Expression - Reprinted with Permission

What makes a good expression? I know that in dance, it is the lines of the body, the muscles of the face, and the quality of the movement. Many young and new dancers tend to perform dance as a series of poses: a plie here, a tendu there. The problem with that is dance is NOT a series of poses, but a series of movements. The dance is seen only in the style with which a person moves between one pose and another. This can be a difficult concept for students to grasp on their own, so I find it useful to explain this outright, to let students know that this is exactly what will be looked for.

 

What makes a good expression of words? Here is a problem that our society is running into daily. The issue is that we are humans, used to in-person interactions in which we can see one anothers' faces and be able to tell the meaning of the words from the body language that goes along with those. When the telephone was born, we had to learn how to better use the inflection of our voices to demonstrate meaning where body language was not a factor. With the written word, however, the majority of our society is not educated enough to express their true meanings by using JUST words. It starts in our schools, where students who write papers are allowed to "say what they mean" out loud when they answer a question incorrectly on a test. It goes on from there in online formats, where people might get into fights over something that was said online but meant in a humorous manner, or someone showing true compassion through a text message is interpreted as being sarcastic or poking fun at the less fortunate.

 

The only way to become better writers is to read and to write. We all need to do it, because this is what our society is turning to as its main form of communication. Sure, writing has always been around, through newspapers, books, magazines, you name it and people would read it all. The people writing those publications, however, were well-educated in their trade. Now that EVERYONE must be a writer just in order to communicate, we all need to work on getting educated in good writing techniques to increase our ability to communicate properly and with a solid understanding of one another.

J.M. Hope