I seldom read my son’s compositions not because I do not care, but rather to give him much leeway to express himself in his writings. I do not want to influence his style of writings like most parents do. However, I often encourage him to read novels and books beyond his textbooks to be better educated. I often warned him the danger of rushing through his many homeworks just to please mum, his tuition teacher or simply to finish the arduous task to have enough time to play. To me this is a sure-fire way to kill the joy of learning.
However, this morning when he showed me his essay, wanting my comments, I was pleasantly surprised and made a serious effort to read it without much prejudice.
What surprised me indeed was not his lack of bombastic words (that would score a few points here and there as he told me) but rather the incoherent manner in words and sentences were strung together in brevity lacking sufficient adjectives to stimulate readers’ imaginations.
Feeling something was amiss, I thought about it and sure, I felt I was reading a comic book but obviously without the drawing or caricatures since this is a school COMPOSITION! Come to think of it, my son loves comics and had been churning out a few of his own too. Thus when his writes now, he probably have a mental frame of a series of sequential comic poses/scenes and uses minimal words to supplant his mental images for the missing cartoon sketch in his writings. So weird indeed!
When I told him that his writing was like script-writing for theatre or screen production minus the play enactions, he was rather adamant, reminding me he was getting quite high marks for his compositions. I tried to explain to him that without the accompanying comics (as in school essays exams) I would have difficulty fueling my imagination with his nondescript essay. He gave me a blank look. I am not so sure either. But I guess, beautiful proses and phrases are becoming less relevant or even redundant in today’s nondescript world.
I am not even sure if this is the present trend in our education system, to prepare students to eventually master a reporter’s style of writings, to string words coherently and be pragmatic about it. Words that convey feelings and which brings out the beauty of the language would be sidelined or even abhorred to suppress emotions and feelings.
Perhaps, that is why many turn to comics nowadays. This is the medium that mixes caricature, drawings and words together for visual and descriptive imaginations. Whereas words alone in novels and writings used to bring about different connotations of landscapes and interpretations, I guess comics would appeal to the present generation that thrives on extreme brevity likened to Short Message Services (SMS); to avoid the danger of using too much words; tabooed words; to be quick in communications; to just state the facts and who cares about your comments anyway.
Perhaps in the globalised world, comics serve to bridge the gap of bringing about language abstractions that many could not afford given their lack of mastery of the many languages or simply to use pictures, caricatures to bring out the feeling that would otherwise be difficult to portray in words to the masses in different parts of the world.
I am not sure if it would work either but this appears to be the natural progression in today’s society given the need to be quick, to avoid adding too much of your feelings into your report, to be able to share your feelings in scenes or even the use of emoticons; to write in a manner that a robot or syntactic sentence extraction program would understand. The comics would allow others to infer the feelings or at least the portrayal of fear or abjections etc that would otherwise be lost for want of words.
So comic for comics to fill the emotional void given the slow and steady dearth of the human language.
Mikey
Way to go Encik!