Week 3: Using language effectively, John Hammersley

This lesson was very interesting, but a little tricky to keep pace – i definitely at times felt out of my depth. Within the class we broke down words into as many possible chunks as we could within the time frame. I had been aware of morphemes, graphemes and phonemes but not of the technical terminology or of the precise rules that should be applied. I wasn’t aware that morphemes can only be made from the way a word is pronounced e.g. you can’t have ‘arch’ from ‘architecture’ but you can have ‘arc’. We then looked at a paragraph laden with metaphors and made it more prosaic and turned a mundane one more abstract. I have never really considered a metaphor at its most basic level – simply ‘jazzing’ up a sentence (I managed to sneak in a metaphor!) I definitely found it easier in class to remove metaphorical content than to make it more abstract and metaphorical however listening to some members of the class read out their more metaphorical abstracts definitely helped me to understand this better. There is definitely room for improvement for me on this one.