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Comment by Ginger Manning on July 29, 2010 at 2:53pm

We so love having Barry with us in South Carolina. He has been working with us for four days "Deepening Our Understanding of the Reading-Writing Workshop." What an exciting four days!

You know his knowledge is so vast and his ability to recall is amazing. So one thing he talked a bit about was Moffett's work with the abstraction ladder, which prompted a discussion about Hayakawa's "Ladder of Abstraction."

I have attached a visual of Hayakawa's Ladder that one of our SCRI High School Literacy coaches created during a summer writing workshop class. I am also including, at Barry's request, a follow-up letter to a group of Coastal Area Writing Project Fellows after a workshop I did. It's sort of a moodling on the "Ladder of Abstraction" and how I see it working in writing:

Hello Everyone (Coastal Area Writing Project Teacher Consultants and Janet Files, Director/Marcie Ellerbee, Co-Director,

I so enjoyed being with you. What a delicious group of writers and readers to think with! I am attaching my power point and a graphic of Hayakawa's "Ladder of Abstraction," created by one of our South Carolina Reading Initiative (SCRI) high school coaches, I thought it might be of help to you in your own writing as well as for your classrooms.

I had planned to work with the ladder a bit, but we had to "turn a corner" and go to our wonderful writing. I will just introduce it to you this way.

Good writing moves up and down the "Ladder of Abstraction." I know you have talked about the amazing Barry Lane's "Mountain of Perception" and "Sea of Experience," a theory based on a similar concept. I have found this and Hayakawa's Ladder very helpful in my own writing. You might look at the graphic of the ladder that I have attached as you read this explanation.

Having been in Scotland for the last 10 days, I have a new concept of "sheep." Sheep are everywhere. Now I could go on and talk about the fields of sheep, how they look dotting the hills, how they climb precarious slopes and peer over into the water, but you may soon become bored if I kept it at "sheep" which is (looking at Hayakawa's Ladder) right in the middle of the continuum. This is where writing, especially student writing, often gets stuck. If, however, I move down the continuum and talk a little more specifically about black-faced sheep, how they look like Zorro and are so much more distinguishable than the ones who are white all over, it becomes easier to picture.

And then, if I continue down the ladder and name the sweet black-faced lamb who stares into my camera for only a second before he nuzzles it into his mother's sweet milk, the picture becomes even more vivid (Barry would say the binoculars become more focused). If I name him Ebony Lamb and show my lamb's photos (snapshots, Barry) to you, his black eyes, his sudden fear (thoughtshot), his flight to his mother, his frantic suckling, he becomes more real, more interesting.

I can also, in good writing, move up the continuum to the more abstract. Ebony is just one lamb among many. His mother, I notice, (let's name her Mary) is bald, newly shorn. This taking of her wool brands her as not just Ebony's mother, but as a part of a herd of "livestock" (Level 3 - Noun Classes). I can also move up the ladder even more to Level 4 and make her and Ebony more abstract, just a small part of the GNP of the UK (Level 4 - Abstraction. Ebony's future and his world become suddenly much larger than the lovely mountain glen. It begins to include "shearing stalls," My new blue "lambswool" sweater may include some of Mary's coat. And, very sad to think, now that we know Ebony as a beautiful baby black-faced lamb, it may also include slaughter houses. He may be part of the plate of "local" lamb that is so sought after in Scotland's fine restaurants.

Even though I love lamb, I just couldn't bring myself to eat it after having met and so intimately photographed Ebony.

Now, I know we care more about Ebony and Ebony's future than we would have had had I just you how the sheep roam freely in the roads and glens and mountains of Scotland. So, moving up and down Haykawa's ladder can accomplish this. You might give it a try in your own writing.

Hope to see you all again.

Ginger

Comment by Ginger Manning on July 27, 2010 at 3:23pm

I'm working on a baseball memory, a memory that I learned from Barry is "a moment that wants to be written about."

Comment by Tonia Major on July 26, 2010 at 8:07pm

Learning is life.
Teachers give birth to learning.
We alter life.