Aim: How does a writer create effects through the connotations of words and images?
Do Now: Think/Share - What if life had a reset button?
Everyone regrets something they did in the course of their life and I’m pretty sure everyone wants to go back and change it. The class discussed what they would do if they were to go back in time. We learned Mrs.Peterson was a dangerous woman back in the day, almost drowning her cousin. I’m definitely not getting on her bad side. Some students wished they were nicer to other people and others wished they could change how they handled school.
Denotation and Connotation:
The denotation of a word, or precise meaning of a word, but often the connotations, or associations & emotional overtones attached, help the reader make important inferences about meaning. Writers choose words both for their literal meanings (their dictionary definitions or denotations) and for their implied meanings (their emotional associations, or connotations). Writers can convey certain vibes and feelings to the reader through the connotations of a word. Some words have a negative or a positive connotation. For example, if I were to describe Squidward as scrawny, he would be quite upset, but if I described him as slim, he might just crack a smile. Both scrawny and slim mean skinny, but have totally different connotations, scrawny being the one with the negative connotation and slim being the one with the positive connotation. Another example is; “Youthful” and “Childish”. Both describe the state of being similar to a child, but Youthful has a positive connotation (vibrant, lively, energetic) and Childish has a negative connotation (immature, juvenile, having the emotional maturity of a child).
Childish: Youthful:
TEAMWORK CONNOTATION and DENOTATION in Speak
Students were broken up into groups to discuss the connotations of these sentences and scenarios. My group along with many others thought this:
“I dive into the stream of fourth-period lunch students and swim down the hall to the cafeteria.”
I think the image of diving has more of a negative connotation compared to swimming. Diving makes me think that there is a whole sea of kids and you have to straight up jump into them. Swimming also has a negative connotation but not as bad as diving.
To make the sentence neutral, we took out all the flavour out of the sentence and made this: “I go into the group of fourth-period lunch students and go down the hall to the cafeteria.”
“I ditch my tray and bolt for the door.”
The words “ditch” and “bolt” give off a sense of urgency. This gives off negative vibes because no one wants to be in a rush. The speaker feels like he needs to get out of wherever he is at the moment. To make the sentence neutral, we took the sense of urgency out and ended up with; “I drop my tray off and go towards the door.”
Students also had to annotate a paragraph from our homework. We searched for words that show diction, syntax, and imagery that create the narrator’s voice, and connotative word choices. Here’s an example:
“When I think of the hometown of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel. And so, when I think of that time and that place, I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shantytown where I lived. And one other thing I remember, another incongruency of memory—a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust—Miss Lottie’s marigolds.”
All the highlighted words give us a good idea of where the author grew up in her childhood. Most of the words in the paragraph have negative connotations and paints a picture in your head of a musty, dusty, dirty, beat down, and dry town. There are a few words with positive connotations like “brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust” and “lush green lawns” which gives this town a bit more hope.
HW: Annotate the story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier, while reading. Use the annotations rubric as a guide as to what you should be executing.
Reflection:
I learned that the connotations of a word can really change the way your work is read and changes the way the reader feels. Connotations hold lots of weight. As we could see from the teamwork exercises, connotations add lots of flavour to a sentence and gives the reader a whole different feeling. Connotations(connected ideas and feelings) really shows the tone and the point the author is trying to get across.
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