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Jerry Pinkham
College of Lake County
Course
Composition II, ENG 122, (3 semester hours) is designed to further the work begun in Composition I by
giving students more experience as writers and readers with various purposes in different contexts.
Students write analytical, research, and other advanced papers based on sources from literature and other
texts.
Prerequisite: ENG 121
Description
This exercise is designed to provide an auxiliary and self-engaging way for students to explore, research, and
document traditional literary works in entirely new ways using electronic "filters."
Using downloadable text files and a few common "find" functions of a typical word processing program, students
can perform a variety of quick, easy, and often insightful word searches into a literary work in ways that would be
prohibitively time-consuming to perform manually. The ultimate educational purpose of this electronic exploration is to
help generate new insights about a literary work for class discussion and debate, which, in the end, will hopefully result
in expanding a student's understanding and enjoyment of a literary work. Other applications of this module might include
key word searches of a student's own papers to assess whether or not he or she sufficiently stayed "on topic." The value
and versatility of this module lies in the imaginative flexibility users have to determine what word(s) they want to find,
having a clear reason for finding those words, and being able to determine whether there is significance to any patterns
that may or may not emerge from the search results.
The ability to electronically search an entire literary work and instantly find every reoccurrence of a given
specific word would allow teachers and students to perform dynamic research and analysis in such areas as literary
themes, writing structure, symbolism, and reoccurring motifs.
By using the Internet to download a full-text literary work, such as a novel, play, short story, or epic poem,
students can research and analyze that work in a variety of innovative ways by using common word processing program
functions. For example, let's say a teacher wanted to explore the theme of revenge in Shakespeare's play The Tragedy
of Titus Andronicus. The traditional approach‹and there's no substitute for this‹would probably center on discussing
such things as cause and effect, justification, moral issues, behavioral motivation, character strengths, and
weaknesses, and so on. What if we used a computer to instantly find where and how often Shakespeare uses the word
revenge in his play? By using a common word processor function, the "find" command, we can easily and quickly find
and highlight each of the 31 times in which Shakespeare does indeed use the word revenge in this play.
Once each occurrence is identified the class might explore which characters are talking about revenge, in what
context, what adjectives and adverbs help define revenge, and whether or not the concept of revenge plays a central
theme within the story. Other potential themes, tentatively identified by specific words, might also be explored and
discussed. For example, outlined below is a sample list of central or sub themes students might ascribe to Titus
Andronicus along with the number of times these words are actually found in the play itself (again, using the "find"
command of a typical word processing program).
| power |
6 |
| lust |
9 |
| greed |
0 |
| desire |
6 |
| vanity |
0 |
| virtue |
8 |
| innocence |
0 |
| love |
24 |
| honour |
24 |
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Lower occurrence values for the words above might suggest, for example, that the concepts of power, greed,
desire, virtue, and vanity are not strong themes in this play, while the principles of love and honor, by numerical
contrast, might be stronger candidates. These numerical differences can give rise to various class discussions and
insights that wouldn't be available through traditional instructional methods.
A logical extension of this exercise might be to expand this approach and explore how multiple word use might
provide further insights. For example, students might want to analyze the idea of how often and in what context the
concepts of love, honour, and revenge actually occur together. Using various options in Microsoft Word's "Find" command
, students can easily highlight each of these words in different boldface colors for quick identification and further
exploration either on screen or on a color-printed hard copy.
While this exercise provides a previously unavailable type of quantitative analysis approach to literary analysis,
it by no means should or can substitute for the traditional forms of qualitative analysis. In this case, technology
simply affords us yet another method to view a literary work in new and hopefully more productive ways.
* Sample website sources are provided at the end of this document.
Transferability
A large factor in the transferability of this approach to other composition courses and academic disciplines relies
largely, of course, on the availability of full-text sources; however, full-text works are beginning to increase
dramatically from two sources: (1) the availability of older, no-longer-copy-protected works via Internet sources
has risen sharply over the past several years, and (2) more recent works, both on the commercial and academic fronts,
are being made available, albeit for a price, in several formats such as web page archives, traditional text, and the new
"e-book" formats.
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