Matt Ramsey

WORD PALLETING*

A Personal Perspective

As a writing educator, my approach to the writing act emerges from a slightly unique vantage; I am both a writing tutor of students and struggle with writing, myself.

Upon entering undergraduate school, three years after having undergone life-saving brain surgery, I transitioned to higher education in the way many learn-ing disabled students do: bewildered and utterly unsure that I would be able to succeed, scholastically.

As part of my personal transition, I was forced to reconfigure many of my cognitive strategies by learning a variety of compensatory methods that helped me to experience success as a college student; however, in contrast to what many other learning disabled students experience, I entered higher education willing to embrace the writing process, even though it was sometimes painstakingly difficult.

I was fortunate to have graduated from a high school that had a strong creative writing program that emphasized poetry; our teacher encouraged students to embrace writing, from the vantage point of a poet; and, by virtue of this, I ingested, processed and externalized responses to lessons that promoted experimentation with language and writing concepts, taught me how to discuss my writing, and provided me with a positive view of myself as a writer.

Making the transition from high school, junior college/community college, to university-level academia can easily frustrate and discourage students who have learning disabilities; as, during their first semesters, disabled students often struggle with new methods, routines and strategies for learning, coincidentally as they are required to maintain the rigorous usage of newly-acquired cognitive compensation methods. LD students, especially, are required to struggle for several semesters before having the chance to access courses in curricula that are specifically important to their aspirations or that are just creative and fun. There is another approach.

Embracing the Poetic Function of Language

James Britton et al performed a study The Development of Writing Abilities, (11-18) in which language was classified as expressive, transactional and poetic.

Transactional language was defined as that which is focused on the production of communication for a purpose: to inform or influence. The researchers defined Poetic Language as that which allows writers to examine knowledge, through a personal lens, that utilizes imagination to understand and apply knowledge. (Young, 2000).

In Considering Values: The Poetic Function of Language, Art Jang asserts that political forum necessitates students’ becoming a spectator in the writing process and to shape their writing, founded on their personal conceptions of their own values and understanding, as it relates to new knowledge or experience as opposed to basing this on their attempts to accomplish a task. Poetic form and language offers students a viable amount of learning that is separate from any individual task.

Due to learning disabled students need to focus more on struggling with tasks, during their educations, introducing poetic concepts that value the exper-ience of the individual more so than a valuable the individual’s output con-trasts with the customary method more writing education.

This contrast could provide learning disabled students a much more positive experience in becoming equipped with communicative writing skills.

Essentially, poetic form requires students’ engagement; however, it also unveils students the ability to control and queues in their expression, without the need to feel pressure to achieve that is inherent in transactional writing methods and curricula. Students’ responses to poetic writing, in Young’s assignments, are devised for prone applications to business-, science- and engineering-related emphases.

From writers who were engaged in a writing across the curriculum program responses, like: I feel in control, it was really fun to express my feelings and ideas without worrying about a grade or grammar and it’s interesting to see how my mind develops an idea to a point I haven’t planned. (Young, 2000) even though these student writers were not identified as having learning disability, the new results that returned are the objectives for a poetry-centered learning disabled writing class and/or learning-disabled writing tutoring facility.

The Word Paletting Process

The process’ first step has the student writer select his or her anchor term; this is a word or phrase from which each student brainstorms a palette of connected words, each of which, in conjunction with the anchor term, comprises a compound word or phrase that it is recognized as commonplace in conversational speech.

Then, the writer brainstorms a list of words that each connects to the anchor term in fairly-commonplace speech. The palette terms can be adjectives, verbs, adverbs, puns, homonyms, homophones or semantically-related to the anchor term. However, the anchor term would best not to be an overtly commonplace word, such as an article, when students are first learning to utilize word paletting, due to the potential for the effects of the process to be inadvertently diluted.

In the next step, students are prompted to provide an introduction that segues in to incorporate the first paletted term. Students should be prompted to worry less about meaning-making and focus more on generating a flow of ideas, utilizing their creativity and imagina-tion. Learners should be seeking out potential connections that exist between the paletted term that is being focused upon and utilized, currently, and the potential connections that exist between it and the subsequent paletted term they will be including, next, in the wording of their poem. (I have realized, quite recently, that the paletted terms, addition to representing quoted information, represent identified intellectual property that a writer searches for, acquires, includes in his or her body of writing and must cite, too.)

The next step, rock-tumbling, requires students to assess and adjust the wording within the poem, to improve the flow of their creation, through the elimination of unnecessary wording. After rock-tumbling, bridge-building, the act of adding wording or layering implied meaning is utilized, in which the addition of wording or the layering of implied meaning and connections within the structure of the poem is carried out.

Then, in the Wrap-up stage, writers adjust line-length, infuse slant rhyme and add homophones, homonyms and alliteration, as a means to enhance the poem’s cadence, while preserving the meaning of the written work. Students, here, will modify the poem’s visual representation, by experimenting with typographic elements, such as purposed line breaks, altered typography, form and creative hyphenation.

The primary focus of Word Paletting is placed on language creation and making connections, through the stages of the writing process; meaning is usually discovered in a Word Paletted poem, through the act of composing it or in evaluating it, after its completion.

After acquiring proficiency in this writing strategy’s usage and having experienced discovery, while writing, subsequent lessons can be structured, utilizing specific attention, that can be placed on direction. Understanding that writing can be a process through which thoughts are discovered and by which connections are made between found material is a valuable lesson for learning disabled students and, potentially, can be transferred to other written tasks.

*quot;Word Palleting" is an excerpt from Matt Ramsey's "THE ALTERNATIVE LEARNING POETRY WRITING LABORATORY" which can be found on his blog t The Grammar Cracker.

Matt Ramsey, M.Ed. was born in 1971, in Baltimore, MD, took a BA in Writing in 1996 and an M.Ed. in Writing in 2011. His publication rights span from 1987-2016, in Baltimore, MD; Washington, DC; New York, New York; New Haven, CT; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA and online.