Monday, December 5, 2011

Writing is a Dance

Learning how to write is very similar to learning how to dance. One common dream held by 3-year-old little girls is the dream of becoming a Prima Ballerina. They rush to the store to buy their first pair of ballet slippers and a brand new fluffy tutu. When they arrive in class for the first time they start small: pointing their foot and turning in place, but soon they will be doing grandiose leaps and turns across the floor. As little girls they learn basic terms such as “point” and “turn.” Later, they will learn that the real terms are “tendu” and “pirouette.” With enough time and practice, the will move up from the Ballet Corp to Prima Ballerina.
Writing isn’t very much different from learning to dance. We show up at school with our new notebooks and pencils all ready to learn. We start out small – learning that a subject and a verb make a sentence. Then we are ready to form paragraphs and maybe even put those together into an essay. As we advance in our learning experience we memorize an advanced vocabulary that we will almost never use because the average human doesn’t understand them. While some of us will be satisfied with our basic ability to write, others of us will move on to write novels and become the next big writer…or Prima Ballerina.

5 comments:

  1. Wow. I have never done ballet or dance for that matter, but I could relate how dancing is like writing. The way that you compared the two was a perfect example of how writing is. This was an amazing blog.

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  2. I really like your comparison of dancing and writing. It totally makes sense! It's so true how we start out small and advance to bigger and better concepts as we get older.

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  3. That's awesome! I can relate to this because I started ballet when I was three. I remember doing the points and turns. That's something I really wish that I would of stuck with. Writing on the other hand; is something that I'm stuck with sticking with. You made a valid point that we start out young with the basics and grow and grow until we are making interesting metaphors (like yourself) and other intellectually analytical pieces of writing. Interesting point of view.

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  4. I really liked this blog, Emily! (:
    I have never taken ballet, or any dance class for that matter, but I related to this really well! I think it reminded me of gymnastics; I used to do that!

    But anyways, I thought that you compared the two very well, and it made complete sense. I also liked how your blog post flowed together effortlessly...the movements between sentences were smooth like a ballerina? Sorry, that was a bad joke :P

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  5. I love this! Since I love dancing (and used to be that 3 year old girl dreaming to be the Prima Ballerina) I really relate to this. It's so interesting that two things as different as dancing and writing are really pretty similar.

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