Is Our Children Learning?

[elfs]

Yamaraashi-chan's sixth grade class is studying writing. This entertains Omaha and I to no end. We have rectified some of Yamaraashi-chan's misunderstandings by introducing her to the non-fiction section of our Writer's Digest collection, but the little booklet her teacher gave her was a pretty good introduction.

In fact, it was so good that I photocopied sections of it. Sometimes, we adult writers can benefit from the experiences and even the materials used to educate children. There are whole lists of concepts and first-tier adjectives and verbs associated with them, which I've decided to keep. While the thesaurus is a rockin' resource, sometimes linking "sadness" and "unloved" isn't as easy as it sounds. Having these lists is a good start, a second-tier intellectual starting point to exploring Roget's world.

There is one section that I take offense to, however. What it says is simply so wrong that I worry it will distort my kid's writing habits for years to come. The school, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to ban a word from my child's creative writing. That word is "said." The section is entitled, "Said is dead," has a big picture of the word said stricken out (just like that) and instead provides an entire page, in 8-point arial, of alternatives to "said."

If you google for the phrase, "just use said," you'll find hundreds of published writers more or less agreeing: "Just use 'said'." Dialogue isn't like the description of any other action, and the content of a dialogue is contained in the dialogue itself. The rest of each paragraph in a dialogue contains things the characters do. We use "said" as furniture, the simplest way, short of writing a play with stage directions, to indicate who is speaking. You don't want to write "Jim argued," you want to write dialogue in which Jim argues. If a character "restates" something, just write the dialogue twice.

I may ask her teacher about this.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Said is not dead in fiction - but fiction is designed to tell a story.

Almost all school writing is designed to demonstrate skill (and vocabulary), so reusing "said" would tend to hurt the writer's image with her grader. Hence, in school writing - easy on the "said". In writing-for-other-purposes, "said" is fine.

It's all a matter of your target audience.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It's a fair point, but there's still that fiction/non-fiction problem, and I'm not sure that maps well onto school/non-school.

Not that my experience disinclines me to the view that schoolteachers know sweet F.A. about writing for an audience, who can choose not to the read the work.

"And said isn't always the right word for fiction," she mumbles.

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

Wow. Yeah, that is horribly misguided advice.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

satyrblade, who has been a professional writer for 20 years and who teaches storytelling, says that's ridiculous--all his experience, and every book on writing he's ever read, suggests that it's far better to just use "said" than to overuse the thesaurus.

For that matter, my favorite English/writing teacher used to say that the thesaurus should have died out with all the rest of the dinosaurs.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Every time I write and try to avoid 'said', I just go back and replace all my characters' overacting verbs with 'said'. Fiction is terrible if you're banned from the use of the word 'said'.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

ZOMG... said-bookism .... Turkey City Lexicon .... <boggle>

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

$25 for the college fund if you get her to turn in a fiction assignment in which every dialog element is a Tom Swifty; $50 for an A.

Minimum 5 dialog elements. Offer void where prohibited. Limit one per customer.