

 

 

 

Where does language come from? Where does my language come from?

 The short answer to that question is that no one knows. What the text books say is that it 'evolved' as humans evolved. Let's park that for the moment then and twist the question round: where did (or does) my language come from?

Part of the answer to that question is that it came from everybody. If you look at the words and phrases and sentences that I've just written here, one way to look at them is to say that they all have a history. There is a whole field of study that can tell us how each of these words as evolved since versions of them first appeared in writing. Same goes for the punctuation, the spelling and also ideas about writing in sentences, paragraphs and writing in this 'genre' of non-fiction, a kind of 'essay' about a subject - which is what I'm doing right now. These all have histories, so they are in a way answers to the question, 'where did my language come from? If you like the idea that words have histories, the quickest and easiest way to find out about this part of the story is to get a local library ticket, then go to the internet, find your local area's libraries section, navigate to where they offer 'online research' or some such, then go to 'Oxford' guides (or some such) and you'll find the 'Oxford English Dictionary'. You put in your library card number and you now have free access to one of the most remarkable 'books' in the world: a history of words in English - with examples. Each word is an essay in itself!

It won't tell you where the other ideas are that I mentioned: sentences, paragraphs, the genre of the 'essay'. Those stories are harder to find. 

But there's another route to answering that question, 'where does my language come from?' Research your own history. 

Think of yourself as a baby. You arrive in the world. You have no language. In the womb, you heard sounds (assuming you have your hearing apparatus). The moment you arrive though, you are surrounded with language, people are talking, singing, humming making noises for you and at you. There's also talk about you. This is all in a context: touch, taste, sight, hearing a whole landscape of sounds. In other words (!), language is connected to what people are doing - for you, with you, about you. All the words, phrases, sentences are part of eg looking after you, feeding you, hugging you, helping you go to sleep, keeping you dry and clean and so on. Language is not some kind of isolated channel separate from life. It is in and amongst life, helping life happen, helping explore the world, helping us do things, think things. It can't really be extracted from these contexts eve though there is a whole school of 'grammar' that tries to do just that! 

The scenario I've just painted is to set up a project. Think of yourself for a moment as being the centre of the universe. Put a small version of yourself in the middle of a page - this could be picture of you, or a diagram or even just a circle with  your name in it, or just the word 'me', if you like. Now draw lines out and way  from 'you'. These lines connect with the people in your life - whoever they are - who you think might have influenced the way you speak, sing, or write. I'm going to guess that these lines will connect with such people or places as your parents,  your grandparents, school, TV, internet, cinema, shops..and other places that are special to  you: perhaps a very important holiday (I would do that one!).

So your lines go out to all these different people, but now we need examples of language. In a box next to or under each of these people and places, put in an example of the language that you use that come from or 'derives from' these people and places. It may be a word, or a phrase, a sentence, or a line from a song. 

Now a problem: the more you think about this, you may find you start thinking of more and more examples. What to do: first of all stick with the best and most interesting examples for this first page of the language map. Perhaps one example for each person or place.

When you've filled it in, you will have a kind of graphic list poem that tells the story of the influences on the way you speak ad write. Maybe you have between about 10 or 20 examples there. Treasure these!

But now, you can take it on further. You could create a page for each of the people and places you chose. Over the next few weeks, you could fill in more and more examples of words, phrases and sentences for each person or place. You will now have lists for each one. Again, a kind of poem about each person or place derived from what those people say or what they wrote or what was written in the place that you think affected you. 

You will now have your own language map (that was the first page) and your own language book (that was the pages for each person and place). 

What is this? There are two words for this: idiolect and sociolect. Your idiolect is what you think is personal to you about the way you speak. Your sociolect is where and how you fit in with a group or groups. In my case, I say some things that are very much down to the things that my brother, mum and dad spoke, like the way my dad used to say, 'The  noise!' if he wanted us to be quiet. But there are also, for example, words and phrases that came from a language my mother and father spoke, Yiddish. That's part of a shared language of millions of people. Same goes for English as well, of course, but my accent belongs to a particular region and social class of person. You can see that idiolect and sociolect overlap. You can see this working its way through your language map and language book. 

Anyway, that's the theory. The real fun of this bit of exploration is doing it. You start to discover all sorts of things about yourself, your parents, your siblings, where you come from and of course plenty about language and languages. 

You can also explore further back: stories about the history of languages, the origin of proverbs, phrases, slang that people use in your family. There are books on the history of such things. 

The other area you can get into is names. After all, how we name things is a crucial part of language. There is a way of thinking that says in a way, all language is a kind of naming. This essay is about naming how we find out about the language(s) we use. All the words i this essay are in a way, names. Or is that a wrong 'model' to describe language? 

Anyway, the subject of names, I'll leave to the next post, but just flagging up here, if you want to include names in this language map and language book, why not?!

What is 'standard English'? How should we teach it?

 Standard English is a way of writing. We do it for a range of purposes. There are many ways of writing standard English. There are many themes, 'genres' for which Standard English is suitable. There are many 'genres' for which Standard English is not suitable. We do not speak with Standard English except when we read out loud pre-written scripts. 

Standard English is, as it suggests, a way of 'standardising' English. By that definition alone, it indicates that there are many other ways of using language: virtually the whole of our spoken 'performance' (in conversation, mostly) and many kinds of writing: eg signs, ads, slogans, TV scripts, film scripts, song lyrics, some poetry, drama, social media. 

The people who  devise and teach Standard English are perfectly entitled to devise 'rules' for Standard English. It is a form with a purpose (or purposes) of its own, so they can and do say what is right for that form. However, these are not 'rules' for all uses of English - far from it. 

Where do we find Standard English? In all forms of administration - laws, reports, instructions and the like; in all forms of academic writing, text books and most books of non-fiction; in most - but not all - forms of written speeches eg politicians, written scripts for News and radio and TV presenting. Newspaper and magazine articles are mostly written in Standard English but by no means all: headlines, sub-heads, captions are frequently not and quite often there are passages full of slang, and the ads are not always in Standard English. Most narrations in most books of fiction are written in Standard English. Much of the dialogue tends to be written in SE too, but not all of it. A good deal of characters' thought is not written in SE. 

There is a consensus that schools are places where Standard English should be taught. 

How is this best done? One theory is that we teach it through teaching what I call DfE 'grammar'. I call it that because it's a 'grammar' that is specially devised, simplified and distributed as part of Education policy. DfE 'grammar' is taught in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. It's not taught at Key Stage 3 or 4. It crops up in English Literature and Language lessons at Key Stage 5. I've never seen any rationale for this other than that teaching 'grammar' at Key Stages 1 and 2 enables government to assess teachers (Bew Report 2011). I've never seen any rationale for it to be not taught at Key Stages 3 or 4. 

Most KS3 students learn a foreign language. Most of these will encounter versions of 'grammar' as they do. Some of this corresponds to DfE 'grammar'. Some of it does not. For example, French has a 'future tense'. English does not. In English, we create a sense of the future through using 'auxiliaries', adverbs, adverbial phrases, adverbial clauses and adjectives or other contextual clues. The grammar of the future involves all these contexts. It's not a tense. 

Other ways to learn the grammar of Standard English is through immersion, imitation and invention within the idiom of Standard English. The easiest way to do immersion is through reading for pleasure. Most writing (not all) in children's books is in Standard English. Imitation is a way of writing 'in the style of' the writing. It's one of the most effective ways of getting to know and to use the language and structures of a kind of writing - in this case, done with mostly Standard English. Invention is done by adapting and changing from within the forms and language of a kind of writing: taking eg a fairy tale and changing the setting, the time-frame or the nature of the characters (eg from male to female). 

We can also do explicit observing of Standard English. One way to do this is through comparison. We can look at, for example, ways in which authors begin stories, ways in which authors convince us that we are 'there' in a scene (most often through a mix of dialogue and descriptions of what can be seen, heard, touched, felt or tasted); ways in which writers tell us 'when' or 'where' we are; ways in which writers invite us to wonder about what might or might not happen next. We can experiment with these ourselves. (These are in a sense the 'grammar' of writing, at a level to do with the 'effect' of writing ie how we are 'affected' by it without going into the DfE 'grammar' as an explanation for these. At the same time, we are immersing the children in uses of Standard English.)

We can also do transcripts of spoken language and compare them to written Standard English. It amazes me that this 'tool' isn't used more. Most spoken language is conversation. In conversations we hesitate, repeat, talk over each other, revise what we just said. We construct the language in different ways. We avoid long linked utterances. We avoid 'front-loading' our utterances with too much stuff before we get to the meat of what it is we want to say (in DfE 'grammar' terms, we avoid putting too many phrases, clauses and adverbs before we get to the 'main clause'. ) We prefer to put them later. We use a lot more pronouns and words like 'here' or 'there', 'this/that/these' because the context indicates who or what we are referring to. We use a lot of short replies that self-explanatory for the situation: 'yes/no', 'tomorrow/today/yesterday' and a general way of again and again picking up on single words from what has just been said to us - either as answers to questions, or to move the conversation on. We do this without using Standard English, particularly in fiction, say when we are writing about the inner thoughts of a character. 

One of the best ways to draw attention to what Standard English is, is to take a passage of Standard English and put it alongside a transcript of a conversation. We can then ask ourselves (or students) to spot the differences. Why are there differences? What is the purpose of each in their own separate ways? We can also put into the mix 'textspeak' taken from personal texts, or social media. What kind of language is this? How is this different from the Standard English of, say, an exam paper, or a text book? Why?

I suggest that these methods are rigorous, attentive to language, attentive to the purpose and contexts of language and effects of language, embedded in the use and variation in language. Depending on the age of pupil, teachers can judge how much explicit naming is needed or advisable.