Telling It Like It Is: Talking Metaphor in FYW

mimmoore
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G346524_sheaser.jpguest Blogger: sara heaser  is a Lecturer of English at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, where she specializes in basic/co-requisite and first-year writing curriculum, pedagogy, and program development. She is an alum of the Dartmouth Summer Seminar for Studies in Composition Research and is currently in the midst of a qualitative study to explore first-year writing as a space for retention. She can be reached at sheaser@uwlax.edu.

I have a four-year-old son who understands the world in basic binaries: good vs evil, happy vs sad, big vs small, and such. So when he asks his big questionslots and lots of themabout really abstract things, I resort to the most simple, applicable analogy I can think of.

Here’s an example. We were reading a book about the human body and he asked about the “weird-looking lines” (veins) inside us. We live in the Midwest on the Mississippi River, so I said that those lines were like little rivers of blood, and that the blood rivers have barges on them, and the barges carry things he needs around his body to where his body needs them. There’s obviously not microscopic chunks of bananas and fruit snacks floating from his stomach to his toes via his veins, but it’s a close enough explanation to appease his curiosity and to reach a level of understanding that he gets, for now.

This is a hard part of parenting, negotiating mutual understanding of an unfamiliar concept. The same goes for teaching. As teachers, we collectively live in the same world as our students, sometimes quite literally in the same communities. But this doesn’t mean we share or value common experiences. This is especially true when it comes to writing.

The students in my FYW courses are well beyond understanding the world dualistically like my son does, but when it comes to writing, I see them rely on old tropes. I often find their understanding of writing and its processes is limited to playing it safethey rely on archaic rules that someone told them to follow somewhere along the way in their writing education. And as we know, FYW can sometimes be a student’s first foray into writing for purposes and audiences instead of writing to follow rules--a very unfamiliar concept, indeed.

Rules are inflexible; metaphors are interpretative. Introducing metaphors in FYW that imply writing is flexible, unsteady, confusing, messy, frustrating, and such might suggest not only a difference in kind but a difference in understanding of what writing is, as a verb. Some I rely on often:

  • A wacky genius effortlessly producing prose is a mythological trope seen in fictional films.
  • Writing is like cooking. Gather the ingredients as you prepare, adjust them as needed to your purpose and audience. (And this one reminds me of my own role: I’m not the one cooking. The students are. So back off.)
  • Engaging in research is like having a conversation. Sometimes you might not know what the conversation is about, and that’s ok. Just listen for a while.
  • Learning to write well is like learning a sport. It requires repetitive, deliberate practice. Just like you might stretch or lift weights to train for a big race, you might practice combining sentences to train for revising a big draft.

 

The five-paragraph essay, sad and useless, is a particularly fun target on which to apply metaphor. Even entire rhetorics for FYW invoke metaphor, like Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, which uses “hosts” (the authors) that guide students through a journey of learning about writing.

I don’t have extensive data on student response to metaphor or the effectiveness of metaphorical language in composition pedagogy, but I have a teacherly sense that the use of metaphor in FYW plays a special role beyond just explaining what writing is and can be.

If shared language is a symbol of intimacy, metaphor is essentially the foundation on which we can build a sense of community. (A metaphor to explain a metaphor—I couldn’t resist.) When I overhear students drop our metaphors in conversations or read them in a reflective essay, I can literally see and hear metaphor functioning to humanize writing and to establish a relationship between writer and audience, between student and teacher, and between the most important relationship of them all, between the novice writer and writing itself.  

What metaphors do you use to talk about writing with your students?

2 Comments
pemerson
Migrated Account

I don't just "like" this post—I love it.  One of the best professors I had during my Masters program, and continue to hear his "voice in my head" obviously because I'm mentioning him here after reading your insights, had us write a metaphor to describe our teaching at the beginning of the semester.  What was terrific, and a real model of how we should be with our students, is that, as we read more, researched more, discussed more, we revisited our metaphors to either extend them, seeing added efficacy, or abandon them for one that had more possibility.   I love that you begin with the "veins as rivers" for your son and proceed from there.  There is such richness in thinking about anything metaphorically.  I once heard Billy Collins quip that poetry would never die until everything had been compared to everything else.  You offer your FYW class members a valuable experience and a playful one, too.

The "argument as conversation" is one that I read somewhere, maybe Graff & Birkenstein, comparing late arrival to a party, listening to get the gist of what people are talking about, and then engaging, after being familiar with what others are saying.  That's been a truly successful one for me and lends itself to extension as we discuss how we respond civilly when someone expresses a view counter to ours, tone, posture...

Thanks, again.

ekstew
Migrated Account

I teach writing at a community college and I use a metaphor I learned in Grad school that set bells and whistles on for me back then. A THESIS STATEMENT is like a road map. It tells the reader where you are going to take them. I have added to that that you need to put your supports right in the thesis statement - think of them as land marks along the road for your reader. I have also used old student essays to show students how no road map leads to no conclusion; that is if you don't have a good thesis statement it's harder to come full circle to a good conclusion.

Kate Stewart

Adjunct Professor of English

Mass Bay Community College

Framingham, MA