Screw Conventions.

I'll start off with Noden, since that's what insisted my blog title. Chapter 6: The Artist's Special Effects really got me thinking about my own writing. I write on the fly, and there are many times where I want to portray a distinct mood, tone, thought. I want the reader to really truly understand a sentence the way that I meant for them to understand it-and sometimes you just have to chuck the grammar conventions that you're hung up on and go with your heart. As Noden says, "good sentences don't always follow conventions...[special effects] help create meanings that otherwise couldn't be expressed.
Now back to Chapter 5: Advanced Techniques. I'll start off by saying that some of the "chunks" that Noden defines are indeed advanced. For example, Chunk #3 deals with using run ons within your writing to create certain meanings. Now, obviously this supports what I just finished saying about conventions. HOWEVER, this isn't a technique that I'd find easy to teach a high school class. Students are taught for years and years that run on sentences are bad, that they need to separate lengthy sentences with the appropriate punctuation. How can we then say, "but sometimes it's okay." we can't. This technique is only effective for a writer who knows the conventions, has exhausted every other possibility, and then decides a run on sentence is appropriate. A high school student is not, in my opinion, an advanced enough writer to be able to decided when to follow and not follow convention. That's for the big dogs. Teach yours students the conventions, first; later they can learn to rule break.
Chunk #1 deals with noun collages and Chunk #2 with mixed collages. Of the two, I prefer the latter. In the examples Noden provided, I found the use of noun collages to be overwhelming. The authors are on imagery overload and the reader can't catch up. Detail and specifics are great, but moderation is also healthy. Mixed collages, in contrast, utilize variety and aren't as repetitive.
In Chunk #4, Noden discusses the power of describing invisible objects. I do this in my own writing - use "no" to show what a character or setting lacks - but I never realized I was utilizing a literary technique :) I love the examples Noden uses; the use of "no" is just as powerful and telling as the description of visible, animate objects and characters. I immediately thought of a presentation I did on my trips to Haiti. I started out by challenging the audience with this sentence: "imagine a world with no clean water, no ready and available food, no functioning and supplied hospitals, no way out." Of course, the reason I employ this method of introduction is because it immediately gets my audience thinking about what they have and what the Haitians do not. It is such a powerful visual-even though I'm describing invisible things. Crazy, huh?