COMMENTARY WRITING IS EASY WHEN YOU KNOW HOW…

Criterion A: Understanding and interpretation

How well does the student’s interpretation reveal understanding of the thought and feeling of the passage?

How well are ideas supported by references to the passage?

Criterion B: Appreciation of the writer’s choices

To what extent does the analysis show appreciation of how the writer’s choices of language, structure, technique and style shape meaning?

Criterion C: Organization and development

How well organized, coherent and developed is the presentation of ideas?

Criterion D: Language

How clear, varied and accurate is the language?

How appropriate is the choice of register, style and terminology? (“Register” refers, in this context, to the student’s use of elements such as vocabulary, tone, sentence structure and terminology appropriate to the commentary.)

Let us begin small and have a look at how meaning is created through technique, structure and style.

Who ever heard of a clockwork orange? … The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

The Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.

Write an analysis of this extract. You will be graded on the following criteria.

Criteria Yes/No Comment

Point-of-view / narrative voice

Use of punctuation

Adjectives and adverbs

Personification

Metaphor

Theme – comment on society or humanity

The structure of your writing

Ability to embed relevant quotes

Use of register and language

As with all commentaries you will need ‘a way in’. Try using the SCASI system to help you with the following extracts. Make some notes on the following and then see if you can write a paragraph discussing HOW meaning was created and WHAT the meaning is for the reader!

S: SETTING - Is there a place?C: CHARACTER - Who’s involved?A: ACTION/SITUATION - What’s the situation? (i.e. What

if anything is going on?)S: STYLE - What’s interesting about the words and the

way they’re arranged?I: IDEA/THEME - Is there an idea (Either state or

underlying) or topic?

1. Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand.

(Sonnet to My Mother, George Barker)

2. To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of. To know he can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is not next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with

(Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett)

3. When lovely woman stoops to follyAnd finds too late that men betrayWhat charm can soothe her melancholy?What art can wash her tears away?

(Woman, Oliver Goldsmith, 1728 – 1774)

4. To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of. To know he can do better next time, unrecognizable better, and there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with.

(Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett)

5. The lights burn low in the barber-shopAnd the shades are drawn with careTo hide the haughty barbersCutting each other’s hair.

(The Tales the Barbers Tell, Morris Bishop)

6. Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fightBut Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

(Epigrams, The Pacifist Hilaire Belloc)

Have a look at the following extract from a short story by Sam Lipsyte’s titled “The Climber Room.”

She wanted a baby. That was all. She still believed everything she believed, cultivated privacy and solitude, and, despite her attachment to the Sweet Apple tykes, believed childlessness the noble course (yes, your kid might cure cancer, but probably he’d grow up to play video games or, if the world followed its current path, huddle in a gulch slurping gulchwater and recalling the magnificence of video games). But she wanted a baby.

The following analysis was written by Justin Taylor… note how much you can take away from a text by looking at how sentences are constructed and how sounds are made…

There’s a lot to love in Lipsyte’s long loopy sentence, rich as it is with harsh jokes and wild asides. One thing I love is that it is neither sloppy nor slack. There’s a secret minimalism at work below the surface of his flashy, fast-moving prose, perhaps best embodied in the phrase “huddle in a gulch slurping gulchwater.” The phrase is bound tightly together by the short “u” sound that recurs in five of the six words (even the “a” sounds like an “uh” here) and the repetition of “gulch,” an inherently absurd-ish word that is also rich with music. The short sentences on either side of the long one serve as its frame. Those first two sentences are simple, declarative, seemingly definitive, four and three words respectively—small and getting smaller, a done deal. Then the third sentence explodes: sixty words of half-unhinged hopes and fears, all in the self-hectoring rhythm of human thought, culminating in a horrific vision of a hypothetical child in a post-cataclysmic ditch, which ought to be enough to spook anyone out of procreating—only it’s not. “But she wanted a baby” says the fourth sentence, five words reprising the blunt structure and declarative tone of those first two sentences. Syntax, word choice, and narrative flow are all mutually reinforcing and enhance each other to make the passage’s point: This woman is arguing with herself and losing. She wants something that she does not want to want.

Taken from an article by Justin Taylorhttp://bombmagazine.org/article/922899/craft-talk-nobody-asked-for

The following has been taken from a lecturer talking about how writers work to craft sentences…

In her story “The Blood Jet,” Schutt ends a sentence about “life after a certain age” by describing it as something completely contained - “acutely felt, clearly flat”—two pairs of words in which an adverb precedes an adjective. The adjectives (felt and flat) are both monosyllabic, they are both four letters in length, and they both share the same consonantal casing: they begin with a tentative-sounding, deflating f and end with the abrupt t. In between the two ends of each adjective, Schutt retains the l, though it slides one space backward in the second adjective;

and for the interior vowel, she moves downward from a short e to a short a. The predecessive adverbs acutely and clearly share the k-sounding c, and both words are constituted of virtually the same letters, except that clearly doesn’t retain the t of acutely. The four-word phrase has a resigned and final sound to it; there is more than a little agony in how, with just two little adjustments, felt has been diminished and transmogrified into flat, in how the richness of receptivity summed up in felt has been leveled into the thudding spiritlessness of flat. All of this emotion has been delivered by the most ordinary of words—nothing dredged up from a thesaurus. But what is perhaps most striking about the four-word phrase is the family resemblances between the two pairs of words. There is nothing in the letter-by-letter makeup of the phrase “clearly flat” that wasn’t already physically present in “acutely felt”; the second of the two phrases contains the alphabetic DNA of the first phrase.

Almost every word in a sentence can be categorized as either a content word or a functional word. The content words comprise the nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and most verbs: they are carriers of information and suppliers of sensory evidence. The functional words are the prepositions, the conjunctions, the articles, the to of an infinitive, and such—the kinds of words necessary to hold the content words in place on the page, to absorb them into the syntax. The functional words in fact tend to recede into the sentence structure; their visibility and audibility are limited. It’s the content words that impress themselves upon the eye and the ear, so the writer’s attention to sound and shape has to be lavished on the exposed words. They stand out in relief. (Pronouns, of course, do not quite fit tidily into this binary system; pronouns tend to be prominent when they are functioning as subjects or objects and tend to be shrinking when they are in a possessive capacity. And some common verbs—especially those formed from the infinitives to be and to have—tend toward the unnoticeability of operational words.)

In Christine Schutt’s two-clause formation “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,” the second half of a sentence from the short story “Young,” the conspicuous content words are lips, stuck, licked, and talk. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common—we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a k that has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminal k (talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don’t appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i and c that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the k are side-by-side at last—coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.

Consider the following extract by the same author. What can you write about how words work in this extract?

I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck. This was at night, from my mother’s window. The man dropped the crooked end behind the woman’s neck and yanked just hard enough to get the woman walking to the car.

If you would like to view full content of the above extract, it is great reading – it has been taken from: THE SENTENCE IS A LONELY PLACE - A LECTURE DELIVERED BY THE SHORT-STORY WRITER GARY LUTZ TO THE STUDENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S WRITING PROGRAM IN NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2005

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200901/?read=article_lutz

LET’S TRY DECONSTRUCTING A POEM.

The Woman at the Washington Zoo

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.   They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I....                this print of mine, that has kept its color   Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null   Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so   To my bed, so to my grave, with no Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,   The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief— Only I complain.... this serviceable Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,   Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining   In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped   As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,   Aging, but without knowledge of their age, Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death— Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.   And there come not to me, as come to these, The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,   Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards   Tearing the meat the flies have clouded....                                                                 Vulture,   When you come for the white rat that the foxes left, Take off the red helmet of your head, the black Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man: The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn, To whose hand of power the great lioness Stalks, purring....                               You know what I was, You see what I am: change me, change me!

Randall Jarrell

To help you deconstruct the poem… we will look at SCASI and see if it helps.

1. SETTINGWhat significance lies in the poem’s Washington setting? Consider the following quotes from the poem – they support setting.

The saris go by me from the embassies

Neither from my chief./ The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief. dome-shadowed, withering among columns, / Wavy beneath

fountains

2. CHARACTERSWhat does the reader learn about the protagonist in the poem? What type of life does she lead? How does she feel about her life?

this dull null/Navy I wear to work, and wear from work. So /To my bed, so to my grave no /Complaints, no comment these beings trapped /As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap: Aging, but without knowledge of their age, /Kept safe here, knowing

not of death The world goes by my cage and never sees me

3. ACTIONGive a detailed account of the poem’s structure and development.

The opening stanza is one line only – why? How is duality established?

How does the duality continue into the next two lines? Why is the line following that short and broken? It introduces a long

stanza setting the woman’s life in contrast to what has gone before. How does the shape of the stanza mimic how she is feeling?

There seems to be a pause – at line 20 – and the tone changes. What does it change to? Why? How? How is there a sense of the persona’s anguish growing?

The next stanza carries the poem to its climax – what is the climax?

4. STYLEExamine the poet’s use of repetition.It is very important to consider how you can mention style when you write your introduction. The style is usually HOW the author creates meaning… The style give weight to the author’s central themes. Consider how the author echoes phrases. They are not exactly repeated.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet Navy I wear to work, and wear from work so /To my bed, so to my grave my…so to my no /Complaints, no comment My chief … his chief no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses open, open! change me, change me!

5. IDEASWhich line do you think is the most important in reflecting the poet’s message? Quite often either the title of the poem or the final lines will help you identify the author’s intent.

Can you write an introduction for this Commentary now?

WHEN DOING THE PROSE IT IS USUALLY EASY TO WORK OUT WHETHER THE EXTRACT IS PREDOMINANTLY ABOUT CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS OR SETTING

If there is little or no dialogue, it is more likely to be about setting. A setting is not just the physical surroundings… it is much more than that. Ask yourself whether the setting is one of the following:

Internal… does the main character struggle with a dilemma? This is an internal setting.

An external setting that is symbolic of the protagonist. A setting that is cultural and reveals the struggles of the character/s A setting that is political and reveals elements of society or human

nature… Remember that in a extract the setting will support the construction

of the character in some way.

IDEAS/THEMES If you don’t see it – don’t make it up… Generally speaking the theme will be about society or human nature The theme can be a comment on human nature and their behaviour The theme might be man’s struggle in the natural environment

A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had to do carefully because he had a peg leg1.

The roadway was asp halted blue.It was a summer day in England. Rain clouds were amassed back of a

1 peg leg: wooden leg

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church tower which stood on rising ground. As he looked up he noticed well those slits, built for defence, in the blood coloured brick. Then he ran his eye with caution over cypresses and between gravestones. He might have been watching for a trap, who had lost his leg in France for not noticing the gun beneath a rose.

For, climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life above in the green grass, in the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright which, as still as this dark afternoon, stared at whosoever looked, or hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.

It was a time of war. The young man in pink tweeds had been repatriated from a prisoners' camp on the other side. Now, at the first opportunity, he was back.

He had known the village this church stood over, but not well. He had learned the walks before he turned soldier, though he had met few of those who lived by. The 20 graveyard he had never entered. But he came now to visit because someone he loved, a woman, who, above all at night, had been in his feelings when he was behind barbed wire, had been put there while he was away, and her name, of all names, was Rose.

The bus, with its watching passengers, departed. In the silence which followed he began to climb the path leading to those graves, when came a sudden upthrusting cackle of geese in a panic, the sound of which brought home to him a stack of faggots2 he had seen blown high by a grenade, each stick separately stabbing the air in a frieze3 which he had watched fall back, as an opened fan closes. So, while the geese quietened, he felt what he had seen until the silence which followed, when he at once forgot.

But there was left him an idea that he had been warned.Propping himself on his stick, he moved slowly up that path to the wicket

gate between two larger cypresses. He felt more than ever that he did not wish to be observed. So he no longer watched the roses. As if to do his best to become unseen, he kept his eyes on the gravel over which he was dragging the peg leg.

For there was a bicycle bell, ringing closer and closer by the church, clustering spray upon spray of sound which wreathed the air much as those roses grew around the headstones, whence, so he felt, they narrowly regarded him.

Which caused him to stop dead when a boy of about six came, over the hill on a tricycle, past the porch; then, as the machine got up speed, he stood to one side, in spite of the gate still being closed between the two of them. He sharply stared but, as he took in the child's fair head, he saw nothing, nothing was brought back. He did not even feel a pang, as well he might if only he had known.

Charley was irritated when the boy, after getting off to open the gate and climbing onto his machine again, shrilly rang the bell as he dashed past. Then

2 faggots: a bundle of sticks tied together3 frieze: a painted or sculptured decoration

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50

the young man 45 started slowly on his way once more. And he forgot the boy who was gone, who spelled nothing to him.

For Rose had died while he was in France, he said over and over under his breath. She was dead, and he did not hear until he was a prisoner. She had died, and this sort of sad garden was where they had put her without him, and, as he looked about while he leaned on the gate, he felt she must surely have come as a stranger when her time came, that if a person's nature is at all alive after he or she has gone, then she could never have imagined herself here nailed into a box, in total darkness, briar roots pushing down to the red hair of which she had been so proud and fond. He could not even remember her saying that she had been in this churchyard, which was now the one place one could pay a call on Rose, whom he could call to mind, though never all over at one time, or at all clearly, crying, dear Rose, laughing, mad Rose, holding her baby, or, oh Rose, best of all in bed, her glorious locks abounding.

Henry Green, the opening paragraphs of the novel Black

Let’s break this down using SCASI

1. SETTING AND CHARACTERHow does the writer use the setting of this episode to convey his central character?

2. ACTIONAre there any indications of how the story may develop beyond this point?

3. STYLEHow does the passage’s style contribute to its atmosphere of drama and high emotion?

4. IDEAS

What does the passage suggest about life, death, love and war?

DOES SCASI WORK FOR YOU?Is it a good base from which to work? What other ways are there to deconstruct a text?

HAVE A LOOK AT THE POEM BELOW. FOLLOWING IT IS A SHORT COMMENTARY. READ BOTH AND DO THE FOLLOING QUESTIONS WITH THE ESSAY.

1. Can you identify three main points used in the essay?2. Can you identify where the thesis has been referenced?3. Can you identify any meta-language? Underline it.4. Identify the personal perspective in the conclusion?

Two Hands 

My father in his study sits up late, a pencil nodding stiffly in the hand 

that thirteen times between breakfast and supper led a ascalpel an intricate dance. The phone has sobbed itself to sleep but he has articles to read. I curse tonight, at the other end of the house, this other hand whose indecisions keep me cursing nightly; fingers with some style on paper, elsewhere none. Who would have thought hands so alike - spade palms, blunt fingers short in the joint- would have no more in common? All today, remembering the one, I have watched the other save no one, serve no one, dance with this pencil. Hand, you may have your chance to stitch a life for finger that have stitched new life for many. Down the Lancet margin thsi hand moves rapidly as mine moves slow. A spasm shakes the phone at his elbow. The pencil drops: he will be out again. ----------------------- Jon Stallworthy

In the poem Two Hands, by Jon Stallworthy, the speaker suggests his admiration for his father through references to his disciplined, hard work, and his expertise in his life saving work as a surgeon. Even after a long day of thirteen ‘intricate’ operations and an evening of phone calls, he is sitting up making notes. As the title implies, there are another set of hands and they belong to the speaker. The narrator juxtaposes his skills and their worth, with his father’s, to imply an ironic and sad lack of connection between them.

The lack of connection between the son and father is illustrated in the tone of the narrator. The narrator expresses his frustration and ‘curses’ his indecisiveness ‘nightly’. Despite the narrator’s desire to be connected to his father he is situated ‘at the other end of the house’. The distance more metaphorical than literal confirms the narrator’s dejected tone. It is reinforced further through the use of the rhetorical question ‘Who would have thought/… would have no more in common?’ Despite the each hand representing part of a whole, the narrator laments that tonight his father ‘… will be out again.’

The father is ‘out’ literally and metaphorically as the narrator represents the attributes of his father as vastly different to his own. Superficially their hands are similar as they are both have ‘spade palms’ and ‘blunt fingers’. However the reader is invited to see the difference and their distance in the personification of his father’s hand that ‘moves rapidly’ and ‘performs an intricate dance’. In sharp contrast to this, the narrator’s hand is ‘slow’ and ‘indecisive’ implying a lack of confidence in his own ability. This in conjunction with the final lines referencing a phone that ‘spasm(s)’ and ‘shakes’ reveals sadness in the lack of attention the

narrator draws from his father. It is indeed the phone that, in its personification of something that has ‘sobbed itself to sleep’, connotes the narrator.

Despite this distance between the son and father there is also a unity in the structure and repetition of hands. While the father’s hands ‘led a scalpel’ thirteen times that day, the speaker laments his own hand that all day ‘save(ed) no one’. The image of hands being connected is furthered in the ‘stitching’ that unites the work of father and son and in both cases in connotes care and creation. The narrator stiches with words, creating the life of a crafted work while the surgeon stiches the flesh, giving the body a new lease of life. There is a realisation in the concluding part of the poem and the ‘stitching’, that the narrator may be able to immortalise his father in his writing and he has found a way to appreciate his own talent.

The poem’s title ‘Two Hands’ establishes the theme of the poem and builds upon the idea of two hands that can be similar and have such variance. The relationship between the father and son is revealed through the voice of the son and the reader is invited to see the admiration the son has for the father through Stallworthy’s unified structure. The tone of frustration is emphasised through the juxtaposition and personification of the ‘pencil that nods stiffly’ and the pencil that dances. The poem could be read as an exploration on societal perceptions regarding the value of science in relation to the arts. The narrator’s conclusion that one can support the other highlights the interconnectedness of areas of knowledge.

 

Brainstorm

The house was shaken by a rising windThat rattled window and door. He sat aloneIn an upstairs room and heard these things: a blindRan up with a bang, a door slammed, a groanCame from some hidden joist, and a leaky tap,At any silence of the wind, walked likeA blind man through the house. Timber and sapRevolt, he thought, from washer, baulk and spike.Bent to his book, continued unafraidUntil the crows came down from their loud flightTo walk along the rooftree overhead.Their horny feet, so near but out of sight,Scratched on the slate; when they were blown awayHe heard their wings beat till they came again,While the wind rose, and the house seemed to sway,And window panes began to blind with rain.

The house was talking, not to him, he thought,But to the crows; the crows were talking backIn their black voices. The secret might be out;Houses are only trees stretched on the rack.And once the crows knew, all nature would know.Fur, leaf and feather would invade the form,Nail rust with rain and shingle warp with snow,Vine tear the wall, till any straw-borne stormCould rip both roof and rooftree off and showNaked to nature what they had kept warm.

He came to feel the crows walk on his headAs if he were the house, their crooked feetScratched, through the hair, his scalp. He might be deadIt seemed, and all the noises underneathBe but the cooling of the sinews, veins,Juices, and sodden sacks suddenly letting go;While in his ruins of wiring, his burst mains,The rainy wind had been set free to blowUntil the green uprising and mob ruleThat ran the world had taken over him,Split him like seed, and set him in the schoolWhere any crutch can learn to be a limb.

Inside his head he heard the stormy crows.

Wimsey did not want to hear anymore. He made his way down to the belfry1 door and climbed the stair to the ringing chamber. The bells were still sounding their frenzied call. He passed the sweating ringers and climbed again – up through the clock-chamber, piled with household goods, and up and on to the bell-chamber itself. As his head rose through the floor, the brazen fury of the bells fell about his ears like the blows from a thousand beating hammers. The whole tower was drenched and drunken with noise. It rocked and reeled with the reeling of the bells, and staggered like a drunken man. Stunned and shaken, Wimsey set his foot on the last ladder.

Halfway up he stopped, clinging desperately with his hands. He was pierced through and buffeted by the clamour. Through the brazen crash and clatter there went one high note, shrill and sustained, that was like a sword in the brain. All the blood in his body seemed to rush to his head, swelling it to bursting-point. He released his hold on the ladder and tried to shut out the uproar with his fingers, but such a sick giddiness overcame him that he swayed, ready to fall. It was not noise – it was brute pain, a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan2, crazy, intolerable torment. He felt himself screaming, but could not hear his own cry. His ear-drums were cracking; his senses swam away. It was infinitely worse than any roar of heavy artillery. That had beaten and deafened, but this unendurable shrill clangour was a raving madness, an assault of devils. He could move neither forward nor backwards though his failing wits urged him, ‘I must get out – I must get out of this.’ The belfry heaved and

wheeled about him as the bells dipped and swung within the reach of an outstretched hand. Mouth up, mouth down, they brawled with their tongues of bronze, and through it all that shrill, high, sweet, relentless note went stabbing and shivering.

He could not go down, for his head dizzied and stomach retched at the thought of it. With a last, desperate sanity he clutched at the ladder and forced his tottering limbs upward. Foot by foot, rung by rung, he fought his way to the top. Now the trap-door was close above his head. He raised a leaden hand and thrust the bolt aside. Staggering, feeling as though his bones were turned to water, and with blood running from his nose and ears, he felt rather than stepped, out upon the windy roof. As he flung the door to behind him, the demoniac clangour sank back into the pit, to rise again, transmuted to harmony, through the louvres of the belfry windows.

The Nine Tailors Dorothy L. Sayers, Landsborough Publications 1959