Best of Week: Structures

I never think about what I’ve actually learned over the course of a week or even a day. But something I never thought about before was how much of a difference it makes when you figure out the structure of a book that you’re reading. Talking about how Marianne Wiggins structures her book; I think it would help a lot of students when reading and comprehending the book at the same time because most of the books we read in school are often hard to follow.

If you actually focus on how an author sets up a book it changes the whole meaning of the book and the way you understand it. For example In the things they carried by Tim O’Brien he tell us multiple stories to make up his novel.  The reason he does this is because he is trying to express to us how going to Vietnam really was for him and his troops. By him telling us different stories from different points of view; it allows us to gain deeper thoughts and connections to the text. This is very smart because by the end of the book all the short storied make up one whole novel and all of a sudden it isn’t just short stories it’s a whole.

There are different ways to go about this. One being the way Tim O’Brien did, or the way Marianne Wiggins has so far in her book The Shadow Catcher.  She uses a different technique; she uses a “shadowing” technique being the essay at the beginning can relate to the whole book and the chapters “Take Fountain” and “Reds” help set up more background and details for the reader to fall back on when confused. Another thing she does is she showed us her narrative self, character self, and now we get to see other characters like Edward and Carla. This enables us to gain deeper thoughts and connections to the book.

If teachers always took the time to help lay out the structure of the book with the students I think that the students would understand the book and maybe think the book is more pleasing to read. I can back that up from my experience because I know that in some books we read like In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez it was very hard for me to understand who was talking when; because all the characters talk the same and the tone never really change drastically like it did in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Over all take the time and look deeper into how the author is trying to set up the book because they do this for a reason so it is of big importance to the book itself.