To Fashion a Text & Language Choice

To Fashion a Text

"It's about waking up. A child wakes up over and over again, and notices that she's living. She dreams along, loving the exuberant life of the senses, in love with beauty and power, oblivious of herself - and then suddenly, bingo, she wakes up and feels herself alive. She notices her own awareness. And she notices that she is set down here, mysteriously, in a going world. The world is full of fascinating information that she can collect and enjoy. And the world is public; its issues are moral and historical ones."

I appreciated this paragraph far more than any of the other stories we have read thus far because of its flow and use of imagery. It also incorporates elements of meta-cognition which I enjoy reading because of how philosophical it is. Already it sets an adventurous and optimistic tone which, even as a brief (and somewhat vague) synopsis, captures the essence of what the story is about. Rewritten, this paragraph would make for a good introduction to an essay/story.


"The interior life is in constant vertical motion; consciousness runs up and down the scales every hour like a slide trombone. It dreams down below; it notices up above; and it notices itself, too, and its own alertness. The vertical motion of consciousness, from inside to outside and back, interests me. I've written about it once before, in an essay about a solar eclipse, and I wanted to do more with it."

This paragraph is about the most third-person omniscient it gets in literature. I appreciate the weaving of philosophical conceptions with imagery. It gets ideas across in a picturesque way which I find thoroughly interesting, mostly because many pieces fail to do so. As a reader, I find this paragraph very clear although it tackles a tough topic for explanation. I hope to do the same with my writing as it improves in the years to come.

"I put in what it was that had me so excited all the time - the sensation of time pelting me as if I were standing under a waterfall. I loved the power of the life in which I found myself. I loved to feel its many things in all their force. I put in what it feels like to play with the skin on your mother's knuckles. I put in what it feels like to throw a baseball - you aim your whole body at the target and watch the ball fly off as if it were your own head. I put in drawing pencil studies of my baseball mitt and collecting insects and fooling around with a microscope"

This author is in love with literature in a far more literal sense than any of the previous texts we have read thus far. What she is basically conveying in this paragraph is that imagery is of utmost important to her as a writer. Although I have always been taught to try to incorporate all of my senses into writing, Annie Dillard seems to me primarily influenced by touch. Furthermore, this paragraph serves as contextual evidence that Dillard writes in her own voice because it illustrates how her thought process plays into the piece she mentioned earlier, "An American Childhood"
 

Language Choice

 "In fact, I’m okay with people mispronouncing my name and calling me whatever they would like to call me, based on what they think "Young Jin Park"sounds like. I’ve realized that demanding the proper pronunciation only makes people forget how to pronounce my name every week and thus forget who I am. My name, in all its bastardized variations, gives me individuality."

I’m exactly the same way. I’ve heard so many variations of my name that two people incorrectly saying my name may think they are talking about two different people! The last two lines of this text sparked my interest because even though my name is pretty common in Israel, it is very unique here, especially given the difference in pronunciation. This piece made me think of how languages filter our certain sounds that are unknown to them, replacing them with friendlier ones. Many Americans can’t roll their r’s or pronounce the ‘khh’ sound present in middle eastern languages. Likewise, Americans and British folk seem to speak English more "smoothly" and without so much emphasis than the rest of the world that can’t break their accents.


"Every English word I write, I hear, I speak, transforms into a Korean word and is visualized in my mind, sometimes resulting in bilingual sentences like the one above. Just as Rodriguez distinguished "private" and "public" language, to me, Korean was my private language and English was my public language, and I often return to the comforts of the former when English words fail me. "

Language is such an interesting thing because there are so many variations that even though they are all massive they can’t always define or express the same things in a completely clear fashion. What’s the expression for ‘bon appetit’ in English? In Hebrew its ‘be te-ha-von.’ Being bilingual is also very fascinating because you can think in more than one way while using the same lobe of your brain! The two sides of the brain think differently in that one is very logical while the other utilizes an intuitive process. The left brain processes from part to whole while the right brain reverse-engineers. Lastly, I completely relate to this notion of exterior and interior languages. Up until the age of five, I didn’t speak English though I was born and raised in New York. Now Hebrew has become my familial language as English takes precedent due to location. I find this reversing however when I visit Israel.