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Choices are being made all the time, whether or not an author devotes hours of agonising deliberation to weighing alternative words and sentences, or whether or not the author feels like the piece somehow “just wrote itself.” At issue in either of these (or every other) case is the depth and proficiency of the author’s toolkit and how it’s all put to use: their vocabulary, grammar skills, reading background, sense of humour, opinions, personality, perceptivity, imagination, on and on… Alongside an author’s motive for writing to an audience, the synthesis of all these traits and skills comprises an author’s resources. And the synthesis of their use, the whole sum of these separate parts, these tools, is a different effect every time. Tools create effects, and sometimes they’re great, and sometimes they’re not.
By tools, I specifically mean diction (word choice), syntax and phrasing (word order), semantics (word meaning), vocabulary (range of diction), figurative language (imaginative or expressive imagery), and sentence types (semantic construction and arrangement), as well as knowledge of other more grammatical details. And I suppose it’s not nearly as accurate to lump in personality traits, opinions, sense of humour, and the like with what I commonly call “tools.” But to suggest to a student when she’s staring at a blank page, trying to remember what’s at her disposal, “Hey, all this stuff is in your author’s toolkit,” just helps to keep the task of writing more straightforward.
With all this said, remember that my task was to teach writing that I would enjoy reading; marking is tedious, yet the more proficient and engaging the writing is, the smoother and more enjoyable the marking becomes. Since we all make choices while writing something down – often split-second subconscious choices – the task I posed for students was to do it as deliberately as possible. But I also wanted students to enjoy writing, and taking an attitude while teaching that “writing is a task” seemed counterproductive. So instead I tried to encourage ownership. “If you remember nothing else from this course,” I used to stress, “remember ‘connotation’ and ‘denotation.’”
Connotation: a word’s contextual meaning and/or all the semantic baggage that word carries
*easy to remember: connotation = context = convey (also = concise)
Denotation: the various definitions of a given word, to be found in the dictionary, that might suitably apply to this-or-that context
*easy to remember: denotation = dictionary definition
I stressed denotation more as a moot concept – which can get rather philosophical – by suggesting that words tend to convey meaning because they are mediated and influenced by the other words around them (whether diction alone, or syntax, or metaphor, or sentence structure, and so on) as well as by the people who say that word and all the other words. So connotation is really the key to understanding voice or style. By choosing to use ‘this’ tool over ‘that’ one, a writer has deliberately made a precise decision to help convey some message of intended effect to the audience, and that decision must be owned because the audience will seek no one else to account for it.
Connotation, though, is entirely in the hands of the author, as far as it concerns developing that piece of writing. On the other hand, once the piece is published or handed in, the author is done. At that point, connotation is entirely the purview of the audience. “So get it right,” I told students. “Be clear by being responsible: concise and precise.” Incidentally, this is why – in the Rhetorical triangle model – I place small-‘t’ “truth” directly in the centre. This is the real pressure I think writing students face, and of course, most students more broadly: once that piece is turned in or handed over, once an assignment or production is out of my hands and into yours, once I can no longer control or adapt the effect of the tools, the message I intended to send…
But you know what? This kind of pressure is precisely what I wanted students to feel, this weight of bearing responsibility for oneself, because this is what I believe school should teach above all other lessons. I just happened to use writing as the tool.
More than just the secret to good writing, connotation sums up all I might ever hope that a student would learn from my teaching. In this single robust concept exists everything of value to be found not just in the Rhetorical triangle model of communication but in the ways we learn overall.
The Rhetorical WHY 