Oral Patterns as a Resource in Children’s Writing: Ethnopoetic Notes

This chapter is essentially a set of notes to two books which document and discuss children’s writing (Himley, 1991; Shuman, 1986). I want to show that the writing uses patterns of oral narrative. That in itself is not surprising (cf. Dickinson, Wolf, and Stotsky, 1993). One basic kind of pattern, however, has seldom been taken into account, that of the organization of lines in verses, stanzas and scenes.