Difficulties in using detail
One of the challenges in
teaching a foreign language is how to motivate and guide the students especially
at a higher level in using descriptive/narrative detail.
Details are not add-ons;
they are rather the manifestation of an inquisitive mind and a watchful eye. In
other words, asking one to flesh out one’s ideas with all the relevant details
presupposes that one is already being encouraged at school by science and first
language teachers to use one’s senses in order to allow all kinds of
information to reach one’s mind through the sensory organs.
How Can one define detail?
An equally important
consideration is how we define detail: certainly, it is not adjectives
preceding or following nouns or adverbs before adjectives or adverbials. It is
so much more than that and certainly closely bound up with coordination or
subordination and sentence complexity.
However, to the extent
that a language teacher can interfere, there are ways of sensitising students
to the significance of zooming in on detail.
Examples of how to engage students’ attention
in detail
I make a point of first
exposing students to a basic (devoid of detail) short extract and subsequently
overlaying the extract with all the details in place. It is a passive way of
indicating the huge difference detail can make to our writing, but a necessary step
before engaging students in more demanding tasks where they have to “fill in” the
details.
Let me cite a couple of
examples though they are by no means exhaustive or thorough since detail is
difficult to disentangle from the structure of the text. They will only poorly
serve the purpose.
Ø
Here is
an extract from Graham Swift’s novel Last
Orders with its detail missing:
The road went on, [
], like [
], the one sure thing in the
world.
This is the extract in
full detail:
The road went on,[black
and curving and cat’s-eyed,] like [the
one sure thing in the wet and the dark and the spray,] the one sure thing
in the world.
Ø
And
another from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire:
Snow was falling [ ] upon the castle and
its grounds now. The [
]Beauxbatons carriage looked like a [ ] pumpkin next to the [ ] house that
was Hagrid’s cabin, while the Durmstrang ship’s portholes were glazed with ice,
[
].
Snow was falling [thickly]
upon the castle and its grounds now. The [pale
blue] Beauxbatons carriage looked like a [large, chilly, frosted] pumpkin next to the [iced gingerbread] house that was Hagrid’s cabin, while the
Durmstrang ship’s portholes were glazed with ice, [the rigging white with frost].
I will now cite an extract
in which it is impossible to tease out the details. It is also a good example
of how the specifics can displace the whole since it is the parts that figure prominent and capture the
reader’s imagination. The last sentence of the paragraph best illustrates this precedence of the part(s) over the whole.
Ø
The
extract is from Christopher Paolini’s The
Eldest:
(p.232)
As Eragon listened, his gaze wandered and alighted
upon a small girl prowling behind the queen. When he looked again, he saw that
her shaggy hair was not silver, like many of the elves, but bleached white with
age, and that her face was creased and lined, like a dry withered apple. She
was no elf, nor dwarf, nor – Eragon felt – even human. She smiled at him, and he glimpsed rows of sharp teeth.
A more active engagement
After showing the detail
missing in the first version, students could be asked to “reverse” one aspect of the description: for example, they could
focus on the face but instead of old and creased, it should be firm and fresh
like a rose in bud or whatever they think appropriate for a young face.
Something to look forward to
In a future post, I will
suggest further ways of enhancing students’ power of observation to notice
subtle detail and try their hand at achieving a similar result.
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