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Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of pop music. At some point you realize most of the songs on the radio are "verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus" with only subtle variations in structure.

But in the end, I don't actually think that's a bad thing. There is a lot of variations you can do, even within such a limiting structure. Summer blockbusters are the pop music of movies. And just like pop songs, even if you know the overall structure you can still be surprised and entertained throughout.

And, just like music, it doesn't mean that there can't be things that break the mold entirely, even if they aren't quite as popular. There's always going to be someone out there pushing the boundaries, and there's always going to be someone really skilled who makes something really popular that doesn't conform to the formula at all.

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This reminds me of pop music.

There was a book of this sort written for pop music, too: The Manual, or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way by Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty, also known as The KLF.

It's brilliant and hilarious; at one point they describe "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley as the perfect pop song because it plays so deliberately into schoolgirls' fantasies.

This is pretty much the songwriting bits of The Manual, for films. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/07/19/the-manual-hollywood-editio...

> It's brilliant and hilarious; at one point they describe "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley as the perfect pop song because it plays so deliberately into schoolgirls' fantasies.

Oh I didn't catch that part, I only read it half-way. I should pick it up again :)

BTW anyone interested can find several plain text copies of this book with a simple search query. The KLF (Discordians) were pretty big on Kopyleft afaik, so I doubt they mind either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2cfxv8Pq-Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk-I85A5-hU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

Exactly what I was thinking of - "This is How To Write a Love Song"

I wonder if, in future generations, schoolchildren will write their own formulaic pop-songs as today they write their own sonnets.

In all seriousness, where is this happening? I don't remember being taught to write sonnets in school. If this is something relatively recent, maybe education has improved a little.

I wrote a few sonnets in 11th (iirc, may have been 12th) grade English class (public school, prior to the standardization craze apparently). We did half a year on English Renaissance drama, and wrote some sonnets while we were learning about Shakespeare. I assumed this was relatively typical.

It was pretty fun, I think one of mine was about bears on the moon. We basically just learned the rhyming scheme 'abab cdcd efef gg'.

I was taught to write sonnets at school (and most of the other obvious verse forms, from clerihews to iambic pentameter), but then my school also taught Ancient Greek and Latin.

In my high school Spanish was the only foreign language (even though lots of students were central/South American so that was an easy pass for them). The closest we got to writing poetry was a haiku.

In all seriousness, where is this happening?

It must have been public school.

Nah, I did it in a regular public school in a rural area. The variety of quality you would get from different public schools is pretty extreme (or at least it use to be). Had I lived a few more miles away I probably would have ended up in a school that got sued for refusing to not teach creationism. Big differences even in the same state in the same sort of area.

It's trendy to slam public schools, but I think the only thing that really is (or was?) systemic about public schools is inconsistency.

My English class (not an "advanced" one) in 9th or 10th grade had us practice writing sonnets and other rhyme-pattern-based poetry when we studied Shakespeare. It's possible that this was due to an awesome teacher, rather than being generally true of our area's curriculum, though.

Nooooo...Speak of the spring and foison of the year!

I curse you seven times for reminding me of those foul exercises.

I wrote sonnets as part of the English curriculum in high school, and I graduated relatively recently (2007).

I recall being assigned to write an epic poem with heroic couplets back in high school in the 1970s. I wrote mostly about the heroic struggle against boredom that students in our high school's computer science class had to endure.

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