Sunday, November 8, 2009
Prose Revised!
This play was difficult to understand, but the course packet helped a lot. I understood the play better by the end of it. I didn’t necessarily like the play, but I enjoyed the interesting parts and trying to figure out what was going on. The characters are so different than other plays we’ve read. The setting of the play influenced how I saw the characters in my mind. The Pilkings, Simon and Jane, annoyed me because of their ignorance about the culture around them. Simon thought the culture’s ways were completely wrong. It was his job to get rid of the natives’ “ridiculous” customs and superstitions. The character Olunde puts it well when speaking to Jane. He says she has no respect for what she doesn’t understand. He speaks to the western world at this moment. Jane is a representation of that. Olunde experiences both cultures, allowing him to understand both. His respect falls on both the western world and his own. At the end of the play, he teaches everyone a lesson. He dies instead of his father, taking his place in the afterworld with the King.
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I am still trying to grasp the Lanham Method, but right now it looks like your essay follows the S-V-O guidelines. The only problem is that I think you have used the Lanham Method to strip your essay to its bones. It sounds as if all the meat was taken out of your paper and that the raw structure was the only thing left. The problem is that there isn’t any savory juices or meat for the reader to stop and enjoy.
ReplyDeleteThe literal version of the Lanham Method seems very cut and dry, I am wondering if both of us don't understand how to use it properly because there has to be a way to keep the basic structure and without cutting out the good stuff. I am sure there is a balance between passive voice and s-v-o sentences that must be found.
Lana, the problem isn't the Lanham method... the problem is "writing like ya talk"--without complex sentences and sentence-length variety. Toward the end of this short paragraph, though, Jenn does "brush-stroke" in some participle phrases, and those sentences flow much better than earlier ones.
ReplyDeleteSo, Jennifer, I basically varied your sentence lengths by using different syntactic structures--including just compounding the verb in a simple sentence (sentence 2, I believe). Check out this revised version and see what you think. Of course my version is much more formal and academic--which would be appropriate for a college paper, but not necessarily for a learning (b)log...
REVISED:
Although this play was difficult to understand, I understood the play better by the end, thanks to the course packet. I still didn’t necessarily like the play, but I enjoyed the interesting parts and liked figuring out what was going on. The setting of the play influenced how I visualized the characters, who were so different from the characters in other plays we've read. The Pilkings, Simon and Jane--they all annoyed me because of their ignorance about the culture around them. Simon, who believed the culture’s ways were completely wrong, thought he should rid of the natives’ “ridiculous” customs and superstitions. Only Olunde senses how wrong this position is. He openly faults Jane for her sense of cultural superiority, pointing out that she has no respect for what she doesn’t understand. The same could be said for the western world in general, which Jane represents. Olunde experiences both cultures, allowing him to understand--and respect--both. At the end of the play, he teaches everyone a lesson. He dies instead of his father, taking his place in the afterworld with the King.