One of my favorite blogs is Cakewrecks.com. I rarely cease to laugh out loud when reading it. While it is not literacy specific, what makes it appealing is based in literacy. Jen Yates started this blog in May of 2008 “one night when she was bored. She honestly never thought anyone would read it.”
CakeWrecks.com won the 2008 Blogger's Choice Award for Best Humor Blog, and three 2009 Weblog awards (Bloggies) for Best Writing on a Blog, Best New Blog, and Best Food Blog. She has also written a book Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong
Jen explains what a cake wreck is:
A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.
In addition to wild looking icing blobs and laugh-out-loud-to-tears inducing visuals, some of what is extremely funny are the grammatical errors in the inscriptions. Punctuation, misspellings, homonyms, and decorator interpretations of the text totally change the meaning and the intended response to the cakes.
Jim Burke author of Illuminating Texts offers a companion website to go along with the book.
Featured on the website is an article he wrote Developing Students' Textual Intelligence Through Grammar which relates to the Cakewrecks inscription dynamic. (It is also reminiscent of Lynn Trusso’s books, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Girl’s Like Spaghetti and Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, every punctuation mark counts! )
In the article Burke discusses Textual Intelligence. He writes:
Textual intelligence (TI), a term I like, refers to our knowledge about how texts---literary and informational, on a page or a screen, spoken or written---work. TI requires that students understand the difference between usage---where and when, or under what conditions a word or its meaning is appropriately used---and grammar---the rules that govern the structural relationships between words in sentences.
TI also applies to how texts are made, and how different grammatical structures create meaning for or affect the reader.
Burke wants students to understand and develop textual intelligence to learn and experience how language shapes meaning and causes in readers certain feelings.
To describe textual intelligence, Burke uses the metaphor “intellectual tool belt.”
TI asks text builders (readers and writers) to decide what tools they need, how the structure works and what materials will work best on a particular job/text.
In making those decisions readers and writers might ask questions and analyze:
- Format (Why write this as an essay instead of a poem or short story or dramatic monologue?)
- Sentence type and structure. (What type of sentences---e.g., short, staccato ones, or long, rolling ones---are most appropriate for the effect I want to create in the reader?)
- Tone (How do I create a dark (or anxious or somber or comical) tone in a story?
- Clarity (Should I use a list here with bullets instead of paragraphs? How do I keep everything in the list parallel?)
- Word Choice (What words will make the reader feel that this character was wise, dangerous, evil or good? What word makes the idea clearest? What word is best?)
- More Word Choice (What words do I need to choose to make the character, idea, information, content in the text come alive for the reader?)
Having textual intelligence and insight into the text provides “some sense of power in a world where language is often used to coerce and confuse instead of clarify and communicate.” By developing a TI tool belt loaded and heavy with tools needed to write and read different kinds of texts in different media for different audiences and purposes.
I appreciate how you have tied "Cake Wrecks" into "texxtual intelligence." Robert Scholes is another scholar who thinks that kids should be conducting inquiries into the nature of how texts work, what they look like, how readers will most likely interpret them, etc. I look forward to reading how Burke thinks we can endow students with this kind of intelligence. I wonder if James Gee would concur with this notion.
ReplyDeleteTextual intelligence- I like that. This book sounds so useful... I'm thinking I may be ordering it from Amazon.com... All of this makes me think of the type of textual usage teenagers uses, with their phones and on Facebook. There are shortcuts and words they use in these 2 formats that you won't find in regular writing, like "OMG" and "LOL". I find myself using them now in texting, too. I had to explain to my mom in a text what OMG meant.
ReplyDeleteLove the cakewrecks blog and how you linked it to textual intelligence. The idea of giving our students knowledge about how texts work makes so much sense. I agree with Karen this book sounds very useful.
ReplyDeletePenny,
ReplyDeleteRobert Scholes is amazing!
Coincidentally he is quoted in Illuminating Texts:
We can and do read not only words and pictures but faces, clouds, waves and even stones.
--Robert Scholes from Protocols of Reading.
That is different and interesting. My wife said that is something I would be interested in. but this seems a lot like what Gee talked about in our readings. The discourses that Gee discusses and literacy and other information is what Burke is talking about.
ReplyDelete