The Importance of Learning English from an Author’s Perspective
Given that my microphone is not running smoothly, tonight I’d like to launch a text version of live-streaming. Hopefully, the topic I about discuss could satisfy the appetite of my beloved VIP members.
Tonight, I‘m going to set you up in the right direction of grasping the essence of a TV show so that, whenever you come across a scenario, you develop a sense of understanding the reason why it has been constructed in that specific episode,
The trick is to put yourself in the author’s shoes, imagining that you’re supposed to pull the audience’s focus, you do not have a clear picture as to how you could manage to hit the target. Now you’re racking your brain, ranting and raving, how am I going to pull it off with no clue?
Blank sheet…blank sheet…blank sheet…
Here we go:
Now let’s take Desperate Housewives for example, As far as I am concerned, the creator Marc Cherry’s final goal all comes down to two aspects:
First and foremost, to ingratiate the main cast members with their targeted audiences, by whom I mean the mass majority of the American public, other than that, to convey a message or instill a concept inconspicuously throughout the media platform so as to spread his idea and make his voice heard.
As soon as you figure out the ultimate goal of the author, you will understand the mindset of his targeted audiences. So, the question remains:
What exactly is the show creator’s agenda?
How successfully he managed to deliver the outcomes?
What are the most frequently used ingredients?
By understanding the author’s intention and desire, we learn not only how to put a cultivated Westerner’s mindset into perspective, but also the process concerning how he put all the ingredients together to make the show eye-catching, thought-provoking and heart-wrenching, therefore striking a resonating chord with the audience. These ingredients include but not limited to the following aspects:
- Beautifully refined and polished words along with coherent and illustrative pictures make the monologue and dialogue incredibly engaging, inspirational, and sometimes remarkably hysterical.
- The tone and the way how each character speaks is carefully orchestrated which appeals to a distinctive type of audience, thus making them glued to the screen and devoutly stayed tuned.
- Literature narratives are coordinated with an incredibly soothing voice to unveil and denote the mysterious lives of a dozen of stereotypical yet dramatized American housewives.
- Apart from being a soap opera and cliffhanger, DH had all the juicy anecdotes wrapped up together, making the show exhilaratingly absorbing.
From a middle-aged man’s perspective, I can relate a plethora of scenarios to my real-life situations, ranging from trivial matters to profound life epiphanies and everything else in between, such as child discipline, teenage rebellion, middle-life crises, extra-marital affairs, religious belief, business negotiation, neighborhood relations, hospital and law enforcement scenarios, the list goes on. Desperate Housewives vividly demonstrated five disparate women regarding how they lead their lives and deal with struggles, conflicts, and middle-life crises as a whole. If we take a closer look into the drama behind the scene, we would be deeply amazed by the author’s talent in terms of constructing the storyline and assembling the most appropriate characters.
From an English learner’s perspective, it has all the superior and sophisticated raw materials we need——words, phrases, idiomatic expressions, sentence structures, rhetorical devices, not to mention the culture behind it, these components are all worth time to navigate.
With an experienced veteran rallying you guys around, all you need to do is to keep abreast with the peace and rhythm l set out for you. For pre-intermediate members, as long as you’re constantly exposing yourself in my channel, you will naturally develop a sense of storing, categorizing, retrieving, and processing multi-layered information. Although I can’t promise you a magic potion handy, I’m positively optimistic that through a mixing-business-with-pleasure approach, we gradually go through the accumulation, repetition process without getting bored, getting tired, and getting lost.
I know you may find it unrealistically idealistic to pull such a stunt, of course, as the narrator of desperate housewives puts it “In order to win, you have to want it more”. So, talking about “triumph over and breakthrough”, I dare to say that, it has to be built upon mutual understanding and mutual support, as long as you’re willing to cater to my needs and spare my feelings, I can be able to serve to your satisfaction.
As the exploring goes further, I just can’t help but admire that every line of the script is fabulously refined, every drab event is meticulously devised, every scene of the spot is carefully laid out….to level with you, whenever I had time to relive this masterpiece, I can feel a babbling brook running through my body, my vessel, my heart, and it whispers that “You shall make the most of it”, and that babbling brook never dried out, washing away my disbelief, my anxiety, my secular urges. In fact, it equipped me with the knowledge, strength, and courage to jump into the unknown, and that is how I geared myself up to circulate this ground-breaking approach of language acquisition on the WeChat platform.
I am fully aware of the fact that this MBWP methodology still has a long way to go, especially since we’re in the face of a climate where English discipline is undergoing a downturn, but I have every reason to believe that this will strengthen the determination of well-educated minds to explore options of going abroad, in which case, this group will thrive.