Satirical writing offers a means of encouraging students to criticize those forms of victimization and inequality that trouble them most without that overt, dogmatic indoctrination of a political agenda that many would consider an anathema to democratic teaching. The indirect, satirical jab provides students with an intellectually challenging and…

This paper describes an investigation of problem finding in art. The concept of empathy with oneself is hypothesized as the means by which artists perceive problems. This concept is then used to analyze the origins of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and van Gogh's "The Starry Night" as well as the origins of art works…

Imitation of organizational and sentence patterns is an ancient technique for teaching rhetoric, but to be effective, imitation must be informed, deliberate, and creative. Students must first learn to recognize the characteristics of a given style and then to appreciate the connection between specific stylistic qualities and their cumulative…

Four Native American poets in easy narrative style tell about some of the aesthetic judgments they make in their work and, in the process, shed some light upon the traditions from which their poetry emerges. Joy Harjo discusses how she wrote "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window," her use of repetition influenced by music…

The search for presuppositions of a people's thought is not new. Octavio Paz and Samuel Ramos have both attempted to describe the assumptions underlying the Mexican character. Paz described Mexicans as private, defensive, and stoic, characteristics taken to the extreme in the "pachuco." Ramos, on the other hand, described Mexicans as…

Voice is a useful critical concept for studying texts, and can be classified into three types: (1) audible voice--how much the reader "hears" the text; (2) dramatic voice--what kind of speaker or writer is implied in the text; and (3) one's own voice--the relationship of the text to the actual writer. Written language is more likely to…

This paper examines the fantasy literature that is currently available to young readers. Twenty-two children's books are listed and discussed under the following topics: good storytelling and lively imagination, recurring themes, satires and word play, original fairytales, and works that reflect the divided self, the occult, and parapsychology. It…

The hypothesis that professional writers would be judged superior to college students on both holistic and analytic evaluations was only partially confirmed when four teacher-evaluators rated the anonymously submitted compositions of 64 college students and 5 professional writers. On the holistic scale the professionals did not distinguish…

In the past, writers have chosen stylistic devices within the parameters of the traditional grammar of style, "Grammar A," characterized by analyticity, coherence, and clarity. But many contemporary writers are creating a new grammar of style, "Grammar B," characterized by synchronicity, discontinuity, and ambiguity, which…

A useful device in revising technical reports is the metaphor of entropy, which refers to the amount of disorder that is present in a system. Applied to communication theory, high entropy would correspond to increased amounts of unfamiliar or useless information in a text. Since entropy in rhetorical systems increases with the unfamiliarity of…

This annotated bibliography lists works of criticism that analyze women writers in the United States as a group. The categories under which over 400 titles are listed include biography, special groups, special topics, literary history, contemporary assessments, feminine sensibility (whether men and women write differently, and why), the problems…

This collection of twenty-seven short readings is intended to augment the readings in the authors' previous work, "Literary Sinhala" (1974). These selections are intended to serve as further exemplification of the grammatical material in that text. The selections here are mostly contemporary prose in several styles, ranging from fiction…

The reading strategies of twenty-four tenth grade subjects were analyzed to obtain information about the reading process. Subjects were assigned to one of eight conditions formed by the combination of two levels of three factors, a 2x2x2 modified factorial design. The three factors were: proficient and non-proficient readers, readers with high and…

This collection of 12 critical essays--written for teachers, librarians, students, and parents--comments on the style, characterization, sense of wonder, and sense of reality in children's books. Specific subjects covered are (1) the fantasy worlds of Andersen, Beatrix Potter, Walter de la Mare, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, and J. R. R. Tolkien;…