Interactions Between Words and Meanings

I have to say I got a bit weighed down with Elbow’s cooking analogies. He lost me a couple of times but I did understand what he was saying as a whole. Writing is a dynamic process of making words and ideas interact to produce something that is coherent and interesting.

Making wine made a better analogy for me than Elbow’s cooking comparison. His recipe seemed complicated some of the time so in my head I made similar comparisons to making wine.

Here’s my version of the cooking analogy.

The final product is to make good wine (coherent, interesting writing with a purpose). The grapes, yeast, oak and sugar are the words. You choose the ingredients to add according to your idea of what the wine should taste like. Sometimes you have to brainstorm with someone else to arrive at the correct ingredients (should it be oaked or unoaked, does it need more sugar, what kind of yeast will work best). Next mix it all together so it can work and ferment (cook). A week later squeeze the grapes (words), and remove the skins. The concentrated juice that remains should be close to your idea of a good wine. Sometimes you need to keep tweaking the wine to make it taste like you want (energy) and other times it needs nothing. Let the wine sit for a while. Go back and sample the wine and make final adjustments (edit) to your liking. Finally you are ready to enjoy your final product.

The taste of the wine is dependent on the quality of the grapes (words) and how well they interacted with the other ingredients. The problem is if you didn’t have an idea of what your wine should taste like you might never add the right ingredients to make a good wine. According to Elbow the most important interaction is between the words (grapes) and the meaning (good wine) (73).

I wrote an essay last year for another class about a car accident I was in. I had many thoughts in my head about a lot of things related to the accident. When I wrote the essay words poured out on the paper but didn’t amount to anything except me recounting the details of the accident itself. I was never satisfied with my essay and I didn’t know why. Now I see it was because I never really wrote my thoughts into words. There was no interaction between the 500 words and the real meaning. All I did was tell about the accident, which was very straightforward and as Elbow said not very “interesting, satisfactory or sufficient (56). I should have written about my own mortality because that was my point and it would have provided more “contrasting or conflicting elements to interact” (56). It would have been a much better essay.

I think if I had done more of what Elbow calls external cooking even though it is a lot of bla bla bla… I might have eventually realized that I was “telling” about my accident instead of “showing” what it meant to me.

For the most part I liked what Elbow had to say especially the six ways to facilitate the cooking process. I already use some of these and plan to try some of the others.