Topic 2 (session A) - Being creative with words and phrases > (Semi-) Automatic Poetry

(Semi-) Automatic Poetry

On this page we are going to begin to explore the idea of grammatical word class (in particular nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) by producing some (semi-) automatic poetry. You will create your own poem by choosing words from lists of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and dropping them into an overall grammatical structure. This will begin to sensitise you to the idea of word class before we go on to look at it in more analytical detail.

Below is a grammatical skeleton based on an English translation of a Japanese poem written in the Tanka form. [Note: Although the original Japanese has a rigid syllable structure, the English translation does not mimic it (basically because English words tend to have less syllables than Japanese words)].

Your task is to create your very own poem by choosing words from the lists of nouns, verbs and adjectives provided. When you're happy with your own word choices click on the "Create poem" button and wait for your masterpiece to appear.

You can do this exercise more than once if you like.

(a) Firstly, try the following possibilities and compare the results you get:

• Choose words randomly from within the relevant word class list;

• Choose words carefully from within the relevant word class list;

Compare your efforts with your tutors' attempts and get some comments.

Tutors' Attempts

When you have finished testing out your word-class intuitions by exploring word class choice in the creation of automatic poetry, you should be ready to think about word class and word-class choice more analytically.

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