Devineni Venkata Ramana & Dr. Hima Sekhar

MIC College Of TechnologyKANCHIKACHERLA

TO : ADVANCED ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS LAB

FORM : A . ARUN KUMAR [07H71A0302]

M . BHARAT [07H71A0304]

S . BHARATH KUMAR [07H71A0305]

T . CH . AVINASH [07H71A0306]

C . NAGARJUNA [07H71A0326]

TITLE : MYTHS AND FACTS

DATE : 21 – 03 -2010

INTRODUCTION :

Writing a content of matter requires lot of stuff and if at all it is writing for people it needs special qualities to attract them. ”Writers” an awsome community of people who attract others through their style of writing. Art of writing of a writer have a great impact on the community of people who read their writings. English literature is classified into categories like :

1. Poetry 2. Short Stories3. Drama 4. Prose

TERMS OF REFERENCE :

As a part of ADVANCED ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS LAB we have done this project on “ Writing Skills of existing writers and qualities of an efficient writer” & submitted on 21-03-2010.

SYNOPSIS :

Books play a vital role in any field of life. It needs great skills to write books and importantly books which relate to man and his social relationship with environment. This project deals with the study of styles of writers and the aspects they take in to consideration while writing their books. And also deals with the aspect of, qualities to become a good writer.

PROCEDURES FOLLOWED :

We collected major part of this project from internet. And some part of the project had been collected from the books of corresponding writers, who had written them.

Textbooks Include :

Good Style by JOHN KIRKMAN

English for technical communication by R.K.LAKSHMINARAYANAN

Web sites include :

www.google.com

www.wikipedia.com

www.answers.com

www.amazon.com

www.iloveindia.com

www.allreaders.com

POETRY:

Poetry (from the Greek poiesis, a "making") is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.

Great poems differ from others exactly because of these, since their words invoke thoughts and powerful feelings in the listener or reader.

Some of these became sayings in the everyday language. Across time and cultures the meanings of the words change, and make it difficult to enjoy the original beauty and power of poems.

Poetry as an art form may predate literacy.The methods for creating Poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions.

Some of the efficient poets and their styles are included here :

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth was one of the great Romantic poets of 19th-century England. His poems celebrated the glories of nature and the human spirit while using the simple language of the "common man" -- a radical idea for the time. Critics hooted at Wordsworth's poems and his politics early in his career, but in later years he became accepted as a key voice in the Romantic movement. His poetry is perhaps most original in its vision of the organic relation between man and the natural world, a vision that culminated in the sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of God. The most memorable poems of his middle and late years were often cast in elegaic mode; few match the best of his earlier works. By the time he became widely appreciated by the critics and the public, his poetry had lost much of its force and his radical politics had yielded to conservatism.

"That best portion of a good man's life;

His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."

"The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly."

JUDITH WRIGHT

Judith Wright was a prolific Australian poet, critic, and short-story writer, who published more than 50 books. Wright was also an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems.

According to Wright, "the true function of art and culture is to interpret us to ourselves, and to relate us to the country and the society in which we live."

She started to see that her mission was to find words and poetic forms to bridge the human experience and the natural world, man and earth. "Poetry needs a background in which emotional, as well as material values are given their due weight; and the effect of this shallowness of roots is easily traceable in Australian writing, with its uneasy attempts to solve or to ignore the problem of its attitude to the country."

Alienation from the land meant for Wright crisis of the language. As a literary critic Wright enjoyed a high reputation, and edited several collections of Australian verse.

Her work is noted for a keen focus on the Australian environment, which began to gain prominence in Australian art in the years following World War II. She deals with the relationship between settlers, Indigenous Australians and the bush, amongst other themes.

Wright's aesthetic centers on the relationship between mankind and the environment, which she views as the catalyst for poetic creation. Her images characteristically draw from the Australian flora and fauna, yet contain a mythic substrata that probes at the poetic process, limitations of language, and the correspondence between inner existence and objective reality.

When I was a child I saw a burning bird in a tree. I see became I am, I am became I see. (from 'To a Child')

She started to see that her mission was to find words and poetic forms to bridge the human experience and the natural world, man and earth.

She criticized the education system for failing to teach students the pleasures of poetry, and promoted the reading and writing of poetry in schools. Realistically, she also expressed doubts about the power of poetry to change the scheme of things.

Wright also wrote love poems to her husband. His death in 1966 and her increasing anxiety of the destruction of the natural environment brought more pessimistic undercurrents in her work.

SHORT STORY:

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. Since the short story format includes a wide range of genres and styles, the actual length is mitigated somewhere between the individual author's preference and the submission guidelines. Many short story writers define their work through a combination of creative, personal expression and artistic integrity.

Some of the efficient short-story writers and their styles are included here :

O HENRY

O. Henry was the pseudonym (pen name) of the American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910). O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.

"It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are." (from The Octopus Marooned)

OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer, poet and prominent aesthete.

Oscar Wilde denied the traditional criterions of the bourgeois ethics. He thought that the only moral value was the ideal of beauty in nature and in person. However, he said that beauty was not the reflection of realistic life in the people’s minds, but contrary, it was just the product of artist’s imagination. That is why he confirmed that art was existing independent of the life and was developing according to its own laws. He was known as a poet of graceful diction.

In other words, Oscar Wilde did not dive very deeply below the surface of human nature. But found to a certain extent rightly, that there is more on the surface of life then is seen by the eyes of most people.

O.Wilde’s plays were written in a light satirical vein, cultured and refined, and in good taste. His characters served as the mouths to enunciate the author’s exquisitely funny remarks on society. The remarks of the cynical young men about life, love and society and the garrulous Duchess of Berwick, may show a keen appreciation of the vices of the upper-class society.

Oscar Wilde tried to create the fame of the great aesthete. His speech was full of paradoxical judgements. Here are some examples taken from different plays:

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade name of the firm. That is all.”;

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose”;

“Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.”;

“Life is far too important a thing to talk seriously about it.”;

“A man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person”;

Most of Wilde’s characters are true representatives of their society.

“Women are pictures. Men are problems.

If you want to know a woman really means, which is absolutely a

dangerous thing to do-look at her, do not listen to her”

DRAMA:

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning “action”. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception

Drama is often combined with music and dance: the drama in opera is sung throughout; musicals include spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have regular music.In certain periods of history (the ancient Roman and modern Romantic) dramas have been written to be read rather than performed. In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance; performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.

Indian drama is traced back to certain dramatic episodes described in the Rigveda, which dates back to the 2nd millenium BC. Dramatists often worked on pre-existing mythological or historical themes that were familiar to the audience of the age. For instance, many plays drew their plot lines from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the great epics of India. Their stories have often been used for plots in Indian drama and this practice continues today.

Creative Drama refers to dramatic activities and games used primarily in educational settings with children. Its roots in the United States began in the early 1900s. Winifred Ward is considered to be the founder of creative drama in education, establishing the first academic use of drama in Evanston, Illinois.

Some of the efficient dramatists and their styles are included here :

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes.

In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.

Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre.

In his late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.

AUGUST WILSON

August Wilson was an influential 20th-century playwright and the most prominent African American of that craft. Born on April 27, 1945, August Wilson grew up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

His childhood experiences in this black slum community would later inform his dramatic writings, including his first produced play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills.

Though he lived much of his adult life in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in Seattle, the characters and plots of his plays were inspired by realities he experienced growing up in Pittsburgh's Hill District and Oakland

He was noted especially for his "Decade Cycle" or "Pittsburgh Cycle," consisting of one play set in each decade of the 20th century.

At the outset of his career, Wilson envisioned theater as a means to raise the collective community's consciousness about black life in twentieth-century America and committed himself to writing a cycle of ten plays that would rewrite the history of each decade of this century so that black life becomes a more fully acknowledged part of America's theatrical history.

His plays are not, however, agitprop. He avoids pat answers; instead, he effects a powerful experience that forces his audience to search for their own political conclusions as an extension of his characters' life situations.

A playwright of startling imagination and depth, he is often considered a theatrical spokesperson for the African American experience, and his ability to infuse everyday language with the stuff of poetry is an essential, distinguishing factor of his work.

Perhaps he no longer considers himself a poet, but it is his poetic gift that has helped him to become the preeminent playwright in contemporary American drama.

PROSE:

Prose is the most typical form of language. The English word 'prose' is derived from the Latin prōsa, which literally translates as 'straight-forward.

Poetry with fewer rules and restrictions is known as free verse. Poetry is considered to be more systematic or formulaic, whereas prose is the most reflective of ordinary speech.

According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge :

Prose — words in their best order;

Poetry — the best words in their best order.

A philosophy master said that "there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse," for the simple reason being that "everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose."

Poetry is considered to be more systematic or formulaic, whereas prose is the most reflective of ordinary speech.

NOVEL:

A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. To become part of the literary production novels have to address the discussion of art. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the work of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits.

Some of the efficient fiction and non-fiction writers and their styles are included here :

SYDNEY SHELDON

Sidney Sheldon (February 11, 1917 – January 30, 2007) was an American writer.

His novels often featured determined women who persevere in a tough world run by hostile men.

Most of his readers were women. When someone asked him why this was the case he said:

"I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power - their femininity, because men can't do without it."

RICHARD DAVID BACH

Richard David Bach (born 23 June 1936) is an American writer. His books espouse his philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearance. He is noted for his love of flying and for his books related to air flight and flying in a metaphorical context. He has pursued flying as a hobby since the age of 17.

In 1970, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a story about a seagull who flew for the love of flying rather than merely to catch food, was published by Macmillan Publishers after the manuscript was turned down by many other publishers. The book, which included unique photos of seagulls in flight by photographer Russell Munson, became a number-one bestseller on both the fiction and non-fiction lists. The book contained fewer than 10,000 words, yet it broke all hardcover sales records since Gone with the Wind.

It sold more than 1,000,000 copies in 1972 alone. The surprise success of the book was widely reported in the media in the early 1970s.

Most of his books involve flight in some way, from the early stories which are straightforwardly about flying aircraft

“ Avoid problems, and you'll never be the one who overcame them.”

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”

“Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.”

“Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.”

R K NARAYAN

R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 – May 13, 2001), shortened from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami was an Indian author whose works of fiction include a series of books about people and their interactions in an imagined town in India. He is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English, along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. He is credited with bringing Indian literature in English to the rest of the world, and is regarded as one of India's greatest English language novelists.

Narayan's writing style was simple and unpretentious with a natural element of humour about it. It focused on ordinary people, reminding the reader of next-door neighbours, cousins and the like, thereby providing a greater ability to relate to the topic. Unlike his national contemporaries, he was able to write about the intricacies of Indian society without having to modify his characteristic simplicity to conform to trends and fashions in fiction writing.

Narayan's short stories have the same captivating feeling as his novels, with most of them less than ten pages long, and taking about as many minutes to read.

His attitude, coupled with his perception of life, provided a unique ability to fuse characters and actions, and an ability to use ordinary events to create a connection in the mind of the reader.

Narayan's writing style was often compared to that of William Faulkner since both their works brought out the humour and energy of ordinary life while diplaying compassionate humanism. The similarities also extended to their juxtaposing of the demands of society against the confusions of individuality. Although their approach to subjects was similar, their methods were different; Faulkner was rhetorical and illustrated his points with immense prose while Narayan was very simple and realistic, capturing the elements all the same.[

A general perception on Narayan was that he did not involve himself or his writings with the politics or problems of India.

Malgudi evolved with the changing political landscape of India. In the 1980s, when the nationalistic fervor in India dictated the changing of British names of towns and localities and removal of British landmarks.

FINDINGS :

Poetry

“Poetry needs a background in which emotional, as well as material values are given their due weight; and the effect of this shallowness of roots is easily traceable in Australian writing, with its uneasy attempts to solve or to ignore the problem of its attitude to the country.”

Most of the poets are basing on nature for their illustration of their poems. Most of them faced agony in their life by which their feeling came through their poems. Some of the poets are romantic poets who by using simple language which is a radical idea at that

time made feel feel.

Short Stories

Some writers thought that only moral value was the ideal of beauty in nature and in a person. Some of them feel there is more on the surface of life than is seen by the eyes of most people. Their common view was that beauty was not the reflection of realistic life in people’s minds, but

contrary.

Drama

They adopted traditional styles and included political contexts through out the world. In the early period of their life their romantic style of writing was more natural and later years they

deliberately returned to a more artificial style. Their idea was to mark a lasting impression on the literature and so they expanded the dramatic

potential of characterization, plot, language and genre.

Prose

Some of them supported women for their ferminity and also been encouraged by them. Some of them were favoured nature for their illustration. Interestingly love and romantic writer became fomous in no time. They had a positive edge towars the society and intended, some of them initiated change in the

society. Their writing were based on facts rather supusticious imaginations.

CONCLUSIONS:

To become a good writer in any part of literature we need to have: You need to have audience in mind while you write . Target the audience while you write. You need to have factual knowledge on the subject you write. You need passion for writing. Your writings have to be impartial. You need to have good contacts with your family members to write on aspects related to social

relations. You need to have awesome relation with nature. Your writings need to have variations and variety which attracts the audience. You have to be updated with your usage of words n your writings.

RECOMMENDATIONS :

Every on in this world has a unique ability to write. So if you have the passion for writing then persistent hardwork and sincere efforts leads you to be the best at which you want.

Follow atleast some writers to be updated with the trends relating to writing.

“ Life only gives hardships to sail to land of success.”

“Aspiration needs inspiration to start ,

Inspiration needs success to start ! ”

REQUIREMENTS :

Writers need to be encouraged because , there is no end to literature .

“Literature is like an ocean it can accommodate any number of rivers.

Literature is like a mother which can give birth to any number of writers.”