Just a little outline

I have found that it's nearly impossible for me to write anything without having an outline first. After writing the outline I've done probably half of the work to write the paper. Between the outline and the research and reading beforehand.

So just for fun, I wanted to share my outline for my Winnie the Pooh paper. I like to make it pretty detailed so it's almost like I just need to turn it into full sentences to come up with the paper. It is pretty long, so feel free to just glance if you don't want to read the whole thing.

Outline:

Introduction

• Introduce A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories
• Stories for children are generally to teach as they are constantly developing
• Compare to a story written to teach a lesson- The Story of Snow: The science of Winter’s Wonder by Mark Cassino
• Thesis: Although many consider nonsense literature to be purely for entertainment purposes, much nonsense literature like A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories are actually valuable to learners because they not only help children grasp the concept of language, but they teach them how to sift out the sense from the nonsense.
  
  

Body 1

• Introduce nonsense literature
• examples include, Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Seuss, Aesop’s Fables, Nursery Rhymes, etc.
• p 5. Nonsense is not the absence of sense but a clever subversion of it that heightens rather than destroys meaning. The very notion of topsy-turvy implies that there is a right side up. Essentially dyadic nonsense consists of humorous absurdities with double or split meanings of contrasts, reversals, and mirror images.
• Discuss nonsense techniques

• juxtaposition calls attention to incongruous relationships
• Matter of fact narrator that can anchor nonsense in reality
• parody highlights sensible and silly elements
• Using verse forms like strict rhyme and meter or heavy alliteration and assonance keep nonsense from getting too out of control
• pg. 46- inanimate objects have the ability to think or feel (stuffed toys)
• such an animate universe has enormous appeal for the child, finding it acceptable to speak to objects.
• puns, idioms, figurative language, parodies, satire, tall tale,
• faulty cause and effect,
• portmanteau, (combining two words into one like smog)
• neologism, (a newly coined word or phrase that is not yet in a dictionary but people say it)
• reversals and inversions,
• imprecision,
• simultaneity,
• picture/text incongruity,
• arbitrariness, --based on random choice or personal whim
• infinite repetition,
• negativity or
• mirroring, and
• misappropriation.[6]
• Nonsense tautology,(needless repitition of an idea)
• reduplication, and
• absurd precision have also been used effectively in the nonsense genre.[

Body 2

• How the forms of nonsense make it able to teach children
• Split into
• language
• pg. 99 “Intellectual development in children is heavily dependent on the acquisition through rote learning. Nonsense literature provides the inspiration to use words in an innovative way, whether in novel rhymes...or to “figure out” the verbal formula that will bring together the seemingly disparate parts of a problem.”
• Kids use nonsense to experiment with a language to learn to shape its sounds and hear the meaning and connect the black symbols on a page which speech , to understand written code well enough to decode and reproduce it

• playing with sound and meaning (or non meaning) is a major element in nonsense tradition.
• Sound over sense is why children take to nonsense lit so well
• sound is the sensory aspect of speech that young children can manipulate to better acquaint themselves with the systems structures

• sense from the nonsense
• pg. 95 “Nonsense literature, by expanding the imagination, may free the child to contemplate an enlarged universe of possibilities.”
• pg 94. For kids, what they see is reality. They have little experience to base reality off of.
• “It is the heretical mission of nonsense literature to teach the young that the world constructed by their elders is an artificial thing. Nonsense literature usues the spirit of playfulness to rearrange the famililiar world. It thereby reveals that the rules we live by are not inevitable, nor do they exist on a purely objective plane and apart from human intentions.”
• pg. 64- Every departure from the normal, strengthens his conception of the normal. Thus he values, even more highly his firm realistic orientation.
• pg. 61- nonsense by its very nature gives permission to children to experiment, to break linguistic rules, to babble nonce words and come round about to sense. “Nonsense is a superconductor of sense”
• pg.7 Nonsense affirms that not everything we encounter does or has to make sense
• pg 6. Children live and move in an adult world that they did not make and whose terms they do not readily understand....Nonsense exchanges can give children their first lessons in distinguishing between logic and illogic, between what is to be taken seriously and what is comic.

Body 3

• Discuss how Winnie the Pooh implements such nonsense techniques

• splits the role of child into two perspectives: sensible CR and dreamy and childlike but inventive Pooh
• both sense and nonsense are projected through characters that represent the child
• Pooh claims to have very little brain and yet he is constantly thinking up solutions to problems no matter how silly they are.
• Balloon- honeytree
• Get piglet and he and owl out of the turned over tree
• Wordplay- astute and helpful, a stout and helpful

• How those specific techniques help to teach children

Conclusion

• Re-compare teaching book from the intro and show how WTP is equally if not better at teaching