To honor Martin Luther King, Jr., today, I am asking you to you engage in a close study of his epistolary essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Although I could ask you to listen to a recording of it, I ask that you to read it instead. King’s gift for oratory is well known, but for students of writing, closely examining his words on the page is a more pertinent exercise than listening to his voice.
What makes King’s letter an effective piece of writing? With that question in mind, consider these words: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait” (par. 11). Here King is addressing his initial audience, the eight white Birmingham-area clergymen who criticized his protest as “unwise and untimely” (par. 1). He suggests to those men that waiting to act isn’t difficult when you yourself aren’t the victim of injustice, when you haven’t, in King’s words, “felt the stinging darts of segregation” (par. 11). The sentence is notable not only for the contrast it illustrates between King’s reality and the lives of his readers but also for the words that King uses to show that contrast.
Consider King’s sentence and the paraphrase that follows:
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”
Maybe it is simple for people who have not experienced segregation to say, “Wait.”
King’s sentence is stronger than the paraphrase that follows it because of the “stinging darts.” Writing that someone has not “experienced segregation” is abstract. Readers do not feel the general experience in the second sentence, but they feel King’s “stinging darts.” Sensory details strengthen sentences by appealing to readers’ senses, and figurative language invigorates writing by making the unfamiliar familiar. King’s white readers have not been the victims of segregation, but his choice of words makes them feel the sting.
While King’s “stinging darts” sentence—a relatively short one—is laudable, the long, winding sentence that follows is nothing short of staggering.
It starts with these words: “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim.” King presents those atrocities in an introductory dependent clause, one whose full meaning depends on an independent clause that follows. But rather than immediately turning to an independent clause to complete the thought, King expands the sentence with this series of dependent clauses:
when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;
when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;
when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you;
when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”;
when your first name becomes “n—,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”;
when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments;
when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–(par. 11).
The independent clause that readers have been waiting for, the statement that completes the thought is this: “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait” (par. 11). Those words could have immediately followed the first dependent clause, but instead King offers nine more dependent clauses, ten darts that sting his readers.
Ten dependent clauses connected by semicolons followed by a dash and an independent clause, a total of 316 words: That is not a structure I recommend for the sentences you write in English 1103, but it’s a valuable model, nevertheless.
I hope that you, as citizens, will continue to study the words of his letter. As your writing teacher, I hope that you will return to the sentence that I have examined in detail here. Along with showing his readers why his nonviolent protests could not wait, that sentence of King’s demonstrates how to develop a piece of writing through the accumulation of detail—not just the when, but the when and when and when . . . .
In class on Wednesday, we will examine a passage from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and another prose excerpt before you begin planning and drafting your literacy narrative.
Postscript
This morning, I wrote letters of thanks to the twenty-six local men and women who participated in the 1960 High Point Sit-ins. What a pleasure it was to discover that one of the other volunteer letter writers was former student Annika Brown, now a junior accounting major!
Biographers don’t usually offer readers more than a glimpse of their subjects’ bookshelves, but Robert Redford’s biographer, Michael Feeney Callan, who is also a novelist and poet, lingers over the books he read—some of which helped shape his vision as an actor and director.
Nothing could calm the restless Redford as a student at Brentwood Elementary until “one teacher’s passionate reading from Farmer Boy and Little House on the Prairie finally got him interested in books” (26). Soon after, his father, Charlie, began the midweek routine of driving Redford and his mother, Martha, to the Santa Monica Public Library. In Redford’s words, “‘I couldn’t wait for Wednesdays, to go through the doors of that library . . . . I’d make straight for Perseus, Zeus, and The Odyssey. Even when I couldn’t read, I’d pick out a word, “Perseus,” and conjure the story from the illustrations”’(qtd. in Callan 26).
When Redford was attending Colorado University, his mother died from complications of septicemia. Less than two years later, his paternal grandmother, Lena, died. For comfort, Redford pored over the novels of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Mann, all of which “struck chords that would surface later in his work” (52), but it was in the pages of Henry Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter—loaned to him by a classmate who recommended it—where Redford first encountered the frank examination of the world that he had sought in the pages of books. In his words, “‘Yes, he [Miller] talked about hunger and anger and sexual voracity. But it was all in the spirit of saying, “Let’s be honest about human beings.” It was frank, direct human communication, and that was a rare commodity in my life’” (qtd. in Callan 54).
At twenty-two—after dropping out of Colorado University and studying art sporadically in Europe—Redford enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. There, as an exercise in vocal assessment, an instructor asked the new students to prepare a favorite song to showcase their voices. One of Redford’s classmates, Ginny Burns, recalled that rather than performing the required song, “in a smoldering voice [he] dove into Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ which he claimed appropriate because it was lyrical. He didn’t merely recite it. He hollered it like an opera, jumping from one window ledge to the next, caroming around the room” (qtd. in Callan 70).
Redford’s passion for Poe’s words didn’t extend to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s—not yet. When he first read The Great Gatsby at Colorado University, he thought it was overrated: “It seemed florid. But when I went back to it, I saw it was something extraordinary, the depiction of human obsessions, and I felt some great screen work could come from it. I found it tantalizing” (qtd. in Callan 250).
The admiration he developed for Fitzgerald’s prose and his close study of it are apparent in his reaction to producer Robert Evans’s initial refusal to consider him for the role of Jay Gatsby because he was a blond. Redford said, “‘I began to think that Evans never read the book. Sure, he liked the idea of doing a Fitzgerald, but he didn’t know the text. Nowhere in it does Fitzgerald say Gatsby’s hair is dark. He says, “His hair was freshly barbered and smoothed back, and his skin was pulled tight over his face.” That’s it. That’s the description”’ (qtd. in Callan 249).
Similarly, Redford’s careful examination of the novel is evident in his observation of a detail that gave him “a hook on which to hang his personal Gatsby” (253). He noticed that “‘Fitzgerald wrote that Jay Gatsby was awkward when he said “old sport”—it didn’t come out of his mouth easily . . . . There’s a whole encyclopedia right there, and it’s from there I started to build up my own version’” (qtd. in Callan 253).
His biographer’s chronicle of Redford’s love of the written word may lead some readers to ask why he didn’t become a writer—but he was one, in fact. Though he never published, he maintained diaries and notebooks throughout his life. And Michael Ritchie, who directed him in Downhill Racer, observed, ‘He was really an author. His writing credit wasn’t on Downhill or Jeremiah Johnson but he was really an author as much as David Rayfiel, or even [James] Salter’” (qtd. in Callan 220). Rayfiel himself agreed, noting, “‘He had a writer’s eye and ear more than any actor I ever worked with’” (qtd. in Callan 271).
When Hume Cronyn asked Redford how he wanted Sundance to be remembered in one hundred years, Redford replied, “‘Like Walden Pond’” (qtd. in Callan 374). It’s a testament to Redford’s life as a reader that his answer didn’t refer to the film character for whom his writers’ colony and non-profit are named, but instead to the wooded haven he discovered in the pages of Henry David Thoreau.
Work Cited
Callan, Michael. Feeney. Robert Redford: The Biography. 2011. Vintage, 2012.
This morning at the beginning of class, we will examine the literacy narrative that you read for today, “The Day Language Came into My Life,” which is the fourth chapter of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.
Together, Sedaris‘s essay and Keller’s chapter demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” offers a quirky look at the challenges of learning French from a sarcastic, soul-crushing instructor. Keller’s story poignantly recounts learning to make meaning of the world through sign language.
After we discuss Keller’s chapter, you will begin planning and drafting your first essay assignment, a literacy narrative: an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language.
Directions
Begin by asking yourself this question: What were some of my most formative experiences as a reader, a writer, or a language learner? Freewrite on those, then choose one to bring to life. Your aim is to recreate your experience on the page and reflect on its significance. Your focus may be any one of the following:
A memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly
Someone who helped you learn to read or write
A writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
A particular type of writing that you found (or still find) challenging
A memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
Learning a second language
Your literacy narrative should be a well-told story that includes these elements:
Vivid detail
Some indication of the narrative’s significance
A minimum of 600 words
A title that offers a window into your essay (It should not be titled “Literacy Narrative.”)
Detailed instructions are included in the assignment handout that you will receive in class today. An additional copy is posted on Blackboard in the Major Paper Assignments folder.
Yesterday in class, you wrote about David Sedaris‘s use of similes, metaphors, and hyperboles. The list that follows illustrates the wide variety of figurative language that you identified in “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”
David Sedaris employs a simile when he describes himself as “not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage at a fashion show” (167).
Sedaris fashions a metaphor with the words “everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
The essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” features the metaphorical hyperbole “front teeth the size of tombstones” (Sedaris 168).
David Sedaris uses a simile when he writes that one classmate’s introduction sounds “like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (168).
The author of “Me Talk Pretty One Day” turns to hyperbole when he writes, “The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide” (Sedaris 169), and again when he notes that he and his classmates “learned to dodge chalk” (170).
Similarly, Sedaris uses hyperbole to emphasize his teacher’s reaction, which “led [him] to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France” (170).
David Sedaris fashions a metaphor when he describes his dread, writing, “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide Boulevard” (171).
Sedaris’ teacher insults him with a simile when she remarks, “‘Everyday spent with you is like having a cesarean section'” (172).
The bulleted sentences above follow the format that you should follow in your group exercises and other writing assignments that require quotations. These are the specific guidelines to remember:
The answer should be a minimum of one sentence. It need not be a long sentence, but it should include concrete detail.
The sentence should not begin with a quotation. Though journalists, fiction writers, and memoirists sometimes begin sentences with quotations, in academic writing, quotations are introduced with signal phrases.
Do not foreground the paragraph or page number in a sentence. The most important feature of the sentence is the writer’s particular use of words. The page or paragraph number follows in the parenthetical citation.
Dead Metaphors
Some of you identified “killed some time” (169) as a metaphor, but it’s actually a dead metaphor, one so familiar that it’s lost its meaning. Killing time and running for office have become synonymous with the actions they once compared. A dead metaphor is not the same as one that has become a cliché: a predictable or overly familiar expression. Avoid clichés like the plague, which I just failed to do for the sake of illustration. (Avoid . . . like the plague is textbook cliché.)
Memorable Words
One group cited the use of nonsense words, such as “meimslsxp” (167), as an effective way to convey Sedaris’s utter lack of understanding of his French teacher’s speech.
Another noted the fitting choice of “intoxicating” (173) to describe the feeling Sedaris experienced when he finally began to understand French.
Work Cited
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
“What’s in a Name” Follow-Up
Friday’s blog entry offered a bonus assignment credit to any student who posted a response identifying the classmates whose names are also common nouns, which makes them playable Scrabble words.
The playable names of your classmates appear below in bold, followed by the definitions in parentheses.
Nick (to make a shallow cut) Beeker
Aidan Berlin (a type of carriage)
Jermaine Cain (a tax paid in produce or livestock, also kain)
Zach Dick (a detective)
Tommy (a loaf of bread) McHugh
Davis Smith (a worker in metals)
Dylan Virga (wisps of precipitation evaporating before reaching ground)
Sierra (a mountain range) Welch (to fail to pay a debt, also welsh)
Kudos to Nick Beeker, Aidan Berlin, Jermain Cain, Nicole Marin, Sophia Marin, and Sierra Welch for identifying your classmates’ names that are playable words. For their efforts, they will receive a bonus assignment credit in the short assignments and participation category
I will offer additional bonus assignments, so be on the lookout for those. Reading all the notes that I post for you here, on my blog, will ensure that you don’t miss those opportunities.
Congratulations to Aidan Berlin for winning a copy of The Santaland Diaries in yesterday’s raffle.
Next Up
In class tomorrow, you will begin drafting your first major writing assignment longhand. The assignment, a literacy narrative, is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. As part of your prewriting process, look back at “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and consider how you might incorporate into your own essay some of the same elements that David Sedaris includes in his. Repeat the process with Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life.”
This final Scrabble post of the semester features the names of authors and characters that are playable words. Learning these will not only increase your word power and up your game, it will also broaden your knowledge of literature. If you haven’t read some of classics listed here, I encourage you to check them out.
eyre: a long journey (the last name of of the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847)
dickens: a devil (Charles Dickens, 1812-1870)
fagin: a person, usually an adult, who instructs others, usually children, in crime (from a character of that type in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, 1838)
holden: the past participle of hold (Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951)
huckleberry: a berry like a blueberry (the first name of the title character in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, 1884)
oedipal: describing libidinal feelings of a child toward the parent of the opposite sex (from the title character in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, c. 429 B.C.)
quixote: a quixotic, or extremely idealistic person; also quixotry, a quixotic action or thought (the title character in Michael de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Part I: 1605, Part II: 1615)
Note that “huckleberry” and “quixote” could not be the first two words played in a Scrabble game because “huckleberry” is more than seven letters long. However, “huckleberry” and “quixote” could constitute the first three plays. The first two plays could be “berry” and “quixote,” and the third play could add “huckle” to “berry.”
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
This morning in class, you will compose a final reflective essay that documents your work in the second half of the semester, focusing on what you consider some of your most significant work and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Since you have already written a reflective essay on your final essay and annotated bibliography, your final reflection should focus on other assignments and features, including one, two, or three of the following:
Studying one of the texts we have examined in the second half of the semester, including “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” “A Break from Your Smartphone can Boost Your Mood . . . ,” The Competition, “How a Small North Carolina College . . . ,” “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” Seedlings, “Speed Reading is the New Normal,” “Strawberry Spring,” “To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand,” or one of the sample final essays and annotated bibliographies (“The King of Storytelling,” “Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom”)
Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
Delivering your group presentation.
Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
Playing Scrabble/collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
Writing longhand
Limiting screen time
Keeping a journal
Focus on one, two, or three assignments or features of the course, and include in your reflective essay the following elements:
A title that offers a window into your reflection
An opening paragraph that introduces your focus and presents your thesis
Body paragraphs that offer concrete details from your work to support your thesis.
A relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or a relevant quotation from one of the texts that we have studied in the second half of the semester. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation.
A conclusion that revisits the thesis without restating it verbatim
An MLA-style works cited entry for your source
Coming Soon
In class next Monday, December 1, you will compose a peer blog response to a classmate’s final essay and annotated bibliography. You are welcome to choose any classmate whose subject is different from your own. To ensure that you have sufficient time both to compose your response longhand and type it, choose a classmate and begin reading his or her blog post before next Monday’s class.
Monday in class, after you examined Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover The Competition, you studied Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings (1998) and chose one of those two visual texts as the subject of a writing exercise: a paragraph of summary followed by a paragraph of analysis. That exercise served both as a departure from your study of written texts and as additional writing practice. The summary and analysis of Seedlings that I wrote as samples for you appear below.
Summary
Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings depicts a classroom of uniformed teenagers, all males, whose teacher, seen only from the shoulders down, holds a textbook in one hand. The teacher drapes his other hand on the head of one of the pupils, one of two students presented as microscopes with human faces.
Analysis
Although the subject at hand is biology, the study of living organisms, the student seedlings barely seem alive themselves as they stare blankly into the distance. The uniformity Ishida depicts, with their haircuts, crested blazers, striped neckties, and rows of desks, takes a surrealistic twist with the images of the two pupils who have transformed into microscopes. By placing the teacher’s hand on one of the students-turned-microscope, Ishida indicates that the instructor—himself objectified by the absence of his head—approves of the metamorphosis. For him, the goal of education seems to be that transformation: for the individual to be consumed by the device of study itself, to become a cold, metallic instrument.
As I noted in class yesterday, you will have the opportunity to revisit The Competition or Seedlings, or both, in the final reflection that you will compose next Monday.
Falconer, Ian. “The Competition.” Writing Analytically by David Rosenwaser and Jill Stephen, 9th edition, Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. p. 108.
Yesterday in class, you and two or three of your classmates collaboratively examined Ian Falconer’s The Competition and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Seedlings. Afterward, you chose one of the two as the subject for an individual two-paragraph exercise in composing summary and analysis.
Below are three sample paragraphs that I wrote as models for you. The first is a summary of Falconer’s cover. The second and third offer close readings of the magazine cover. Each integrates one of the two interpretations that the authors of Writing Analytically offer. You were not required to address the textbook authors’ interpretations in your own analysis. I included them in the samples below because they serve as models for integrating a source’s commentary into your analysis, models you may want to follow if you choose to write about The Competition in your final reflection for the course.
Summary
Ian Falconer’s mostly black-and-white New Yorker cover The Competition depicts four beauty pageant contestants, three of whom stand in stark contrast to Miss New York. Her dark hair, angular body, narrowed eyes, tightly pursed lips, and two-piece bathing suit set her apart from the nearly identical blondes–Miss Georgia, Miss California, and Miss Florida–whose wide-open eyes and mouths and one-piece bathing suits are typical of pageant contestants.
Analyses
The contrast between the raven hair and eyes of Miss New York and the platinum-blonde and pale-eyed contestants from Georgia, California, and Florida suggests what the authors of Writing Analytically present as the first of two possible interpretations: The cover “speak[s] to American history, in which New York has been a major point of entry for generations of immigrants, embracing diversity and conformity, while viewing the rest of the nation as more homogenous” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 112).
The self-satisfied expression of Miss New York suggests what the authors of Writing Analytically present as the second of two possible interpretations: “[T]he magazine is . . . admitting, yes America, we New Yorkers do think that we’re cooler and more individual and less plastic than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 112).
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Making an Interpretation: The Example of a New Yorker Cover.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 107-112.
As you continue to work on your final essay and annotated bibliography, review these samples as models for your own summaries and close readings of your sources.
If the style of Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover seems familiar to you, it may be because you encountered his work when you were a child. His book Olivia, published in 2000, received the 2001 Caldecott Medal, an award the Association for Library Service bestows upon the book they deem the best children’s picture book of the year. Falconer followed Olivia with several sequels, including Olivia Saves the Circus and Olivia Helps with Christmas.
Thursday’s blog post will offer a second look at the other visual text we examined yesterday: Tetsua Ishida’s painting Seedlings.
. . . Continuing Your Revisions
As you continue to revise, refer to the checklist I distributed in class, and have included below, to ensure that your essay and bibliography comply with all assignment requirements.
Final Essay
Presents the subject of the bibliography and the purpose for compiling it; in other words, what drives the research, and what question do you seek to answer?
Addresses all your sources at least briefly and quotes a minimum of two of them.
Introduces quotations with signal phrases and follows them with parenthetical citations. The only exception to the parenthetical citation rule is any quotation from the peer interview.
Concludes with a paragraph that mentions a larger project that might develop from it, in what discipline that project might be produced, and what would serve as its theoretical framework.
Annotated Bibliography
Each entry begins with a complete MLA-style bibliographic citation.
Each bibliographic citation is followed by three paragraphs: one of summary, a second of commentary, and a third that includes the author’s credentials.
The commentary paragraphs do not simply restate the information in the summaries but instead demonstrate the usefulness of the sources to researchers and make some connections among them. You are not required to mention another source in each commentary, but you should aim to do so at least once.
The sources in the bibliography are alphabetized by the authors’ last names.
MLA Style
The file’s font is twelve-point Times New Roman, including the running header.
The running header, which includes your last name and the page number, appears one-half inch from the top of the page, on the right side.
All required first-page information is included in the upper left.
The file is double-spaced, with no extra space between any sections.
All paragraphs are indented five spaces, or one-half inch.
All bibliographic citations have hanging idents; in other words, their formatting is the opposite of a conventional paragraph. (The first line is flush left, and any subsequent lines are indented.)
Next Up
Tomorrow in class, you will compose a reflective essay that focuses on the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your final essay and annotated bibliography. The due date for your revision is tomorrow, before class, but you have until the hard deadline, Friday, November 21, before class, to post your revision to Blackboard and publish it on your WordPress blog.
If you are still revising your essay and bibliography tomorrow, in your reflection, you will refer to your writing as ongoing.
In your reflection, you will include a minimum of one relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or from one of the sources included in your bibliography. Before class, identify the passage you plan to quote, and draft a sentence with it in your journal. Also, be sure to write in your journal a complete MLA-style work cited entry for the source you plan to quote. That preparation will ensure that you have ample time to integrate the quotation into your reflection and compose your work cited entry before the end of Wednesday’s class period. You will not have the option to refer to your essay online, so a handwritten version of the information you’ll need is essential.
This morning in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, we will examine the model final essay and annotated bibliography, “Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom,” which appears below.
Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom
Earlier this month, when I reread Jonathan Kay’s Wall Street Journal op-ed feature “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” I once again meditated on his criticism of Scrabble as a word game that deemphasizes semantics. In Kay’s words, “Scrabble treats language the way computers do—as arbitrarily ordered codes stored in a memory chip” (par. 7). I asked myself, If I want my students to play a board game that cultivates word power, collaboration, and critical thinking skills, is Scrabble the game to choose? Thus, Kay’s review became the starting point for my research on the benefits of Scrabble play. As I scrolled through search results, I found not only articles that specifically addressed Scrabble in the college classroom but also many that focused on the value of the game itself for sharpening the mind.
The bibliography that follows includes Kay’s review, the starting point for my research, four refereed research articles, and two interviews with former students of mine. Three of the four refereed articles offer windows into the classrooms of professors who have incorporated Scrabble play into their curricula: an English professor at California State University-Monterey Bay, a professor of Christian education at MidAmerica Nazarene University, and a professor of engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia. The fourth article addresses cognitive evaluations of competitive Scrabble players and what they reveal about how experience shapes word recognition.
Though Kay’s criticism of Scrabble warrants reconsidering the inclusion of Scrabble in my first-year writing classes, his disapproval of the game stems from the practices of tournament-level players, not people for whom the game is a pastime—or from students, like mine, who play Scrabble as a classroom exercise. It’s also notable that collaboration, which is an essential component of team Scrabble, does not factor in Kay’s review.
In “Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skills Practice in the Undergraduate Classroom,” Mark Hayse and his colleagues who participated in the study report “that tabletop gameplay helped students move from classroom passivity to classroom ‘engagement’” (298). My own students did not address engagement in their interviews with me—though their engagement is evident during Scrabble play—but instead focused on vocabulary building and the relationship of the game to the composing process. Jesse Brewer noted that the game has “introduced [him] to new words,” and Ava Salvant observed that the game has “[p]robably influenced [her] ability to write.”
How much does Scrabble play cultivate our word power? The answer to that question remains unclear, but the research of psychologists and educators points to the merits of team Scrabble for improving not only our language skills but also our facility with critical thinking, team-building, and spatial skills.
As I review the research on Scrabble that I have outlined here, I envision it as groundwork for a larger project, one in which I would use the theoretical framework of composition studies to examine the benefits of incorporating Scrabble play into the first-year writing curriculum. Such a project could be an interdisciplinary one since some of the skills the game promotes, such as collaboration and problem solving, are key to a variety of disciplines. Whether I undertake that project, the knowledge that I have gained will inform my teaching as I continue to seek ways to improve my students’ quality of learning through opportunities for wordplay in the classroom.
Annotated Bibliography
Brewer, Jesse. Interview. Conducted by Jane Lucas. 20 Oct. 2023.
English 1103 student Jesse Brewer recounts how he has played Scrabble for most of his life. Ever since he was a young child, he has played the game with his grandparents whenever he visited their home in Pennsylvania. Brewer will continue to play Scrabble after the end of the semester because the game remains a tradition in his family. In his words, “[M]y grandmother is still going to want to play it every summer.” Brewer also notes how the game has expanded his vocabulary, saying it has “introduced me to new words, which allows me to read and write more capably in everyday life.”
Brewer’s remarks on vocabulary building highlight the game’s verbal benefits, and his observations on Scrabble as a family tradition serve as a point of contrast to that of some other students’—such as Ava Salvant’s—who had not played Scrabble before playing it as a weekly exercise in English 1103.
Brewer is a junior computer science major at High Point University, where he was enrolled in English 1103, section 20, in 2023.
“Critical Habits of Mind” addresses the teaching practices of a group of college math and writing faculty who collaborated to develop lessons to foster intellectual capacities, such as motivation and self-efficacy. Developmental educational instructors from three California colleges, Cabrillo College, California State University-Monterey Bay, and Hartnell College, partnered to pilot classroom activities, including clicker technology, peer writing review, improvisation, metacognitive writing activities, and Scrabble Fridays. Reflecting on their collaboration, Fletcher observes that foregrounding procedural knowledge, as their pilot activities did, enabled them to couple their teaching of discipline-specific content with the set of behaviors essential to teaching and learning. Fletcher notes that Hetty Yelland, who devotes her Friday classes to Scrabble play, observes “the extra effort students have to make to overcome the boredom—and their passive word knowledge . . . eventually leads to more active and internalized language practices” (54).
Fletcher’s account of Hartnell writing instructor Hetty Yelland’s Scrabble Fridays is of particular value to education researchers and teachers considering Scrabble play as a classroom activity that dovetails with discipline-specific content and also fosters foundational learning skills.
Jennifer Fletcher is a professor of English at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her books include Teaching Arguments, Teaching Literature Rhetorically, and Writing Rhetorically.
“How a Hobby Can Shape Cognition” presents the findings of Canadian researchers inthe Departments of Psychology and Medicine at Calgary University who investigated how the word recognition skills of competitive Scrabble players differed from those of age-matched nonexperts. The researchers’ cognitive evaluations revealed differences only in Scrabble-specific skills, such as anagramming. Also, the researchers observed that Scrabble expertise was associated with two specific effects: vertical fluency and semantic deemphasis. The study’s results indicate that experience shapes visual word recognition.
The research of Hargreaves and his former colleagues at Cardiff is pertinent to educators who seek to understand the cognitive benefits of frequent Scrabble play. Notably, the semantic deemphasis that the study identifies—and that Jonathan Kay addresses in his commentary—contrasts the gains in language skills that Hetty Yelland observes in her students.
Ian Hargreaves is professor emeritus of journalism, media, and culture at Cardiff University and one of the contributors to A Manifesto for the Creative Economy, a ten-point plan for bolstering creative industries.
Hayse, Mark. “Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skill Practice in the UndergraduateClassroom.” Teaching Theology & Religion, vol. 21, no. 4, 2018, pp. 288–302., https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.libproxy.highpoint.edu /doi/epdf/10.1111/teth.12456.
“In Tabletop Games and 21st Century Skill Practice in the UndergraduateClassroom,” the research of Mark Hayse and his colleagues is guided by the primary research question, “Does tabletop gameplay require the practice of 21st century skills?” (290), and their secondary question, “What initial links might be drawn between tabletop gameplay, 21st century skill practice, and undergraduate learning?” (290). All three professors reported “that tabletop gameplay helped students move from classroom passivity to classroom ‘engagement’” (298) and that “[e]ven though tabletop gameplay technically was coursework . . . the nontraditional nature of it seemed to render it as play more than work” (298).
Hayes’s findings are useful for researchers interested in how incorporating table-top game play into college curricula fosters such twentieth-first century skills as critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration. His findings are also of particular value to educators considering adding table-top game play to their secondary- or post-secondary courses.
Mark Hayse is Director of the Honors Program and Mabee Library Professor at MidAmerica Nazarene University. His other publications include an essay on the World of Warcraft, a study of the video game featured in the collection Don’t Stop Believin’: Pop Culture and Religion from Ben Hur to Zombies, edited by Robert K. Johnston, Craig Detweiler, and Barry Taylor.
Kay, Jonathan. Review. “Scrabble is a Lousy Game.” The Wall Street Journal, 4 Oct. 2018. ProQuest, https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com /newspapers/scrabble-is-lousy-game-why-would-anyone- play/docview/2116081665/se- 2?accountid=11411.
In “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” writer and editor Jonathan Kay criticizes Scrabble for its lack of emphasis on semantics. In Kay’s words, the game “is like a math contest in which you are rewarded for reciting pi to the 1,000th decimal place but not knowing that it expresses the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter” (par. 5). Kay asserts that the best board games for casual players involve a mix of luck and skill and recommends two other board games, Codenames and Paperback, as better options for wordplay.
While Kay’s review focuses on the competitive player’s approach to Scrabble, the concerns he raises about the game’s deemphasis of word meaning and the frustration that novice players can experience warrant the attention of educators who are researching the potential drawbacks of introducing Scrabble play into their classrooms.
Jonathan Kay is senior editor of the journal Quillette and the author of Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life.
Kobzeva, Nadezda. “Scrabble as a Tool for Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Development.” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences, no. 182, 2015, pp. 369-74. ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/pii/S1877042815030669.
“Scrabble as a Tool for Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Development” presents research involving second-year engineering students and teachers of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Tomsk, Russia. The students, all non- native speakers of English, played Scrabble as an in-class and out-of-class-activity for oneacademic year. At the end of the year, the best six student players competed in teams in a tournament against two teams of the six EFL teachers. Throughout the tournament—which was conducted outside of the classroom to relieve students of the pressure to obtain a high score—the researcher, Nadezda Kobzeva, observed the contrast in the students’ and teachers’ practices as players. While the EFL instructors possessed an advanced knowledge of English language, they were newcomers to Scrabble. On the other hand, the engineering students with limited knowledge of English relied on the skills they developed throughout their year-long Scrabble program. In the feedback the students provided after the tournament, which they won, the majority rated the skills they developed as Scrabble players as excellent in all five fields assessed, including team building, thinking, spatial skills, vocabulary, and spelling.
Kobzeva focuses her research on engineering students, but her findings are also valuable to researchers and teachers in other fields who seek answers to the questions of how Scrabble can be used effectively as a learning tool, and what specific skills students may develop through frequent play. Unlike Mark Hayse’s findings, which focus exclusively on the twenty-first century skills, known as the 4Cs, Kobzeva’s research highlights other skills that students develop—in particular the Russian engineering students’ (non-native speakers of English) greater facility with the English language.
Nadezda Kobzeva is a professor of engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University. Her other research articles include “Ontology of Key Metasigns in Translatology,” published in V Mire Nauchnykh Otkrytii (In the World of Scientific Discoveries).
Salvant, Ava. Interview. Conducted by Jane Lucas. 23 Oct. 2023.
English 1103 student Ava Salvant reveals that she had never played a game of Scrabble before playing it as a weekly exercise in English 1103. She also notes that the game has “[p]robably influenced [her] ability to write because not always when you sit down to write do you know the exact words that you want to say. You kind of have to go with the flow and put down as many words as you can on the board in Scrabble or on the paper in writing.”
Salvant’s observations as a novice Scrabble player underscore the similarities between game play and the writing process, and they also serve as a point of contrast to that of some other students’—such as Jesse Brewer’s—who bring years of Scrabble experience to their first-year writing class.
Ava Salvant is a junior neuroscience major at High Point University, where she was enrolled in English 1103, section 19, in 2023.
“The Competition” and “Seedlings”
After we examine “Scrabble as a Game Changer in the College Classroom,” you and your classmates will collaboratively examine Ian Falconer’s The Competition and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Seedlings. Afterward, you will individually compose a one-paragraph summary followed by a second paragraph of commentary on one of the two (The Competition or Seedlings, not both).
Your study of Falconer’s magazine cover and Ishiguro’s painting serves as both a departure from your focus on written texts and as additional practice in summary and analysis.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a reflective essay that focuses on the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your final essay and annotated bibliography. The due date for your revision is Wednesday, November 19, before class, but you have until the hard deadline, Friday, November 21, before class, to post your revision to Blackboard and publish it on your WordPress blog.
If you are still revising on Wednesday, in your reflection, you will refer to your writing as ongoing.
In your reflection, you will include a minimum of one relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or from one of the sources included in your bibliography. Before Wednesday’s class, identify the passage you plan to quote, and draft a sentence with it in your journal. Also, be sure to write in your journal a complete MLA-style work cited entry for the source you plan to quote. That preparation will ensure that you have ample time to integrate the quotation into your reflection and compose your work cited entry before the end of Wednesday’s class period. You will not have the option to refer to your essay online, so a handwritten version of the information you’ll need is essential.
Yesterday’s class focused on a review of the sample student essay and annotated bibliography “The Depths of Scrabble,” an exercise that should continue to serve as a guide for you as you develop and revise your own essay and bibliography.
The notes that follow address points of content and form, some that we addressed in class, others that we didn’t. As you continue your own research and writing, revisit these notes.
Content
In his introduction, the writer addresses his subject and his reason for researching it. Still, his final essay lacks two key components: (1) it does not quote two of his sources, and (2) the conclusion does not address the larger project that might develop from the research and the theoretical framework for that project.
The writer’s mention of specific, uncommon words that he has learned for Scrabble play is admirable, but he does not define the words. Also, in his discussion of “qi” and “xi” (par. 2), he does not clarify that the primary reason for playing those words is the high point value of “q” and “x.”
The words “no real Scrabble player bothers studying” (par. 2) are presented as a line from Jonathan Kay’s “Scrabble is a Lousy Game,” but that line does not appear in Kay’s opinion piece. It’s an inaccurate paraphrase.
The writer incorrectly uses the words “less” (par. 2), “opinionated” (par. 3), and “commutative” (par. 3). He also misspells the last name of Ian Hargreaves, the one of one of his sources, as Hargraves (par. 3). Additionally, such inaccurate statements as “Scrabble thrusts upon the brain” (par. 1) indicate that the writer has not revised his prose.
While Jonathan Kay is a Scrabble detractor, writing that he “devotes[s] an entire piece to hating on the game” (par. 1) is a statement with diction appropriate for casual conversation but not for formal academic prose.
The commentaries in the writer’s annotations do not adequately demonstrate the sources’ usefulness to other researchers studying Scrabble. In his commentary on Stefan Fatsis’s article “The Case of the Stolen Blanks,” he misses the opportunity to create a connection between the cheating reported by Fatsis and the instances of cheating recounted by Kay.
Form
The manuscript does include the required Times New Roman font, the running header with the last name and page number, and the first page information (student’s name, professor’s name, etc.), but the bibliographic entries do not have hanging indents, and the first lines of the paragraphs of the summaries, commentaries, and credentials are not indented five spaces or one-half inch.
The sources in the annotated bibliography are not alphabetized by last name.
The presence of the capital “K” in one of his interviews with a classmate demonstrates that he has referred to the student by first name rather than last, which begins with “D.” In formal writing, people are referred to by first and last name when they are first mentioned. On subsequent references, they are referred to by last name. Fictional characters are an exception to that rule.
Two parenthetical citations, one in the essay and one in the bibliography, are presented incorrectly, and the writer omits the first portion of the bibliographic entry for Ian Hargreaves’s article.
Next Up
On Wednesday, you will have the class period to devote to additional research and writing for your final essay and annotated bibliography, and at the end of class, you will submit a summary of the work that you completed.
Also, I will distribute a checklist for you to refer to as you finalize your revisions over the next week.
Jane Lucas 