{"id":4970,"date":"2022-01-21T15:04:30","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T14:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=4970"},"modified":"2024-07-07T19:57:47","modified_gmt":"2024-07-07T18:57:47","slug":"master-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=4970","title":{"rendered":"Master Class"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Segovia Master Class in Spain - Classical Guitar Masterclass - Andres Segovia\" width=\"604\" height=\"453\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XZDA1crTi9A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>To me, this is the original meaning of &#8220;master class&#8221;. I discovered it <a href=\"https:\/\/secondlanguage.blogspot.com\/2009\/08\/music-lessons.html\">over a decade ago<\/a>, and it has subtly shaped my writing instruction ever since. I don&#8217;t, of course, presume to be a &#8220;master&#8221; at anything like Segovia&#8217;s level. The range of my humor and the depth of my wisdom about scholarly writing is nowhere near his on the matter of playing the guitar. I imagine that the writers who come to see me are correspondingly less ambitious, though I sometimes have to remind myself and my students that I am not really an accomplished scholar at all. Still, this form of instruction seems to work when I do it. Maybe what I lack in humor and wisdom, I make up for in a vaguely Socratic irony. I know, at least, what I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;As far as practice and suffering are concerned,&#8221; said Roland Barthes, &#8220;any writer can be compared to the greatest.&#8221; (He was talking about whether one could compare Philippe Sollers to Marcel Proust.) The master class gives me access, not just to a writer&#8217;s text, which may then be &#8220;corrected&#8221;, but to their practice and suffering, which may be <em><a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=2869\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"2869\">disciplined<\/a><\/em>. As writers, we cannot avoid suffering, but I like to think we can make it more precise. This is best done by direct engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But unlike the playing of Segovia&#8217;s students, another&#8217;s writing can&#8217;t happen right in front of us in real time. You can&#8217;t tell how good a writer is, nor where their writing can be improved, by watching them work for a few minutes. That simply isn&#8217;t how writing works. On the other hand, you can&#8217;t simply point out errors of grammar and punctuation in a draft that they&#8217;ve spend the past week writing either. (That approach has, thankfully, been pretty widely rejected by writing teachers long ago.) Our instruction needs to bring together what Robert Graves called &#8220;the huge impossibility of language&#8221; with what I might call the <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?page_id=775\" data-type=\"page\" data-id=\"775\">&#8220;appreciable finitude of writing&#8221;.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To do this, I require participants in my master classes to bring a well-formed <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?page_id=612\" data-type=\"page\" data-id=\"612\">paragraph<\/a> that has been written during a deliberate <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?page_id=607\" data-type=\"page\" data-id=\"607\">writing moment<\/a>. I imagine Segovia expected that his students had practiced something &#8212; were &#8220;working on something&#8221; as it were &#8212; in the days leading up to their meeting. The session begins with them playing it as well as they can. Likewise, I expect my students to have written several paragraphs in the days and weeks before they attend the master class. The <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=3236\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"3236\">key sentence<\/a> and its <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=3255\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"3255\">rhetorical posture<\/a> had been decided in advance, and the writer has spent 27 minutes composing at least six sentences and at most 200 words to overcome <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=1006\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"1006\">the difficulty<\/a> that they expect the reader to experience during one minute of their deliberate attention. Having written several such paragraphs (having &#8220;practiced&#8221;) they select one to bring the master class (where they will &#8220;suffer&#8221;).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The important thing is that I can now assume that I have before me the product of one deliberate attempt to say one intended thing. I can engage with it directly. First, I read it out loud, straight off the page, having never seen it before, to show the writer how hard or easy that is to do (for a academically literate reader and native speaker of English). I then try to identify the key sentence (the writer knows which sentence they&#8217;re hoping I pick) and determine whether it is being <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=1011\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"1011\">supported<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/difficulty #2\">elaborated<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=1026\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"1026\">defended<\/a> (the writer, again, was presumably trying to do one of these things, <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=2148\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"2148\">with some exceptions<\/a>). All the while I&#8217;m thinking out loud and moving words around to show what I mean. I even draw on the other participants to get multiple points of view on the same text, multiple readings. Sometimes I make some cryptic remark about &#8220;nuance&#8221; or &#8220;style&#8221;. The writer is supposed to sit quietly and take it all in. After 13 minutes (usually) I stop. We then move on to the next participant, another paragraph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t do a lot of language editing in these master classes, except where things are easy to fix and make the rest of the work go more smoothly. And I don&#8217;t ever suggest that I am correcting or even improving the text. That is for the writer to decide on their own. All I can do is reveal the contingencies in the composition, the fact that the paragraph could have been written differently. That, I&#8217;m told, is also the value of the experience to those who have tried it. To steal a line from the Segovia, I try to impart &#8220;a delicate lack of respect&#8221; for the grammar and focus on the possibilities of meaning instead. What participants get is not a judgment of their work but a very explicit experience of being read. &#8220;Writing as freedom,&#8221; said Barthes, &#8220;is perhaps the most explicit in history.&#8221; A master class provides an occasion to become, perhaps not &#8220;great&#8221;, but at least better, through a moment&#8217;s suffering, followed by many moments of subsequent practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">____________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re curious, you can experience my master classes as part the four-week Writing Process Re-engineering <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?page_id=3194#masterclasses\">self-study course<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To me, this is the original meaning of &#8220;master class&#8221;. I discovered it over a decade ago, and it has subtly shaped my writing instruction ever since. I don&#8217;t, of course, presume to be a &#8220;master&#8221; at anything like Segovia&#8217;s level. The range of my humor and the depth of my wisdom about scholarly writing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=4970\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Master Class<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4970"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7155,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4970\/revisions\/7155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}