Last Saturday, I was able to attend a production of Cabaret, which was performed by the Penn State Thespian Society.  If you didn’t get to see it and you happen to like musicals, I would highly recommend it.  The story takes place in 1930s Germany.  It was an excellent performance and the story did a great job of commenting on the political climate of Berlin at the time, while telling the story in the setting of a club.  I went into this musical not knowing much about it, so I decided to look up its production history and how it was made.  What surprised me is the story was not solely based on history.  The musical was actually inspired by a book entitled, The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. It’s really two novellas put together to make up one book, but the musical takes elements from both novellas to create the story of Cabaret. 

Although I was surprised this musical was based on a book, I know there are several successful musicals inspired from a book.  Some of the most well-known ones include: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Wicked: The Untold Stories of the Witches of Oz by Gregory Maguire, Legally Blondeby Amanda Brown, Matilda by Roald Dahl, and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.  Of course, these books are rewritten by the writer of the musical’s book, so the story is not entirely the same.  This is done to clean up the plot a little bit and maybe add some new elements so people don’t know the whole story going in.  Some story elements also don’t translate well to the stage (such as a character’s internal thoughts), so the writer has to either express this in a different way in the script or take it out altogether.

However, not all musicals based off books were a good idea.  For example, Little Women: The Musical was a very short-lived Broadway production of the book by Louisa May Alcott. Part of the reason certain adaptations weren’t successful is because the writers didn’t have an actual purpose in turning the book into a musical.  If you don’t have anything to add to the story or have a way to change the story in order to have it fit with music, then it’s probably not a good idea to try and adapt it. I really admire writers who are able to see past the written words in a book and take them off the page to make something as complex as a musical.  They are able to make something larger than life on that stage, and I really hope I can be like that someday.

This week I wanted to talk about something a little different.  It still has to do with writing (obviously), but I wanted to talk about how writing effects our memory.  I was thinking about this last week because in Psychology we were discussing aspects of memory and how we learn to remember things.  For example, I’m sure most of you have learned the sentence, “My very educated mother just served us noodles,” or “My very elderly mother just sat on Uncle Ned” or something along those lines.  If you’re drawing a blank, these are sentences a lot of grade school teachers use to help children remember the names of the planets in order (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune).  I recently heard some of my friends in an Astrology class using these sentences to study for their test.  I had a test coming up where I needed to remember where consonant sounds are produced in the mouth (which is a LOT of memorization) so I decided to try writing my own sentences to remember where the consonant sounds were produced.

Needless to say, this technique made it much easier to study the material and I wound up memorizing more than I needed to.  I’m sure you’ve all had to do something similar for a test where you’ve written a sentence or something else to help you remember something.  This is actually a legitimate technique called “mnemonics.” The term applies to more than just writing sentences to improve memory.  It’s actually an umbrella term for any development of any technique to help the memory.

This made me wonder: why does writing improve memory?  We’ve all heard teachers tell us to take handwritten notes and make our own memory devices.  However, as someone who writes and who is interested in psychology, I decided to look into it.  There’s actually a lot of science behind it, but I’ll try and summarize it into a few main points.

Basically, what mnemonics do is help you cross-reference the information you have learned by using the other parts of your brain.  The writing helps you organize your thoughts in order to retrieve it later when you need it. It also helps make the material more meaningful for you, which makes it a great technique to use if you don’t care about the subject material.

Anyways, I hope some of you found this interesting.  I think looking at how writing effects memory would be really fascinating to look into further, and if you have heard of this technique before I’d be curious to hear if it’s something that works for you!

I was in my Communication Sciences and Disorders class this week.  We recently started learning about common writing disorders so I thought it might be fun to discuss some of them here.  I never actually realized how many communication disorders were specific to writing.  I feel like most people commonly associate speaking disabilities with communication disorders, but there’s a vast range of disorders that expand across all forms of communication.

In the most general sense, a disorder of written language involves the difficulty spelling, comprehending text, word recognition, and written expression of words.  They can also involve any one or any combination of the five domains of language (for those of you who don’t know these are: morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and syntax).  It can involve impairments of the writing process such as the inability to address the audience of the written work and convey its purpose, or the inability to organize, write, and revise a piece of written work.

There are different signs and symptoms prevalent across many disorders of writing, but some signs and symptoms will vary due to the domains of language that are affected.  Poor reading comprehension is one of the most common symptoms.  This becomes apparent mostly around the third or fourth grade because reading education shifts from recognizing words and phrases to reading strategies and extracting meaning from a text.  Recognizing reading comprehension skills is crucial because these are the first indicators of an underlying disorder.

An example of a writing disability would be dysgraphia.  This involves the inability to produce clear or consistent handwriting.  Usually this consists of mixed print styles (such as using both cursive and print), different case sizes (as in using both upper and lower case letters in inappropriate contexts), and varying shapes or writing.  There is no known cause for the disorder, but it can be associated as an effect of brain injury or just occurring alongside other learning disabilities (i.e. dyslexia or ADHD).  The child may have hunching posture or twisted wrist position while writing, or tend to have a cramped grip on the writing utensil.  It’s difficult to diagnose because doctors need to rule out any other diseases that could result in writing impairments.  There is no cure for dysgraphia, but using wide-ruled paper or learning to type at an earlier age may help make writing easier even though it will not be a cure.

There are a couple other disorders of writing, but dysgraphia is the most common one. Hopefully, you learned something new!