WRITING AND RHETORIC I

Writing and Film

            We can boost writing skills by a close study of popular movies, applying each observed film technique to ongoing writing projects.  Your analytical sight and insight, and your ability to express both, will benefit from a vast repertoire of techniques.  Early writers should recognize how much raw footage of a movie is discarded, and how many hours of preparation precede every moment of screen time.  Writing improves by removing all but the best, using transitions to match the effect of continuity editing.  If writing feels too plodding and pedestrian, the writer can study how movie sequences apply ellipsis to control pacing.  Once continuity is reliable, breaking it (as with sentence fragments) can create the emphasis of a jump cut.

            As in many great movies, a written work can feel complete by ‘rounding’, calling up a resonance at the end that pulls in and alters the beginning.  Structure like that is strategic and can be taught by being seen.  Topic development can also be made visible.  Preparation in a movie narrative, including planting (a gun in the beginning) and delivering (the gun fired at the end), shows how written elements in a paper can gain power and clarity by careful distribution.

            Consider also the creating and controlling of suspense.  Suspense results from knowing only part of what will happen.  If an introductory paragraph summarizes the whole idea – as is often the case with early writers – the writer has lost a chance to create curiosity and forward momentum.  Written with film in mind, an essay would begin with a clear revealing of the topic, but with a significant part hidden and teased.

            The course observes and applies these techniques using analysis-rich movies such as Stand By Me, Citizen Kane, Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, and Mystic River.  By learning writing with movies, each freshman student – you -- can become a director of words.

David G Sharpe
Ohio University