Defining Terms

As someone who changed fields in a pretty big way fairly late (after my bachelors), and who sometimes felt alienated because I didn't understand the "lingo" my peers in classes often took for granted, I try to be pretty careful to define even fairly basic terms in classes when I first use them.  Today, for example, I defined "rhyme."*  Yes, I'm pretty sure my students have heard the term before, but when I define it, I get them to slow down and think about what it is.   And that means when we define "alliteration,"** it's not this weird repetition thing, but one of several different repetition things.

That's not to say I'm prefect, by any means, but I try to remember not to assume that everyone speaks "lit crit" or whatever.


In one of my classes, we're reading Bennett and Royle's Intro to Lit, Crit and Theory, which I chose because I read it as I was choosing books, and it seemed really good.  And I think it is.  But last night, reading the second chapter as I was prepping for today, I noticed that it used terms without defining them.  For many of these, there are definitions in a glossary in the back.

So students who are aware can look stuff up in the back, or look stuff up in a dictionary or wikipedia or whatever.

But while they define "poststructuralism," they never define "structuralism."  How are you supposed to understand the post part without the base part?

And they use "postmodern" but never define it, nor do they define "modern."  Do most early career college students feel comfortable with those terms?

They start the chapter with "Ozymandias" and call it a sonnet (and it's the first one in the book, I think), but "Ozymandias" (while lovely and wonderful in itself) doesn't do a lot of the basic sonnet stuff that most sonnets do.  It's like using "sit com" and using Southpark as your example.  It's a sitcom, but it challenges the typical form in all sorts of ways that make it hard to get a sense of the genre.




*  Rhyme is the repetition of sounds, usually end sounds, or end of a syllable sounds, often at the ends of word and lines.

**Alliteration is the repetition of sounds, especially consonant sounds, usually at the beginning of words or stressed syllables.