Jane Lucas

This morning’s blog post features “A Bridge to Words,” my model literacy narrative that you read and annotated for today’s class. After the Scrabble debriefing and our study of “A Bridge to Words,” I will lead you step by step through the process of posting your literacy narrative to Blackboard and WordPress. Tomorrow’s post entry will include step-by-step directions with screenshots.

The image above meets the guidelines for the picture you are required to include in your blog post: one that documents part of your writing process away from the screen. That image may include notes in your journal or lines of your handwritten draft. The image should not include your laptop, tablet, or phone.

In the picture, a page of my draft serves as the background for a collage with a photocopied illustration of Rebecca, the title character of Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” and lines of the poem in the foreground. (Note that using a fragment of the illustration for educational purposes constitutes fair use.) The image could simply be the lines of my draft, but I wanted to include Rebecca as well since her poem figures prominently in my narrative.

A Bridge to Words

To a small child, the pages of a newspaper are enormous. Looking far back through the years, I see myself, not yet school age, trying to hold up those long, thin sheets of newsprint, only to find myself draped in them, as if covered by a shroud. Of course, back then, my inability to hold a newspaper properly was of little consequence. Even if I could have turned the pages as gracefully as my parents did, I couldn’t decipher the black marks on the page; thus, my family’s ritual reading of the newspaper separated them from me. As the youngest and the only one who couldn’t read, I was left alone on the perimeter to observe. My family’s world of written words was impenetrable; I could only look over their shoulders and try to imagine the places where all those black marks on the page had carried them—these people, my kin, who had clearly forgotten that I was in the room.

My sister, who was three years older, had her very own news source: The Mini Page, a four-page miniature paper that arrived at our house as an insert in the Sunday edition. While our parents sat in their easy chairs poring over the state and local news, my sister, Jo, perched at the drop-front desk and occupied herself with articles, puzzles, and connect-the-dots.

Finally, one Sunday, someone noticed me on the margin and led me into our family’s reading circle. Whether it was one of my parents or my sister, I don’t know. I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny pages, too. You can read Henry.”

I took the giant page and laid it flat in the middle of the oval, braided rug on the floor of the den. Once I situated the page, I lay on top of it with my eyes just inches above the panels of the comic strip. To my parents, my prone position was a source of amusement, but for me it was simply a practical solution. How else was someone so small supposed to manage such a large piece of paper?

As I lay on the floor and looked at the comic strip’s panels, I realized what the voice had meant. I could “read” Henry, the comic with the bald boy in a red shirt, because it consisted entirely of pictures. In between panels of Henry walking, there were panels of him standing still, scratching his hairless head. I didn’t find Henry funny at all. I wondered how that pale forerunner of Charlie Brown had earned a prime spot in the funnies. Still, I was glad he was there. He was the bridge that led me to the written word.

Reading the wordless comic strip Henry for the first time was the beginning of a years-long habit of stretching out on the floor with newspapers and large books—not thick ones but ones that were tall and wide, among them one of my childhood favorites: The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense. My sister and I spent hours lying on our bedroom floor, the pink shag carpet tickling our legs as we delighted in the antics of Rebecca, the mischievous title character of one of the poems.

“Rebecca”—which my sister read to me before I could read it myself—introduced me to the word abhors, the very sound of which appealed to me. Sometimes before Jo had finished reading the opening lines, my uncontrollable giggles collided with her perfect mock-serious delivery. As the last word in the first line, abhors serves as a lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break. It would be years before I learned the term “enjambment,” but I was immediately swept away by its effect in the opening lines: “A trick that everyone abhors/ In Little Girls is Slamming Doors” (Belloc 61). The first line lured me into the second one, and so on and so on. I was drawn both to the individual word abhors—with its side-by-side b and h, rare in English—and the way the words joined, like links in a chain, to yank me giggling through Rebecca’s cautionary tale:

It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.

Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the dreadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun. (61)

Why these particular early memories visit me now, I don’t know. Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has roused the wordless Henry and the word-filled Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense from the corner of my brain where they’ve slumbered. The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since.

Work Cited

Belloc, Hilaire. “Rebecca.” The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense, edited by Louis Untermeyer, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provenson, Golden Press, 1970, p. 61.

Scrabble Debriefing, continued

Today’s Scrabble debriefing continues with a study of some of the plays in the games pictured below. Answers to the questions that I pose about those plays are included near the end of the post.

Assessing S

On the board pictured below, the first team opened the game with the play of dims for fourteen points. Even though the s increases the score, playing it there on the first turn may not have been advisable. Why?

You Can’t Do That

In the game below, a team played the verb cant: to tilt or slant. Despite the word’s playability, the group lost five points because of the presentation of the word on the score sheet. What lost the group five points?

When You Draw a Blank (or Two)

On the board pictured below, a team played l after the e in gore, to form el (an elevated train and the two-letter spelling of the letter l), and below the l used blanks for g and e, along with o, u, n, and s to play lounges. Although the other two u‘s on the board (in juts and aqua) had not been played, you may still question the decision to use both blanks and one of the u‘s in a single turn. Why was el and lounges a well-advised play?

Answers

• Assessing S: Adding s to dims increases the score by only two points. In the team’s second play or another later play, they could likely raise their score by more than two points by using the s to form two or more words through parallel and/or perpendicular play. Keep in mind that the first play of the game is the only one in which you don’t have the opportunity to form more than one word. If playing an s enables you to form a five-letter word with a consonant–especially a high value one–that opportunity would warrant using an s in the first play. For example, if a team had the letters to spell dimes in the first play, playing the d on the double-letter square would increase the score from fourteen to twenty. Even better, if a team had the letters to spell zones in the first play, playing the z on the double-letter square would increase the score from twenty-six to forty-eight.
• You Can’t Do That: Although cant is playable, the team that played it lost points because the scorekeeper recorded the word can’t, the contraction of cannot, on the assignment sheet. Words with apostrophes are not playable in Scrabble, and recording one on the score sheet and subsequently assigning it a point value it cannot have results in a penalty.
• When You Draw a Blank (or Two): At first glance, playing both blanks and one of the u‘s in a single turn might seem like a bad idea; however, by playing the two blanks (as g and e) with l, o, u, n, and s the team used all seven of its tiles in one turn which gave them a bonus of fifty points. With ten for lounges for a double-word play and two for el, the team scored a total of sixty-two points. Note that the misspelling of quills went unchallenged, resulting in a five-point loss.

Bonus Assignment Opportunity

Students who correctly respond to the AI misstep question below will earn a bonus assignment credit.

Information Versus Knowledge

As a model for your own ethical use of generative AI for English 1103, the August 25 blog post features screenshots of a conversation in which I developed ideas for my literacy narrative with the help of ChatGPT. Now that you have read my literacy narrative, it should be apparent that despite the AI assistant’s wealth of information, one of its answers revealed a lack of knowledge about the comic strip Henry. What did the AI assistant not know? (What did it say about Henry that was false?)

Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer

1. To find the AI assistant’s error, review the descriptions of Henry in “A Bridge to Words,” then review the AI assistant’s words in the screenshots in the August 25 blog post.
2. Compose a response of one or more complete sentences that identifies and briefly explains the error.
3. Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 7:30 a.m. on Friday, September 11.
4. To post your comment, click the title of the post, “ENG 1103: A Bridge to Words  . . . ,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. Good luck! I will make the comments visible before class on Monday, September 14.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, you will compose a reflective essay focusing on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. If you are still completing your essay on Wednesday (since you have until Friday morning’s hard deadline to post it), your reflection will address your work in progress. To ensure that you are prepared to meet all the requirements for your reflection, carefully read the directions for preparing, which will be outlined in tomorrow’s blog post.