How very daring, comparing dear homer to freestyle rap.
I don't disagree, but have to say freestyle is ideally song-writing in real time. Personally, I think this means the opposite of recitation. In practice, it is just-in-time and thus very repetetive (I'm happy I managed to make this comment HN on-topic! Thoughts?).
Therefore, it's as variable as any writing, though the constraints may require certain techniques and methods. I don't know, there's a reason freestyle battles aren't hugely popular. Many battle shows are pre-written. One can easily tell the difference. I won't say that's cheating, but will judge it according to expectations.
It's practically no different from regular discourse, ranging from repetitive, casual or formulaic small talk over thought out hacker news comments--I made a draft of this one in my head and am anxious I forgot something, or add too much--or a team meeting with the boss at work, up to legal procedures where the "oral" statements are frequently read out from paper, drafted by a team of experts, or even just submitted as briefs in congress to be bundled with the plenar protocol.
The only difference is the meter, which is not even rigidly up-held in modern poetry slams, nevertheless prosody is an important part of natural language (for lack of a better word).
Prosody in writing should be an interesting topic. Perhaps that's why my writing tends to be hard to read, as I'm a second language learner without much oral experience these days.
> Personally, I think this means the opposite of recitation.
Possibly true, but my point was that Epic Poems would not have been transmitted merely by recitation of exact learned words, but by a rhapsodist learning the story and internalizing it.
Then it would be conveyed as a mixture of repeated learned verses and freestyle improvisation of parts of the story; that would explain how completely new sections appear in the different versions of epic poems.
I don't disagree, but have to say freestyle is ideally song-writing in real time. Personally, I think this means the opposite of recitation. In practice, it is just-in-time and thus very repetetive (I'm happy I managed to make this comment HN on-topic! Thoughts?).
Therefore, it's as variable as any writing, though the constraints may require certain techniques and methods. I don't know, there's a reason freestyle battles aren't hugely popular. Many battle shows are pre-written. One can easily tell the difference. I won't say that's cheating, but will judge it according to expectations.
It's practically no different from regular discourse, ranging from repetitive, casual or formulaic small talk over thought out hacker news comments--I made a draft of this one in my head and am anxious I forgot something, or add too much--or a team meeting with the boss at work, up to legal procedures where the "oral" statements are frequently read out from paper, drafted by a team of experts, or even just submitted as briefs in congress to be bundled with the plenar protocol.
The only difference is the meter, which is not even rigidly up-held in modern poetry slams, nevertheless prosody is an important part of natural language (for lack of a better word).
Prosody in writing should be an interesting topic. Perhaps that's why my writing tends to be hard to read, as I'm a second language learner without much oral experience these days.