Abstraction Ladder

READING: Best American Poetry (2008), pages 113-125.

The image below visually and linguistically outlines S.I. Hayakawa's Ladder of Abstraction and demonstrates what we mean when we speak of abstract and concrete language; I hope, to some extent, this will further clarify the issue for all of us. To see a larger version, please click the image:

02.07.11: UPDATE

READING: Best American Poetry (2008), pages 98-110.

WRITING: Continue on with our in-class assignment by completing the following steps: 1) create syntactically coherent connections between today's student line swaps, 2) extricate abstractions from your poems and replace them with concrete language, 3) insert three neologisms into the fabric of your poem, and 4) enjamb all but the final line of your poem.

REMINDER: As you can tell from comparing our progress in-class to that of the tentative syllabus, we are a bit behind. Workshops will, most likely, begin next week. This necessarily means that we will cut a week from on non-fiction section. This should not be too much a worry because many of the concepts we will address in the non-fiction portion of this class will be components of our fiction section as well.