Post by justasking on Apr 9, 2018 13:16:04 GMT
I think the Mad is the Word essay could have been a expository writing assignment. I found the author's use of the word "dreadful" interesting because it is normally a word I associate with the British vernacular and to a lesser extent the word "horrid", but if it was an assignment, perhaps he used a thesaurus to avoid repetition.
So most likely there was someone (or something) other than the writer him/herself who initiated the writing and gave the formulaic starting point. What follows is speculative, but maybe the thematic premise already was laid out for the group / class. Maybe the assignment was that all of them had to write about the 6th grade year specifically, but there were many words (and so perpectives, emotional states) from which they could choose. 'Happy', 'Sad'... even 'Mad' ( *gasp* ).
Sort of a review of a defined period from their past. It begins with: "Mad is the word that reminds me of 6th grade. I hated that year". Then he goes on to emphasize that he wished he had known what was "going to be going on" during the "6th grade year" after which he puts it like this: "...my dreadful year as a 6th grader". Seems like the one who assigned them the task might have emphasized the word 'year', and that's why the writer too puts the emphasis on 'year' instead of saying something like "when I was a 6th grader", to explicitly demonstrate that he in fact is following the assignment about the "6th grade year".
But if the task actually was to write about the '6th grade year' instead of '6th grade', then there's a possibility that the topic wasn't even intended to stay literally in the confines of the school. The '6th grade year' may have been more of a marker for a definite time period in life. A 6th grader is still a 6th grader outside the school, and the time period as a whole is the '6th grade year'. "Go back to the time when you were a 6th grader". Of course the formula itself, if that's the case, seems to have been '____ is the word that reminds me of 6th grade' instead of '6th grade year'. But when considering how there seems to be the implicit annual theme going on with the emphasis on 'year', it could be that the '6th grade' in the beginning was only meant as a metonymy for that time period as a whole.
This would mean that the writer of the 'Mad is the word' either understood it too literally, or that his associative process was guided by the '6th grade' heading to such a degree that he chose the school environment literally as the topic of the essay. Or most probably; the content was what he really thought and felt about his '6th grade year' and it just happened to have everything to do with school. Although, of course the 'year' after '6th grade' may serve exactly as a specification for the 'school year', too, which would in fact narrow the topic to the school environment.
But in any case, if the setting was something like that, then the '6th grade' may not be the first thing the writer would think of if given only the word 'Mad'. Mad may have been the word that "...reminded him of 6th grade", but perhaps "Mad is the word that..." would remind him primarily of something else than the 6th grade. It was just that the "6th grade (year?)" happened to be the topic given.
So the miniature "profile" derived from the essay may be partly false. "He ruminated on his unfortunate experiences on 6th grade" , "he was mad because of 6th grade", and so on. And even more so if it's thought (perhaps falsely) that it was some diary page on which he "bled" his urgent, private feelings. Like said, there is some "literary" detachment going on with his use of some of those words. Maybe they read some old English texts in the class and it was his impression that a good writing should contain words such as "dreadful" and "horrid".