Writing Center
Overview
This chapter focuses on incorporating imitation practices into a student’s writing toolbox. By encouraging students to look more rhetorically at writing through imitation, they learn to recognize that language is more dynamic, and they can approach writing tasks with more contemplative thought instead of as a dreaded task. Through the use of structural and contextual imitation, students gain more insight into how sentences create meaning, how they can be changed, and how the decision-making processes relate to putting certain writing elements in certain locations for specific effects. While this article briefly touches on plagiarism as being distinct from imitation, students should recognize that imitation is not mindlessly copying, but mindfully understanding the rationale and effect of sentence structure, variety, and placement. They also learn how words form meaning within a sentence and, by extension, paragraphs and the overall paper. Imitation helps student writers realize that the more models, authors, and examples they can imitate, the more diverse and expressive their writing will become. Each time they understand how and why another author’s sentence does what it does, they can use that insight in their own writing, which also increases their confidence.
Think for a moment on how you have learned most of the things you know. Sometimes you learned by reading—perhaps from a textbook in history class. Sometimes you learned by doing something, like riding a bike. Sometimes you watched someone else and copied their movements, such as when you learned to write the alphabet. Oftentimes, we learn by mimicking or imitating others. Consider how you might catch yourself acting like a parent or close loved one—in essence, you are imitating that behavior. Your first reaction might be negative: “I don’t want to imitate anybody!” And I think most people can understand that feeling. We want to be original. However, if we can acknowledge how much we can learn from other people’s writing, then we can incorporate their experience and talent into our writing. In other words, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Here, we will learn how to imitate another’s writing and adapt it to our style, thus enhancing our own style to be more flexible and durable across writing tasks.
Learning by imitation gets a bad reputation even though we do it a lot in our lives. Imitation has mistakenly been linked to plagiarism. As you know, plagiarism is the copying of another person’s work and not crediting them with it or taking credit for a piece of writing you did not write. For example, if you purchase a paper online and turn it in for a grade in a class—that’s plagiarism. Likewise, if you copy a paragraph from a website and don’t cite it, that, too, is plagiarism. Imitation is more complex than mindlessly copying down someone’s words. Think of imitation as having a teacher that encourages you to figure out the hows and the whys something is the way it is—how to break it down, put it back together, and learn from that process to enhance your abilities.
To help illustrate, consider musicians. They listen to a lot of different types of music and each piece they listen to impacts their overall musical knowledge and experience. This influences how they create their own music. For example, I recall an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data, the android (one who supposedly cannot create, just imitate; in fact, an imitation himself!), plays the violin. Captain Picard is called away and misses the concert but gets a recording of it. Later, this scene takes place between Picard and Data; they discuss Data’s violin playing:
Picard: The good doctor was kind enough to provide me with a recording of your concert. Your performance shows feeling.
Data: As I have recently reminded others, sir, I have no feeling.
Picard: It’s hard to believe. Your playing is quite beautiful.
Data: Strictly speaking, sir, it is not my playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trenka Bronken.
Picard: Is there nothing of Data in what I’m hearing? You see, you chose the violinists. Heifetz and Bronken have radically different styles, different techniques, and, yet, you combined them successfully. (“Ensigns”)
Data believes that the imitation and combination of two others is still an imitation in the strictest sense; however, as the scene makes clear, Data, by combining two “radically different styles,” has created his own style. Without the imitation and interpretation of those two, he could not and would not have generated his own style; this is the power of imitation. That creation, then, becomes much more than mere imitation; it evolves. The evolution of prose is no longer an imitation of one, but of the combination of many to create your own. Although the scene depicted above refers to only two violinists, Data no doubt has heard dozens of violinists. Each one has left a mark on Data’s performance and thus made his performance unique. Therefore, by understanding how others put words together and the style or voice of ourselves, we uncover a new set of procedures, styles, and possibilities, which then cease to be imitation but creation.
Our goal is not to only use imitation, but to consider it one of the tools of learning—a powerful tool, but a tool nonetheless. Yet imitation, as one of those tools, is different because it focuses on the improvement and empowerment of the writer through mimicry of another’s style, voice, or pattern—not necessarily their actual words. Some time ago, I was reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and I hit a short section on imitation. Zinsser believes we must learn by imitation, and although Zinsser was a master writer, he continued to be influenced by other writers because all writers can continue to grow as writers. Each author a writer takes as an influence helps the writer grow and make stronger connections to words and phrases. Zinsser gives his take on imitation:
Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn’t spring full-blown as Bach and Picasso; they needed models. This is especially true of writing. Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud. Get their voice and taste into your ear—their attitude toward language. Don’t worry that by imitating them you’ll lose your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become. (235-36)
What he acknowledges is that as you gain more experience, you’ll develop more of your own strategies to deal with the numerous problems you’ll encounter when writing.
Here’s our plan: we are going to look at a few pieces of writing and see what is happening so we might adapt it in our writing. We won’t be copying or simply right-clicking to get a synonym, but learning from the style to improve our own. This doesn’t mean we won’t on occasion use some of the same phrases or words, because we will. But in doing so, we will be tacitly adjusting our understanding of how words make sentences, how sentences make paragraphs, and how paragraphs make papers. As our understanding of language interaction grows by looking at more examples, our style will become broader. Remember, writing is a continual process. We won’t ever be perfect and we will need to continue working on our style by reading others and seeing how they make words work for them, then adapt that experience into our style.
We are going to consider two types of imitation: structural and contextual. First, structural imitation is mimicking the actual sentence structure of an author. We carefully look at how they put the words together to generate meaning and how sentences can be shaped to provide certain meanings. This form of imitation allows us to increase the variety of sentences we can utilize. Second, contextual imitation relates more to the style of a selected piece. By considering what, where, and why an author chooses to do something, we can understand the effect on the reader and why that choice was made. Here, we discuss both because both will add to our writing toolbox. Remember, our goal is to learn from other authors as we continue to improve our own writing and build confidence in our ability to handle writing tasks.
