There are many people out there who say that writing cannot be learned. It is a valid argument, though one that becomes weaker with time. Writing is both a talent and a skill. With the proper foundations and tools, that skill can flourish. Writing geniuses these days are publishing book after book in an attempt to find the best method possible for teaching people how to write “better.” Some are better than others, naturally. This paper will analyze one of these books in an attempt to figure out if it has any value, or if it is just a bunch of bound pages waiting to gather dust.

            In 1995, a man published a book. That’s vague, I know – allow me to elaborate. Rob Pope, the Principal Lecturer in English Studies at Oxford Brookes University, wrote a book titled Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies. Pope has taught at several universities around the world, specializing in teaching and writing strategies, language, ideology, and text analysis. It is most important to note that Pope writes books on how to think and act critically about writing. It is not enough to simply read a piece; you must engage with it and be an active member of the interpretative process. This is precisely what he seeks to impress upon readers of Textual Intervention. The novel, or handbook, does several things: breaks down components of a text, discusses the different theories of a narrative, analyzes the various effects of dialogue among cultural discourses, and provides detailed strategies and exercises to truly intervene in a text. To intervene in a text is to take it apart, ask questions about its nature, and experiment with it in such a way that results in a unique, alternative passage. You might consider textual intervention overkill. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. It’s all subjective to the writer, but I digress.

            The beginning of Textual Intervention is more of a prelude, fittingly titled “Preludes.” It introduces the approach of intervening in a text and lays out the methods of doing so, while also looking at linguistic and nonlinguistic processes in a text. With the foundation laid, Pope then breaks down the notion of subjects and agents. He challenges the concept that texts exist in a fixed perspective, arguing that we, as writers, must acknowledge the various dimensions in which subjects operate. In other words, we have to analyze the temporo-spatial and socio-historical dimensions in which a text could exist. Pope also discusses the subject/agent position, simply known as the “point of view.” Thus, by reviewing these concepts, you can figure out the many ways to re-center a text solely on the subject/agent interaction. After teaching readers how to analyze and re-center the point of view, Pope dives into what truly constitutes a story versus a plot (because they are (un)surprisingly different). Pope defines a narrative as “the representation of events in the third person and in the past, with the emphasis on who and what is being spoken/written about rather than on who is speaking/writing and to whom,” (Pope 74). He acknowledges that, of course, there is first person-narration, but most of the time it is merely a well-disguised third-person representation. Later, Pope discusses how elements such as genre, tense, and representation affect the interpretation of a narrative. He even goes as far as explaining how to adapt a narrative to another medium – a film. After learning what makes a narrative, we move into dramatic intervention: the activity of challenging and changing whatever is, was or has threatened to become ritualistic (Pope 127). By focusing on dramatic scripts, Pope encourages readers to re-work texts through alternative outcomes in dialogue. He emphasizes that reproducing a work lies in plotting current trajectories against altered trajectories. This section of the book consists mainly of interactive exercises laid out for you to re-tell certain interactions in a new and interesting fashion. The last part of the book primarily summarizes the key terms and concepts presented in the handbook, including stylistic features and, more relevantly, the types of textual intervention for which the book is named.

            Pope wrote a book in a similar fashion to Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence. It introduces new critical analyses and techniques to use when engaging with a text, followed by a potentially excessive amount of exercises. For example, in the beginning of the chapter about narration, Pope discusses the concept of a narrative plot as a “combination of participants, processes, and circumstances,” (Pope 72). Then, to explore the nature of a narrative, he asks the reader to use five words or phrases as the tip off for a train of thought no longer than 20 words. What follows is five questions that analyze each train of thought. How far was the chain held together? Did you use past or present tenses? Why do you think you personally produced that particular chain of events? And so on, and so forth. Another type of exercise Pope uses is the rewrite. In the third chapter on dramatic intervention, Pope asks the reader to script alternative outcomes for several pieces of dialogue and then to analyze them in terms of what is the most likely, the most desirable, and the most dramatic. These exercises, among others, help you to critically intervene in a text, allowing you to exist within that text as an active participant. Because of these exercises, Pope seems to believe in the cliché that “practice makes perfect!” While I generally scorn on clichés, I can assure you that this one tends to withstand the test of time. Furthermore, Pope appears adamant that textual intervention is a critical strategy for improving writing. “The best way to understand how a text works… is to change it: to play around with it, to intervene in it in some way (large or small), and then to try to account for the exact effect of what you have done,” (Pope 1). Once you understand a text, then you can emulate its style. And imitation has been supported as one of the key ways to improve writing.

            I found this book to be a bit dense, filled with jargon, seemingly inflated at times. Truthfully, Pope could have made it significantly easier to understand. With that said, it is an important book. I have had numerous English and Writing teachers in my schooling. They have all asked students to analyze and reflect on works by authors such as Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Homer – all big names in the literary world. However, most of them failed to help me improve my writing beyond the basics of syntax and semantics. I attribute this to the lack of textual intervention. What Rob Pope is doing in his book is stressing the interaction between writer, reader, and author. I will admit, he makes a convincing argument despite my natural aversion to imitating texts. Therefore, I think Textual Intervention offers a chance for writers to do two things: critically analyze the basics of a text and learn to (re)work texts to enhance their rhetorical effect.

            It could be argued that any writer would benefit from Textual Intervention – any writer seeking to improve their skills, that is, because the book provides critical tools to do so. I was personally drawn to this book because I was tasked with revising an old piece to fit a new genre. In other words, I had to re-genre and rework a text. Since Textual Intervention provides tools and analyses to do that, any writer wishing to spread their boundaries would benefit the most from the book. To use this book is to challenge everything you thought you knew about narratives and how they are perceived. By doing so, you open yourself up to the possibilities of narrative expansion, crossing text ecosystems and widening the audience parameters.

 

 

Reference

Pope, Rob. Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies. Routledge, 1995.

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