Original_To:  BITNET%"mbu-l@ttuvm1.bitnet"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Sat, 3 Oct 1992 12:31:00 EDT
From:         "Composition Digest (Robert Royar,
              Moderator)" <R0MILL01@ULKYVX.BITNET>
Subject:      (Fwd: *C&CD*) Imitation comes in different shapes (29)

Date:         Sat, 03 Oct 1992 09:45:50 EDT
From:         IN%"RobertRoyar@Delphi.com" Robert Royar (C&CD Moderator)
Message-id:   <1992Oct03.094550.2.Grendel.Lair@Cratylus>
Subject:      Imitation comes in different shapes (29)
Reply-to:     IN%"R0MILL01@ULKYVX.LOUISVILLE.EDU"  C&CD
Organization: Cratylus Educational Software

My rhetoric is rusty, it may not last this post
But oh my colleagues, and ah my comrades
It makes an awful roast.

Well, that's imitation [out] of sorts.  I think that it's not quite
accurate to conflate imitatio and memory too closely.  Wasn't Memory
a division of Rhetoric; whereas, imitatio was a technique used within a
division.  For example we might after reading a good deal of Plato decide
to write a dialogue.  Perhaps the dialogue form (as imitation) is simply a
Discovery exercise that leads later to a discoursive analysis.  I used
dialogue writing when studying for my comps, and once again when blocked
while writing my dissertation.  Since then I've written a number of
dialogues in rough imitation of Erasmus or the Platonists.  My wife took a
course in advanced writing in which Dale Billingsley (a St. Thomas More
scholar and Renaisance Human Being) taught close and loose imitation as a
technique for expository invention.

Try closely imitating _Gravities Rainbow_ or _Finnegan's Wake_ some
afternoon when you've got a lifetime to spare.  Neil Young refuses to
listen to any music for fear he will imitate it.  And how many of us have
noticed how the structures of an intriguing book or the twists of an
engrossing plot weave themselves into our own writing (or musings) long
after the original work has been ingested?

This is imitation, not memorization.  The Korean gentleman who memorized
Raygun speeches was following a tradition that Louie Crew [?] documented in
_College English_ a few years ago with his Chinese students--that is,
invention based solely on existing forms.

I've tried (using Frank D'Angelo's text and Francis Christensen's _Notes
Toward a New Rhetoric_) to introduce fresh peoples to close and loose
imitation. I can't say I've had any success with it.  Note another
interesting irony.  The connection that's been made between grammar study
and memorization seems to argue that because memorizing grammar rules is
counterproductive, memorizing paragraphs would be also.  I'm not advocating
memorization, but many of the studies done on the ill-effects of grammar
instruction have also shown that transformational sentence combining has a
beneficial effect on writing--even more so than writing by itself (Mellon,
1969?).  SentComb is another technique I've had ill luck applying.  But I've
known teachers who can use it effectively.  SC is a gross form of imitation.

Eventually all of us will have software in our classes that will allow a
student to write a "grammar" which matches a passage he/she just read and
feed it a vocabulary from his/her own work or from another writers to create
a new passage along the same form.  I'd like to use something like this with
a group of kids or with advanced writiers (either get 'em before they're
convinced they can't write or after they've become confident they can).

 -- Robert Royar (RobertRoyar@Delphi.com) New York Institute of Technology
    "Do not search for the truth. Simply cease to cherish opinion"
                                           - Sengstan, Third Zen Patriarch

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