Teaching students how to use figurative language is one of the English teacher’s biggest challenges. We often overcomplicate it by presenting students with a myriad of terms—symbolism, metaphor, imagery, simile, hyperbole, oxymoron—before explaining how figurative language works at its most basic level. I’ve found that teaching students about Form and Meaning before teaching any of the specific types of figurative language lays a strong foundation for understanding and, most importantly, using figurative language.
Below is a lesson I use to introduce Form and Meaning to my Creative Writing and English classes.
Form: what a text looks and sounds like[1]
I introduce Form by defining it: Form is what a text looks and sounds like.[2] I tell students to think about their five senses. Form is what you can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch (although we don’t taste, smell, or touch our literature). I then give an example poem. One poem that works well is “(love song, with two goldfish)” by Grace Chua.
Before we read the poem out loud, I ask them to notice how it looks. Anything goes. Students observe that it has short lines that are not always full sentences. They notice it is separated into five parts (most of my students don’t know the word stanza yet). And students notice that most of the “parts” are surrounded by parentheses.
Then, I read it out loud. I ask the students to notice how it sounds. Students observe that it doesn’t rhyme, but some sounds are repeated (“bounded by round walls”).
Students have just identified the form of the poem.
Meaning: what it makes you think or feel
Next, I introduce meaning. Meaning is what something makes you think or feel. We read the poem a few more times out loud, and each time I ask the students to concentrate on what the poem is making them think or feel. Students typically respond by saying the poem makes them feel sad, or that they think the fish broke up with its girlfriend.
Before the students go any further analyzing what the poem means, I show them the following equation.
Form → Meaning
This is where I explicitly connect Form to Meaning and begin to clarify the relationship between the two. The last question I ask students is How does the way the poem looks and sounds make you feel? What does it make you think?
Students respond by saying the parentheses make them think of a fish bowl. The quickest students respond that the phrase “bounded by round walls” has the “O” sound, like the shape of a fish bowl, and that saying it causes the reader to make a kissy-face, like a fish.
We then turn to the final stanza, where the parentheses disappear for two lines. I ask them what they think the form of these two lines means. At this point, most students understand that it means the fish jumped out of the bowl. They can identify how the form creates meaning.
An important last step is addressing the difference between specific versus universal meaning in a text. I end the session asking students if they think the poem is about a literal fish. Do they think this poem is about a literal pair of fish with one fish jumping out of the bowl in the end? At this point, they are able to articulate a more in-depth analysis, such as “the poem is about loss,” or “the poem is about a breakup,” or “the poem is about what happens when two people want different things,” and they should be able to back it up with concrete evidence from the form, such as the parentheses-free lines in the last stanza or the line “bounded by round walls.”
Having the vocabulary of Form and Meaning is a useful foundation for teaching figurative language, because each kind of figurative language can be explained using Form and Meaning. When you teach imagery, you can draw attention to the specific words—the form—of a passage, and then ask students to identify the meaning of those words. It works for all the different types of figurative language. And one of the most useful aspects of teaching Form and Meaning is that it connects the many different and seemingly random types of figurative language into one network of ideas for the students to use.
Finally, when students have a grasp of the relationship between Form and Meaning in other texts, they are far more likely to pay attention to the way Form and Meaning interact in their own writing. The result is more attentive, creative writing.
[1] I am not using the terms Form and Meaning in the same way as it’s used in linguistics, where form is the signifier and meaning is the signified. I’m using them in the more universal sense.
[2] Form and Meaning can be applied to any art, but you would use different sense-words such as, “What a song sounds like,” or “What a sculpture feels and looks like.”
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Annaleta Nichols is a middle school English teacher and graduate student of theology at The University of Notre Dame. She has lived in South Korea, Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas, England, and now Kansas with her husband and greyhound. She has current and forthcoming work at Fathom Magazine and Eunoia Review.