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The small group is a powerful resource, especially when it brings together individuals who offer diversity in viewpoint and experience. We take it for granted every time we engage in the care of our hospitalized patients or participate in teaching rounds. Today we will try a small group technique to help us generate new ideas. This activity asks that you suspend critical judgment and allow new ideas to work into your mindset. The group mind can be extraordinarily creative, beyond the sum of the parts. |
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Following the completion of this session, participants be able to:
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"There Once was a Group Known as SCTL"
Instructions:
- Each group will write a limerick that uses the same first line.
- The limerick must list at least three names of other people in SCTL, no more than one of whom can be in your group.
Here is the first line.
There once was a group named SCTL (Skittel)
- Limericks must be written on large poster papers and pasted on the walls. Each group will read their limerick to the full group. You have 15 minutes to write your limerick and to paste it on the wall.
Helpful Tips for Writing Limericks:
To assist your process, here are some tips taken from Dr. Birch's website “Writing Limericks for Fun and Profit…well mostly for fun”
A limerick is composed of five lines, with lines one, two and five being longer than the third and forth lines. That seems easy enough. However, there are strict rules that must be followed in the construction of these lines. The keyword is metre (meter). In a sense, the metre is the beat or the rhythm of the line.
TIP #1:
There is an easy way to remember the metre.
Recite out loud the first line of the old Christmas classic, 'Twas the night be-fore Christ-mas and all through the house. In this line you can hear the compelling beat: da da DUM. This unit of the beat is called a metrical foot but, unlike the Christmas poem, a limerick contains three metrical feet in lines one, two and five, and two metrical feet in lines three and four. Hence:
da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM
da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM
da da DUM da da DUM
da da DUM da da DUM
da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM
TIP #2:
The rule is, you must stick to this metre in the composition of your limerick.
The metrical foot, da da DUM , is called an anapest, and, as has been said, there are three anapests in the first, second and fifth lines and two anapests in lines three and four. From an anonymous writer comes this example:
Said an ape as he swung by his tail ,
To his off-spring both fe-male and male;
"From your off-spring, my dears,
In a cou-ple of years,
May e-volve a pro-fess-or at Yale .
TIP #3:
If a limerick does not flow easily when read out loud, something is probably wrong.
John Scott, a United Methodist Minister, has attempted to put parts of the Bible into limerick form. He was obviously on his own when, in his book The Limerick Bible, he tried to write "the Creation saga in five lines." Read this one out loud.
As human we are almost like gods,
But, the "almost" makes ominous odds.
Given power to destroy, we
Can screw things up royally.
A dangerous positions for clods.Remember... The easiest way to find the error of your ways and to get back on the proper metrical track is to do what I have done (and still do quite often in my own writing). Bold the accent word or syllable... da da DUM . Look what happens when we do it to the above five lines.
TIP #4:
You will never get away with writing a limerick that does not rhyme.
The last word of lines one, two and five must rhyme with each other, and so must the last words of lines three and four. It is an aabba pattern, and there are only rare exceptions.
My girlfriend had put on my sweater,
The one with my big high school letter,
And it then seemed to me,
And I'm sure you'll agree,
On her it looked quite a bit better.
TIP #5:
There are exceptions to this rule also.
While here are strict guidelines about rhyming that are adhered to by compulsive limericks writers, many of these rules are ignored in the writing of "recreational" limericks. For example, a clever limerick can often get away with a near-rhyme, such as: The party got wilder and wilder, but who was that boy who defiled her. Wilder and defiled her sound very close when read aloud.
There are those who would consider it cheating to drop the final g off a word to make it rhyme, even though we often do this in speaking. Personally, I have been saved many times by the deletion of a g .
There once was an old man named Cohen,
Who cut off the foot of Tim Bowen.
Now it wasn't that hard,
For Tim slept in the yard,
And Cohen clipped Bowen while mowin'.*Remember... Just because two words look the same does not mean they rhyme. Rhyme is not found in what we see, but in what we hear. William Middleton wrote a book titled Limerick 101 and subtitled "A Concise Collegiate Course for Constructing Comic Limericks." Unfortunately the professor must have missed his class on rhyming. He wrote:
King Midas was not one to ration
His gold. He had all in his nation.
His most heinous crime,
For which he did time,
Was guild by association.
TIP #6:
There is a tradition regarding the opening line of a classic limerick.
The classic standard for a first line is to use it to identify a character, as in "There once was a fellow named Jake," or "A silly old man they called Ned" (each of these opening lines has one iamb and two anapests).
Another use of the opening line is to identify a location, as in "There once was a gal from New York ." Again, the meter is a single iamb, followed by two anapests. A limerick by Stephen Cass, published in the book The Penguin Book of Limericks, begins with a line having three anapests as it introduces both a character and a location.A psychiatrist fellow from Rye
Went to visit another close by,
Who said, with a grin,
As he welcomed him in:
"Hello, Smith! You're all right! How am I?"
