Chapter 16:

Summary

Shaking the Form: Clark mentions in the opening section that any writer or poet can never truly drop the shackles of who has come before them in the arena of their writing.

The Big Move: Clark states that writers should look at others works and (without plagiarizing) imitate work. An instructive way to do this is to revisit Shakespeare's sonnets.

Playing with Tradition: Shakespeare was known to take common metaphor and flip it. Clark discusses that inverting meanings is an effective strategy when writing and that the structure of the writing is important when deciding what literary devices to use.

Writing Lessons

1. Incorporate the reading of poetry into your habits of language learning. If any form of discourse was meant for X-ray reading, it is the poem, with its beautiful compression of language, meaning and emotion.
2. Try your hand at writing poetry. If the sonnet seems to exacting a form, try something simpler- a haiku, for example. Forms of writing connect with one another in both mundane and mysterious ways.
3. Use your X-ray reading skills to study and understand traditions in which some forms of writing exist: from the sonnet to the novel, from the ship's log to the web log. Pay special attention to the parts that create the structure of the work. Learn the names of those parts.
4. Poetry begs to be read aloud, bud so does great prose. When you come across a piece of writing that moves you in a special way , you can use two strategies to intensify that experience. First, you can read the passage aloud. Read it aloud to yourself then read it to another person, then let another person read it to you. You can also type out the prose, getting the sense of what it feels like to re-create it with your own fingers.
5. Remember the big move. Study writers you admire and imitate them without plagiarizing. Over time, play with that influence to find you own voice, just as Shakespeare played with the form of the sonnet.

Critique

Clark in this chapter focuses on the process of writing. This aligns with the Chris Anson's article "Process Pedagogy and its Legacy." Clark seems to appeal to the learning of the process of the product. Clark also aligns himself with the article "The Cognition of Discovery: Defining the Rhetorical Problem" by Flowers and Hayes. He does this by encouraging readers to expose themselves to authors and to mimic those authors traits. Flower and Hayes would say that this is assisting writers by exposing them to different rhetorical situations so that different parts of the situation can be identified and used in similar circumstances. Clark's ideas for this chapter align themselves to the research an thus become valuable for the reader who intends to write.