What Kind of People Talk That Way?

Abstract

We were sitting in a circle, ten high school students and I, listening intently to a student read aloud her narrative about her first airplane trip, a flight to Hong Kong to visit her grandmother, with a one night stop-over in Tokyo. She described her view out the airplane window, her exploration of her hotel room, looking in all the drawers, describing the post cards, the stationery, the menus, and the brochures. When she finished reading, the students began their comments, the first asking, Why did you tell us about those post cards and other things which were not important to the story? She shrugged, saying, Maybe I should change it. young writer did not know why she had given us those details. One or two students and I knew why because we recognized her narrator as the wide-eyed innocent abroad, the person who believes that the world has order and seeks it in the details of new surroundings. We urged her not to drop the post cards and other hotel-room details because they were an expression of both her wonder and her faith in the world's order. problem of students asking the wrong questions is not new. We have all had students who wanted to know why Poe did not tell us the name and address of the person wearing the masque of red death. We have also had students who asked just the right question, like the one who asked me, Do I have to use a lot of details all the time like Hemingway? He was sitting at his desk with his composition text open to a selection from Hemingway's The Big Two-Hearted River. text said that the selection from Hemingway was a good example of how to use detail-as if all authors should go around asking themselves how does it smell, taste, look, feel, sound.