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- Reading responses must be AT LEAST 250 words.
- Include your full name at the end of your comments. Unnamed comments will be deleted.
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- Reading responses are due by midnight on the night PRIOR to our discussion of the required reading.
The chapter on dialogue was a great read. I enjoyed it because it helped me understand what dialogue and can do. When I write dialogue, I worry about giving the characters authentic dialects. I love stories that are mostly dialogue driven because it reveals more about the character. I didn’t know that it could be so subtle. I learned I didn’t have to write the emotion after a character says something, because it should already be said through the dialogue. Another problem I have is making everything apparent instead of being subtle. Silence is also powerful in dialogue, i plan to use it more often, but in a subtle way.
ReplyDeleteThe story by Ernest Hemingway, Hills LIke White Elephants has always been a favorite story of mine, so after study dialogue for this chapter, you realize what a boss Hemingway was. The story is about an abortion, but the cool thing, is the word, abortion, is never used. The story is about a man and woman who are waiting for their train. While they are waiting, they address the Elephant in the room, which is the unwanted pregnancy. Subtle things that, I’ve never paid attention to, like when the man says something in a dismissive way by taking a drink of his beer or the way the woman tries to the change the mood by talking about the beads. The story was a great example to show how powerful dialogue can be and the way a character can do something that is translated as something else. This was a great chapter and an amazing story to have reread.
Mathew Betancourt
This is my response
ReplyDeleteIn “Hills Like White Elephants” the dialogue was interesting. Like they mention in chapter 8 dialog can say a lot without saying everything. The story really kept me on my toes. I was like okay what is going on here but it kept me interested. It seemed like they were having a fight of some sort. When the girl is talking about white elephants and the man mentions I don’t see it. That says a lot about the man's character, and the girls as well. She seems like young and confused and isn’t sure about life and decisions. I felt like she was trying to look at her surroundings to distract herself from this conversation. She obviously didn't want to decide on this problem they were talking about. It was cool how they don't mention what the issue was. We have to make our own assumption. In the ending I was quite confused as to what happened. They just sat there and smiled. Made me think they had come up with a solution.
I have had a hard time with dialogue in the past and right now as well in my essays. When I read this chapter It mentions really good pointers. I really thought the five important things to remember about dialogue was helpful. I want to practice my dialogue more the more practice the better. The reading “Hills Like White Elephants” helped me see how dialogue works. It mentions in the chapter that it doesn't have to be grammatically correct, and that's a problem I have.
This is my response
ReplyDeleteIn “Hills Like White Elephants” the dialogue was interesting. Like they mention in chapter 8 dialog can say a lot without saying everything. The story really kept me on my toes. I was like okay what is going on here but it kept me interested. It seemed like they were having a fight of some sort. When the girl is talking about white elephants and the man mentions I don’t see it. That says a lot about the man's character, and the girls as well. She seems like young and confused and isn’t sure about life and decisions. I felt like she was trying to look at her surroundings to distract herself from this conversation. She obviously didn't want to decide on this problem they were talking about. It was cool how they don't mention what the issue was. We have to make our own assumption. In the ending I was quite confused as to what happened. They just sat there and smiled. Made me think they had come up with a solution.
I have had a hard time with dialogue in the past and right now as well in my essays. When I read this chapter It mentions really good pointers. I really thought the five important things to remember about dialogue was helpful. I want to practice my dialogue more the more practice the better. The reading “Hills Like White Elephants” helped me see how dialogue works. It mentions in the chapter that it doesn't have to be grammatically correct, and that's a problem I have.
Lizette Garcia
I think I first read Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants when I was about seventeen or eighteen years old. At the time I was baffled by the story. I didn’t know anything about politics, I hadn’t heard most of the discussion on abortion- though I was aware that it was a controversial topic- and I was in my first literature class. I suppose because I read nothing but Young Adult literature in high school I wasn’t used to looking for subtext in dialogue. It amazes me to read the story again and realize just how much I’ve changed as a reader as well as a writer, since back then. At the time I was surprised to hear my professor mention abortion and looked down to re-read the story and thought “Whoa! That fits!”
ReplyDeleteIn chapter eight I especially loved LaPlante’s advice about using actions and character thoughts to fill in a silence. I hadn’t realized it until I read the chapter, but I was using silence a lot in my short story. I now look forward to going back to those scenes and exchanging sentences like “Jae didn’t say anything.”/ “Jae didn’t respond.” with re-written sentences per her advice.
I definitely enjoy character conflict shown through dialogue rather than with action packed fight scenes. It’s just my taste, but when two characters start tussling they always tend to lose my attention. Maybe that’s why the section “Them’s Fighting Words” resonated with me so much. I also appreciated LaPlante offering us an alternative to dialects in dialogue because I’ve never enjoyed reading heavily dialectic dialogue. It IS distracting and difficult to decipher.
Andrea "Andy" De Llano
Dialogue has always been one of those aspects of writing I’ve tried to focus on more, so I can perfect it (the other being character). While I think I can write dialogue that’s fair, I still think there are areas where I can improve. Some of the tips LaPlante uses in the chapter are pretty helpful – particularly when she talks about body language and not over-doing it with dialogue tags (I’m looking at you people who use crap like “growled”, etc.). The one area where I feel I struggle the most is subtext within speech. I feel as though there are a few examples in some of my own dialogue but they are few and far between, and this is the area where I feel I need the most improvement; I think I need the most improvement in this area because in the example LaPlante uses for subtext I had a hard time understanding how she interpreted the way she did. That’s not to say I didn’t understand some of what was being said “underneath” but I didn’t follow her interpretation of it. Maybe she read too much into it or maybe I didn’t see enough into it.
ReplyDeleteI’ve read “Hills Like White Elephants” many times before, and yes, including a few times during class. I think this an excellent example of subtext – which of course, Hemingway is the king of (just dialogue in general). It really does feel like a couple arguing – over what the reader needs to decipher – and it feels organic.
-Chano Martinez
I think the strongest point the book makes about dialogue is the silence (which the professor also mentioned) and I had never really thought about how impactful silence is in dialogue, this happens in person too, as the book mentions, we’re trying to make dialogue as human as possible.
ReplyDeleteI’ve also always thought that it was wrong to repeat “said” after every piece of dialogue, so I would do what the book says NOT to do. And I think another point the book mentioned which I have done in my writing is the trying to put what’s happening into dialogue, and it certainly sounds better when you avoid it.
Another quick point I was a little intrigued by was the “on subtext” section where the writer of the book got a completely different message of what the mother and daughter said. They were only speaking about shoes, I thought.
Also for the short story by Hemingway, I think the story has a very well written dialogue which follows what the book says to do. There’s a part at the bottom of page 260 which reads how gesture is part of the dialogue. Hemingway, I noticed, wrote “said” not too often, but for the most part he didn’t say anything after the dialogue, yet it’s understandable as to which character is speaking. Or, he also changed said to “Asked” for example which the books says it’s okay. I think these dialogue rules help the story a lot, making it more believable.
Lizbet Cantu
Isaac J McCoy
ReplyDeleteResponse One: Chapter Eight: Dialogue
Dialogue has never been my strong suit, so I found this chapter filled with helpful points. I am not good with silence within my dialogues, I, typically, will fill it with thoughts from one character or another. Emptiness does not feel natural within my stories unless the atmosphere is undergoing heavy or sad changes, occasionally awkward as well. As an English major and a child of parents who demand I speak properly and grammatically, I do not recall ever thinking about allowing my characters to speak improperly. Now and again I would allow specific characters to think ungrammatically, but never to speak in such a way. This is going to be an interested and fun way of improving my dialogues in my stories, though I do believe it will be quite difficult at first. Gesture implication is one of my favorite things to do with dialogue, I’m not a total goof when it comes to characters subtly interacting with each other. I like how actions can emphasize a specific emotion or thought without actually writing out the idea.
In my novel I am writing, I have several characters who speak English as a second language or have grown up speaking it improperly. More to the point, they should be doing so already given their background within the story. The section of chapter eight on dialogue caught me off guard, I had not really ever thought about having my characters use different dialects within their speech. However, I most certainly will now.
Response Two: Hills like White Elephants
I do not like the format for the dialogue in the short story, it is difficult to keep track of who is saying what. There are tens of lines, back and forth, that go on until a character is finally recognized for saying their lines. I do like, however, that throughout the entire story the beer remains within the story. It is used to ignore characters and to provide emphasis of emotion. It is a constant and effective tool, despite it being a stereotype problem in most short stories. I like that kind of idea, using a thing that is usually considered to be used in one kind of way and having it used within a story an entirely different way. I feel like the story itself relied too much on dialogue. It did not seem to have as much detail to surroundings and characters as I am used to. This may just be personal preference, but forgive me if my preference for scenery is outdated or unoriginal. I am very particular about how stories work within my mind. I suppose this is why I found it so difficult to follow along with this story; I think that stories should follow a general outline for things like dialogue, when they do not I am unable to effectively understand or read the story line. Also, I have a problem with the title. I do not like it when the title of the story is a phrase found within the text itself, I prefer it to be an unmentioned idea within the story; an abstract.
Making a fictional character speak and sound normal, or at least the way the author is intending, is not the easiest thing to do. Creating the dialogue for a character goes hand in hand with developing and creating a believable and interesting character that the reader can understand. The chapter gives us many tips and hints that I find could be useful. The one I really liked was the usage of silence as dialogue. The way you can describe the actual pause and the surrounding to imitate a period of silence between a character sounds like a very useful tip. It pushes us away from merely using the actual word, like “the stood in silence”, and instead to use other methods to convey to the reader the lack of dialogue between characters. One thing that I was left wondering is when and how one breaks a paragraph when using dialogue. I was hoping the chapter would touch on this, but it did not. The “Hills Like White Elephants” does a great job in using only dialogue to paint the entire picture. What is seemingly a couple waiting for their train somewhere in Spain we get a deeper story from the dialogue. We see that the young lady is on her way for some sort of procedure of which she is uncomfortable in partaking. The man tries to comfort her and tell her it’s what’s best, but will not force her to take the procedure. Very little else is known or even talked about, but Ernest Hemingway uses the dialogue between these two people to tell a larger story and what is happening between them.
ReplyDeleteFlavio Hernandez
This particular chapter was interesting because I feel like most writers, myself included, believe we can write great dialogue since it’s easy but after reading the chapter, I realized how to make it better. For example, the section about silence being dialogue surprised me! In real life, we know that when someone is silent, it could be infinite reasons why. Now I know it’s the same for writing. The section on dialect was also one that was interesting. LaPlante mentions that writing in dialect can be more distracting than illuminating. While I agree with her, I began wondering if it was actually true. There are so many literary classics that have characters speaking in dialect. For example, in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, there is one character whose dialogue is awful because he is uneducated. While I read his dialogue, it was always so difficult and I usually choose to skip it, but because of this, I end up missing important plot points. It was a section that was particularly puzzling but interesting. After reading the chapter and looking at the exercises, I feel like I can write better dialogue!
ReplyDeleteI have read Ernest Hemmingway’s Hills Life White Elephants since high school. When I first read this short story, I didn’t realize that the man wanted the girl to get an abortion. Now after I read this chapter on dialogue, I found more interesting things about the story. Neither of the characters (the American and the girl) truly listen to each other. There is a sense that there are deeper problems with the relationship between the two, and a baby would just make the problems more difficult. Like the chapter says, dialogue also reveals much by what isn’t being said (264). In this short story, the girl believes the hills look like white elephants but later takes it back. This could mean the baby and because of the common phrase of “the elephant in the room” could be how the American and the girl always avoid discussing and thinking about the baby, which could also be why they both drink beers. It is a very interesting short story that works dialogue amazing.
Emily D'Gyves
I’ve always found dialogue to be one of the most essential aspects of storytelling, since it is up to the author to determine how they want to mold their characters. Not only can dialogue help with characterization of the cast, but it can also give insight to the surroundings or the predicament that is yet to be fully fulfilled. Although, I have never really noticed it before, it was insightful to read that an author would depict more effective dialogue through showing emotion, rather than telling how the speaker is feeling. In addition, the section in which it is annotated that dialogue is not always grammatically correct, sort of ties in with dialect. The reason being is, usually someone who speaks in a dialect does not necessarily have dialogue that is written in traditional speech patterns. Dialect can be beneficial in storytelling since the lingo or speech that is being used can help with the setting. In addition, the author can then add slang or other jargon to attempt to mold the surroundings that the characters are being placed in.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the story by Ernest Hemingway, I remember reading this piece a couple of years ago in another creative writing class that I took. I can clearly recall my first thoughts in regards to the story. My initial feelings weren’t the most positive, it felt that the issue on the character’s abortion was a bit far-fetched. However, now I can see where the dialogue plays a major factor in setting up the story. Most importantly, they don’t state what the issue is, but instead the dialogue describes both of the speakers’ feelings towards the situation. After reading the chapter, now I can see why the story holds much significance in creative classes. Hemingway properly executes dialogue to not only push the narrative, but to also make the dialogue seem authentic and natural.
Patricio Hernandez (P.J.)
Chapter 8 on the dialogue was very interesting. I really liked the example given on the mother and the daughter fighting over the shoe. While I was reading, I tried to analyze that was really being said. Once I read the second part where the author changed the dialogue to what was really being said, I was surprised that it was very similar to what I had originally thought. I have a hard time making my dialogue meaningful and most of the time it just sounds unnatural. It was interesting to read how playing with just a few words a lot could be said.
ReplyDeleteHills like white elephants was something that I had already read before, that does not mean that I did not read it again to reexperience how great it is. Hemingway has such a way with words, I could simply read his work again. In his dialogue is written in such a way that through small short words tells us so much about the character. The lady with her almost romantic choice of words and the man with his pushy, un-chivalric words making her feel as if it is her choice to abort the child. It’s almost a mind play where by using certain words it was no longer the man’s choice but the woman’s. When reading Hemingway I can’t help but think of a character who is ready to fight, has his hands up to his face in fists and is just throwing out words that will help his case. Almost like a fight could break out any minute, it makes it feel tight fast, almost like the man already knows what he is going to say before he says it, making him sound almost ahead of the game.
Evelyn Lopez
Chapter 8
ReplyDeleteI got to understand that dialogue reveals knowledge, subtext, and personality of a character. Not only did I learn what dialogue is, but more importantly, what it isn't. I realized that dialogue shouldn't state the facts of a situation. It causes awkwardness is the story and makes it seem unbelievable. I also realize from my past writings that I've gotten in the habit of using dialogue for existential break downs, and I'm still torn about not including it, but it makes sense. Brooding takes up a story and loses the reader. I also should' try be afraid to experiment with the phonetics of voice and write with dialects. It provides a genuine feel to the story.
Hills like White Elephants
This story by Ernest Hemingway is the perfect example of powerful dialogue. At first it seemed like a normal couple on a somewhat awkward date. A topic about an operation comes up which sends the dates to a downward spiral. After finding out the story is about the woman planning on having an abortion. The dialogue works with the tension. It was masterly written, because the word abortion was never used, but it's indicated when the girl brings up the hills and how they look like white elephants, like the gifts no one wants during Christmas. The couple also uses their surroundings to keep the dialogue flowing. It's obvious to read that the girl has her reservations about having the adoption. She clearly doesn't want to bring it up, and each time she doesn't want to talk about it, the tension elevates.
Kassandra Salas
Dialogue plays and important part in story telling/writing. When books are read, it is dialogue which helps the reader discover more about the characters. It reveals key characteristics. I like how this chapter focuses on giving us ways and examples to better write dialogue. When I write dialogue and write “said” a lot of times, it annoys me because I feel too repetitive. The fact that I was reassured that I could use “said” in dialogue really helped me out. I always thought I had to add different words to change it up. Silence is also a good subject to look upon. I liked that there was a part showing us how to use it and what effects it can create in the story. Overall this chapter really helped shape my overview on dialogue.
ReplyDeleteI think I read this story back in High School in one of my English classes. I remember it being interesting, not really getting the point up until now that it had to deal with abortion. I liked how Hemingway organized the dialogue. It flows smoothly connecting the dots little by little. I was able to imagine the hills and see their surroundings. Through the dialogue the story comes to life, making us empathize with the character. The woman, to me, sounds almost childlike, obeying commands. The man sounds more manipulative, making her believe it’s her choice, her decision. I have a love-hate relationship with the story. It is wonderfully written, but what is written in it makes me hate the situation.
Daniela Hernández
Dialogue, in my opinion, is one of the most powerful facets of creative writing. Something as simple as one word said by a character can reveal so much about his/her personality, habits, and thoughts, especially when accompanied by actions. I believe this chapter did a wonderful job in describing what dialogue is, and just how effective it can be when used correctly. The breakdown of dialogue and the five important points were presented in a concise, informative manner, something further enhanced by the examples provided. I also enjoyed it when they gave examples of what dialogue is not to prevent “empty scenes” or “filler content”, as I like to call it. There are just some things that do not function well when presented as dialogue, and this chapter outlined them clearly.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part of the chapter, however, is the “Attribution” section. It presents readers with a very real concern that plagues most of us in writing, and how one doesn’t really need to change the word “said” to others like “explained” to delineate the way the speaker said something, and can express a character’s emotional state by using gestures instead of “-ly” words (like sadly). The example provided, once again, further emphasizes this point, and I surely felt the difference in effectiveness between the two statements.
Now, when it comes to Ernest Hemingway’s “Hill’s Like White Elephants”, the narrative further exacerbates the importance of dialogue, and how it reveals the characters’ personalities in ways simple description may not be as effective. From the dismissive way the man speaks to the girl at the beginning, to the somber, resigned way the girl speaks to him later on, the narrative didn’t need any sort of external description for the reader to figure out that there was tension between the characters. The words spoken were enough for that.
For some time, I thought I was quite good at writing dialogue. This chapter, though, presented details that I hadn’t even considered before, and will be one I shall return to constantly when writing the dialogue of my short story.
Pedro Cano
Chapter 8 is about how dialogue isn't just supposed to be a transaction or a filler--its purpose is to develop characters, move plot forward, and give more information to the reader. It is supposed to be concise and natural, how real people speak. There are certain ways to use dialogue so that you don't even have to worry about filling the dialogue with useless description and facts--the book gives the example of narrating actions, etc., between dialogue. There's a section about attribution and the limitation of adverbs after "said," address and this is helpful, especially since, in my own experience, when I was first being taught to write narratives in forth grade, my teacher made it a point that we use as many big adverbs as we could, to boost our TAKS writing scores. This chapter is about learning to teach writers to have their characters communicate through actions as well as speech.
ReplyDeleteChapter 8 also makes suggestions on writing dialects--a lot of old Southern lit has phonetically-transcribed dialogue that's hard to get through, but LaPlante points out that the current fashion of writing dialects is to just use words arranged in the way the speaker would arrange them according to their dialect.
The Hemingway story shows the limitation of the word "said" as well as no adverbs before or after "said" (unless I missed one). Dialogue is simplified by having narrative descriptions between the characters' dialogue. It also feels very natural, as if the reader is likely to hear a conversation just like theirs. I also noted that even though this story is almost all dialogue, clues about their surroundings are given by the things they say.
-Nicole Hawke