I was really amazed at the Lost Generation ‘play on syntax’.  Thanks to my EMU colleague Filiz Bodi for passing that on to me.  Watch this video from beginning to end…don’t stop half way through! (Visit http://www.youtube.com/v/42E2fAWM6rA if the embedded video doesn’t load.)

I wondered how difficult it would be to do, so I made a couple to try it out using the theme of ‘success’….it is an interesting language development activity:

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Everyone knows it
is the secret to success
to know the right people
not
to be good at what you do
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Here is the second:

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Success is a state of mind
with the proper education and training
the wealthy and educated
are destined to rise above
the poor and the impoverished
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If you read these from the top down they have the opposite message as when you start reading from the bottom up.  Writing this as prose would demonstrate the function of punctuation.   Maybe there is some term for this in creative writing? I was in the maths and sciences stream, so I know little about such things.   I don’t know what to call it so I will coin a phrase: reversyntax.

• It might be interesting to have an competition between students to see who can create the most memorable reversyntax?  The winner could get ‘published’ in the class blog. Maybe it could be turned into a rap song by other students? Even put to music an published on YouTube. Talk about creating an audience to write for! 🙂
• Might be nice to challenge the really able students to do something creative with English–and it is probably something that even a lower level student could do with some simple structures.   A interesting twist on teaching the concept of inversion.