Activity
Relying only on your experience and intuition, take a look at the following passages of text and match each with its correct genre:
A. Poem B. News article C. Novel D. Non-fiction essay E. Diary entry F. Text message G. Advertisement
1.___ FYI, I’m running l8. ETA: 8:30.
2.___ Lately I’ve been feeling really depressed. I don’t know if it’s hormonal or the weather or what. I just want it to go away. Not sure how to act in front of Jack when I feel like this. I don’t want to lie or be a fake, but I don’t want him to think I’m not fun to be around. So I’ve just been avoiding him—which is so stupid because now he’s gonna think that I don’t like him, which is totally not true. But I can’t tell him. God if he ever read this I would die! Kate is of no help either. She just makes me worry even more. 3.___ In a speech on the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, N.H. to students, staff and alumni, Philip J. Hanlon, the president, said the college would create new spaces for social activity as alternatives to Greek houses, give faculty members more of a role in residential life and provide students more extensive training on preventing sexual assault. But much of his address was devoted to alcohol and the Greek system. “In the majority of alcohol-induced medical transports, it is hard alcohol — rather than just beer or wine — that lands students on a hospital gurney,” Dr. Hanlon said, and so “hard alcohol will
not be served at events open to the public, whether the event is sponsored by the college or by student organizations.”
4.___ To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread anymore. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.
5.___ Introducing the all-new 2015 Subaru Outback. At 33-mpg, it’s the most fuel-effi- cient midsize crossover in America. Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive with X-Mode pro- vides go-anywhere traction and stability. Being named a 2014 IIHS Top Safety Pick provides peace of mind. All to better help you explore the season. Love. It’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.
6.___
I erased you at mile 251.
Just pushed the mile counter and Poof,
you were gone. Like that. Zero. Not even a snowflake on the car’s warm rug. Not even an eyelash
mite. Earlier, we braked for a tabby crossing the road and laughed. We licked enchiladas from the crescent moons of each others’ chins. I might miss the taste of your smoky breath, might think again of your pale blue eyes, an unsure December sky, your fingers, my waist, your thumb
on my hip bone, your unshaven face. How you told me I was beautiful, how you told me you were willing to stick all the way to the coast.
7.___ My great-grandfather on my mother’s side ran a drugstore in a small town in central Illinois. He sold pills and rubbing alcohol from behind the big cash register and creamy ice cream from the soda fountain. My mother remembers the counter’s long pol- ished sweep, its shining face. She swirled on stools. Dreamy fans. Wide summer after- noons and clinking nickels. He sold milkshakes, cherry cokes, old fashioned sandwiches, (what did an old-fashioned sandwich look like?). Dark wooden shelves. Silver spigots on chocolate dispensers.
There are, of course, numerous ways to identify which passage belongs to which genre. And I imagine that when you formulated your answers, you relied on multiple evalua- tions of tone, form, and diction. Clearly the use of lines—verse—indicates a poem. But now, go back through the passages and notice the use of images, or lack thereof. What do you notice? Where are images most prominent?
Here are the answers: 1.F, 2.E, 3.B, 4.C, 5.G, 6.A, 7.D.
Reviewing, you should see that the literary genres—poem, essay, novel, are replete with images. Whether it’s the snowflake melting on a rug in the opening of my poem “The Hitch- hiker” (6), or the sun glaring down “until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet” in John Steinbeck’s opening paragraph to his novel Grapes of Wrath (4), or “the counter’s long polished sweep, its shining face” in Naomi Shihab Nye’s essay “Mint Snowball” (7), we as readers enter the world of the text through its images which evoke our senses. Not so in the case of the text message, diary entry, news article, or advertisement. Why is that? To understand these ways of writing, we should consider their purposes. What is the purpose of a text message? A diary entry? A news article? An advertisement?
Text Message. With the text message, its purpose is its one-time use of sharing infor- mation: In our above example, this person is going to be late and arrive around 8:30.
Diary Entry. With the diary entry, the information is more complex. Remember the differences between journaling and keeping a diary discussed in chapter 1? A diary keeps track of something—experiences, feelings, observations, and is usually kept pri- vate. Since the only intended audience for a diary is the writer him/herself, there is lit- tle if no attention given to how the writing will affect an outside audience. In fact, in the above example, the writer hyperbolically states that if Jack were to read her diary she woulddie.
News Article. In the case of the news article and advertisement, the point is to provide information. The news article by Richard Pérez-Peña informsNew York Timesreaders by objectively and authoritatively summarizing information and naming sources.
Advertisement.The advertisement persuades you to purchase something; in this case, a 2015 Subaru Outback, which gives an overview of its attractive features and estab- lishes ethos through mentioning its awards: “Being named a 2014 IIHS Top Safety Pick provides peace of mind.”
But when we look back at the novel, essay, and poem, among the most relevant things we see is the use of images and description. These genres immerse their readers in a different world, one which values and believes in the power of language to stimulate our senses and transport us somewhere new. And the most successful ones, the masters like John Steinbeck, are able to access our brains in the same way that real-life experiences do, producing in the reader feelings and thoughts and insights generated intelligently by the processing of sensory information.
Discussion
Richard Hugo once wrote that in a poem, “I caution against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying.” What does Hugo mean by this? Does creative writing communicate? If so, how? If not, what does it do? Can this be phrased differently?