The Imitation Game: Making Better Writers Imitation gives students an opportunity to find their critical voice. With use, imitated forms become internalized, incorporated into cognitive structures. Imitation can be used to support (controlled composition) and to challenge (imitating style/persona paraphrase). What we need is not more writing, but more high-quality writing.
Complete the following tasks: Select an excerpt from a text of literary merit. Copy the text word for word using cursive writing. Analyze the excerpt. What stands out? (i.e. diction, parallel structure, punctuation, auditory imagery ...) Jot down 2 - 3 observations. Select ONE sentence from the excerpt. Rewrite. Identify the base (main) clause. Identify the additions. Identify the connections between the descriptive parts of the sentence and what they describe. Write your own sentence. Imitate the pattern, replace words and ideas with your own. (Adrienne Robins, The Analytical Writer: A College Rhetoric. Collegiate Press, 1996)
MODEL SENTENCE: He went through the narrow alley of Temple Bar quickly, muttering to himself that they could go to hell because he was going to have a good night of it.--James Joyce, "Counterparts" IMITATION: They stood outside on the wet pavement of the terrace, pretending that they had not heard us when we called to them from the library. MODEL SENTENCE: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.--Henry David Thoreau, Walden IMITATION: I greeted him politely, although I planned to challenge him repeatedly, to assess his erudition, to test whether he could discriminate what was expedient in each situation, and, after I had probed him thoroughly, to announce that we had no place for him in our organization.
What is dictation? In its simplest form, dictation refers to a person reading some text aloud so that the listener(s) can write down what is being said. When used in the language classroom, the aim has traditionally been for students to write down what is said by the teacher, word for word, later checking their own text against the original and correcting the errors made.
What is dictogloss? In this activity do not write anything during the dictation. Write after the dictation is complete. Do not replicate the original sentence word for word but produce a piece of English that closely reflects the sense of the original. Pool ideas in groups and come up with a composite answer.