Week 3

Good afternoon. I hope you are doing well. Today we will review the short research essay, the nature of arguments, and the conventions of integrating primary and secondary sources. You should have a fairly solid sense of the informative essay by the end of the period. It will be due week 4.  The following week, week 5, we will be meeting at the Art Museum of Ft. Lauderdale to review the Tom Wesselman exhibit. You should sign a release form today or next week in class, if you plan to attend.

The goal of argument, most often, is to convince others that they should change their minds about some issue. Barack Obama, in trying to pass health care reform, sought to convince Congress and the American people that health care reform was in the best interests of citizens and the nation. In his speeches on the issue he compared numbers, best estimates of current and future costs under the current system, to the savings and proposed benefits of reform measures; he cited examples of citizens neglected or underserved by the current system and the kinds of coverage that would be available after reform. He argued that reform, for a number of sound reasons, economic and ethical, is necessary to the health of the nation. To “win” he had to convince others by providing reasons so compelling they agreed with his position.

Yet another goal of argument is to decide or explore rather than to convince others of the rightness of a position. Before making an informed decision or taking a position, we need an adequate acquaintance with a subject or issue and the various perspectives in which it can be seen. Writing that presents information and perspectives to help people to understand an issue, without presuming to have answers, or any easy ones, is another goal of argument. Looking at the facts, asking questions, comparing perspectives, the writer prepares us to see the dimensions of a given problem or issue.

 The thesis of an argument should be an arguable claim, one that tries to convince readers of something or perhaps to do something, or explore a topic so that readers are in a position to make an informed decision. The thesis may address an issue that has no ready or absolute answer, not one readily verified by resort to factual report, but one that readers might realistically take different perspectives on.

Argument or fact?

*Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

* Van Gogh’s work is that of a madman.

* Plastic bags are polluting the seas.

*Consumers must reduce their carbon footprint.

*The average temperature of the earth has risen over the last century.

*Glaciers are melting at a rate unprecedented in modern times.

Build your essay around an arguable claim. Support it with reference to your readings, first-person experience, a factual basis and logical analysis. Consider the following thesis: The use of plastics worldwide must come under closer scrutiny and regulation.

Readers now want to know why, and how the issue affects them and, indeed, if there is something they might do to help resolve the issue. Your sources provide background information, demonstrate your knowledge of the topic, provide authoritative support and perspective, and show the range of perspectives possible, in fairness to differing opinions.

Select material for quotation on the following bases:

1) 1 the wording is particularly memorable, to the point, and not easily paraphrased

2) it expresses an author’s or expert’s direct opinion that you want to emphasize

3) it provides example of the range of perspective

4) it provides a constrssting or opposing view

Format quotations in the following manner:

Brief quotations of no more than four lines should be worked into the text within the usual margins from left to right, and enclosed by quotation marks. Use a signal phrase or tagline to introduce them, followed by a colon or comma. Longer passages should be set off in block format, indented and aligned 10 spaces from the left margin, with no quotation marks but those that may be internal to the passage itself.

Example from “An Ocean of Plastic”:

Kitt Doucette describes the threat of plastic to all marine life, and perhaps human life, too: “Even small organisms like jellyfish, lanternfish and zooplankton have started to ingest tiny bits of plastic. These species, the very foundation of the oceanic food web, are becoming saturated with plastic, which may be passed further up the food chain.” The fish we eat may contain the residues of these ingested plastic particles, and pose clear health risks. He explains, citing also the authority of a leading marine biologist:

[. . .] the chemical toxins concentrated in the [plastic] waste lodge themselves in the animals’ fatty tissues, accumulating at ever increasing levels the higher you go up the food chain. It isn’t clear yet if these chemicals are reaching humans, but PCB’s and DDT are know to disrupt reproduction in marine mammals. In human they have been linked to liver damage, skin lesions, and cancer. “The possibility of more and more creatures ingesting plastics that contain concentrated pollutants is real and quite disturbing,” says Richard Thompson, a British marine biologist who has been studying microplastics for 20 years.

Use brackets around any material you add for the sake of clarity or any change to the original necessary, such as a verb tense or use of a pronoun, or ellipsis punctuation to abbreviate the length of the passage. The source title, be it an article title in a magazine or newspaper or that of a website from which you have borrowed material, should be identified at the outset or your introduction and use of the material. The year or date of such information should be recent , or otherwise noted.

*MLA citations and works cited will not be necessary for this assignment.

 One of the modes or means of developing and organizing essay material is that of illustration or exemplification–providing examples to support a point or assertion or clarify a position. Examples are often used in tandem with description and narration and other modes of organization such as analysis, cause/effect and comparison and contrast. Examples may be presented in lists or itemized or a single one developed at length (the extended example). To remember: an illustration is a specific instance or case, an event, story, artifact, word or thing, picture, chart, map, etc. Some examples here follow:

While viruses and bacteria cause most of the common diseases suffered by people who live in the developed world, protozoa are the major cause of disease in undeveloped tropical zones. Of these diseases, the most widespread are malaria, amoebic dysentery, and African sleeping sickness.

The idea that art does not exist among the lower animals is a primitive notion. A perfect illustration of art in the animal kingdom is the art of the amazing bower birds of Australia. These birds decorate their bowers with shells, colored glass, and shining objects. Some paint their walls with fruit pulp, wet powdered charcoal, or paste of chewed up grass mixed with saliva. One kind of bird even makes a paintbrush from a wad of bark to apply the paint.

–both examples above taken from Readings for Writers, 11th ed.

There was always a touch of seediness and sadness to pay phones, and a sense of transience. Drug dealers made calls from them, and shady types who did not want their whereabouts known, and otherwise respectable people planning assignations, and people too poor to have phones of their own. In the movies, any character who used a pay phone was either in trouble or contemplating a crime. Pay phones came with their own special atmospherics and even accessories sometimes–the predictable bad smells and graffiti, of course, as well as cigarette butts, soda cans, scattered pamphlets from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and single bottles of beer (empty) still in their individual, street-legal paper bags. Mostly, pay phones evoked the mundane: "Honey, I'm jut leaving. I'll be there soon." But you could tell that a lot of undifferentiated humanity had flowed through these places, and that in the muteness of each pay phone's little space, wild emotion had howled.

–Ian Frazier, "Dearly Disconnected"

Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer–surprise, surprise–is that Robert Lowth [author of A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762)] didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?"–merely a contraction of the same words–is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in "Many people were there"), but not when it is followed by a, as in "Many a man was there." There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon [author Thomas Tryon], the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish and, when this came hot out of the frying pan, it smelled admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enable one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.

–Ben Franklin, 1791

Essay#3 will require you come up with a topic that allows you to bring context to it by reading articles that have recently appeared addressing the topic, and incorporating some of what they have put across in a review that uses summary and some direct quotation.  As as a class we'll brainstorm possibilities today by reading "the news". The essay should support a clear thesis idea and be arranged in multi-paragraph form (three to six or more paragraphs). It should be titled, double-spaced, and a well edited 500 words or so in length. It will be due next week, week 4.

Topic Suggestions:

• the Economy
• the Environment
• the President
• the Wars
• the Oscars
• 
  
• 
  

Writing a summary: Handouts and discussion of sample text and summary conventions. 

Verb Tense Use: Exercises 3 and 4. at https://owl.english.purdue.edu/exercises/2/22/51

Week 2

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. . . . We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. . . .

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," from 1841 Essays

Welcome back! I hope your first and second weeks of school have gone well. It is Friday, a day for looking back and looking forward, I believe, or perhaps every day is so. We began last week with readings and freewriting exercises. Today we will follow up on the work you composed for submission today, sharing our thoughts and comments on the topics you've have addressed. We will also begin composing an essay about ourselves, an autobiographical piece structured by means of narration and description. We will explore how the things we own or perhaps even treasure reveal what has been pivotal in our lives. Writing is for many people a very satisfying way of exploring where they have been and where they may be going, and the connections between. In Why I Write, Joan Didion says: "We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and screamed, forget who we were."

Autobiographical narratives are structured as stories about the writer himself or herself. They show an individual caught in some way or facing something troublesome, which has to be dealt with or overcome in some measure. The story or stories show the author both recounting and reflecting on personal experience, making sense of it, putting it in some meaningful frame to be understood and thus communicated to a reader. Such essays have either a historical, social, and/or psychological frame, delving into the events, the changes, the lessons, the themes that have shaped the author's life. Who one has been, and is, is the central focus and the story elements–character, setting, action–serve to dramatize the life. Description is used to convey the physical characteristics of person, places, and things, to bring them vividly to life in the reader's imagination, in specific forms, colors, shapes, sounds, scents–whatever the key sensations.

By writing we become, I believe, more conscious of what we see, for in the theater of our mind we look at things, turn them over, bring them close, take a step back . . . in short we find angles of view that might have escaped us had we not stopped to contemplate the show. Writing about anything, writing well that is, demands we find some perspective to put our subject in, a stance or idea to frame it. The frame and/or thesis tells a reader what to make of our subject. Say the subject–the raw material–is some event we can't shake from memory, whether from childhood, adolescence, or our adult life. Something happened and the memory of it has been shedding a certain light on the stage (screen?) that is there in our head. This subject (event, phenomenon, fact, instance, example, case–call it what you will) must be interpreted, its shape discovered, framed, its meaning revealed (in so far as we can grasp it).

A composition of even a single paragraph must organize itself around an idea, stated or implied, which is the thesis or topic idea. Here are some examples, with topic ideas in italic letters:

Everything is changing. . . . This is a prediction I can make with absolute certainty. As human beings, we are constantly in a state of change. Our bodies change every day. Our attitudes are constantly evolving. Something that we swore by five years ago is now almost impossible for us to imagine ourselves believing. The clothes we wore a few years back now look strange to us in old photographs. The things we take for granted as absolutes, impervious to change, are, in fact, constantly doing just that. Granite boulders become sand in time. Beaches erode and shape new shorelines. Our buildings become outdated and are replaced with modern structures that also will be torn down. Even those things which last thousands of years, such as the Pyramids and the Acropolis, also are changing. This simple insight is very important to grasp if you want to be a no-limit person, and are desirous of raising no-limit children. Everything you feel, think, see, and touch is constantly changing.

–Wayne Dyer, What Do You Really Want For Your Children?

Starting about one million years ago, the fossil record shows an accelerating growth of the human brain. It expanded at first at the rate of of one cubic inch of additional gray matter every hundred thousand years: then the growth rate doubled; it doubled again; and finally it doubled once more. Five hundred thousand years ago the rate of growth hit its peak. At that time, the brain was expanding at the phenomenal rate of ten cubic inches every hundred thousand years. No other organ in the history of life is known to have grown as fast.

–Robert Jastrow, Until the Sun Dies

What my mother never told me was how fast time passes in adult life. I remember, when I was little, thinking I would live to be at least as old as my grandmother, who was dynamic even at ninety-two, the age at which she died. Now I see those ninety-two years hurtling by me. And my mother never told me how much fun sex could be, or what a discovery it is. Of course, I'm of an age when mothers really didn't tell you much about anything. My mother never told me the facts of life.

–Joyce Susskind, "Surprises in a Woman's LIfe"

In the old-time Pueblo world, beauty was manifested in behavior and in one's relationships with other living beings. Beauty was as much a feeling of harmony as it was a visual, aural, or sensual effect. The whole person had to be beautiful, not just the face or the body; faces and bodies could not be separated from hearts and souls. Health was foremost in achieving this sense of well-being and harmony; in the old-time Pueblo world, a person who did not look healthy inspired feelings of worry and anxiety, not feelings of well-being. A healthy person, of course, is in harmony with the world around her; she is at peace with herself too. Thus an unhappy person or spiteful person would not be considered beautiful.

--Leslie Marmon Silko, Essays

Some paragraphs, particularly ones descriptive or narrative, have no directly stated topic idea, but the idea is implied, the purpose of the paragraph clear. What is the implied topic idea in the following examples?

Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the print and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length, he turned to the young man: "You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?" The young photographer said, "Because I had to climb a mountain to get it."

--Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

We would go to the well and wash in the ice-cold, clear water, grease our legs with the equally cold, stiff Vaseline, then tiptoe into the house. We wiped the dust from our toes and settled down for schoolwork, cornbread, clabbered milk, prayers and bed, always in that order. Momma was famous for pulling off the quilts to examine our feet. If they weren't clean enough for her, she took the switch and woke up the offender with a few aptly placed burning reminders.

--Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Notice that well written paragraphs develop adequately the subject; that is, there is sufficient detail and enough examples to make a persuasive case for the idea(s) expressed. Often, too, in descriptive and narrative writing you will notice the pattern of arrangement is either spatial (the eye moves from point A to B and on to C and D in clear, coherent direction) or chronological (time is tracked either from a beginning point on forward, or backward, or some mix of the past, present, and future). Sometimes both the spatial, as in description of a setting or scene, and the chronological, as in an account of actions in time, are at work. Look again at the examples above. How are they arranged?

Stories–narratives–we tell them endlessly. They are built into the fabric of our lives. Our very lives are the stories we tell about them. The meaning we make of existence comes clear in the stories we tell each other, and each is one of the untold gazillions accumulating over time. Each has a point or a purpose. Each involves events, actions, a conflict set in motion, consequences, perhaps the underlying motives and feelings of those involved, the lessons and insights gained through the experiences recounted.

The following paragraphs are shaped as narratives:

A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition–a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next–that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

John Hersey, Hiroshima

We imagine the action that took place in the event referenced above, but the writer does not show us the exploding bomb, the fire and smoke and devastation all around. The wails of the living, and the dying.

Narration does more than suggest, it shows action:

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick–one never does when a shot goes home–but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to go there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly sticken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"

Notice how Orwell works the elements of sight, sound, movement in space, and deep feeling into the account, revealing only at the last line he has been lying down, firing up at the huge animal whose final collapse reverberates in our imagination.

Consider well the opening paragraph, as it should serve to draw the reader in to the story subject.  Choose concrete, specific words to relay setting and the emotions at the heart of your piece.  The following is the start of a roughly 5000 word biographical essay about the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected to the West in 1974, and returned at age 50 to pay homage to his roots and dance for all those who had in some way shaped him.

     It is raining, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is standing in a courtyard in Riga, the capital of Latvia, pointing up at two corner windows of an old stucco building that was probably yellow once.  With him are his companion, Lisa Rhinehart, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, and two of his children–Peter, eight, and Aleksandra, or Shura, sixteen.  He is showing them the house where he grew up. "It's Soviet communal apartment," he says to the children.  "In one apartment, five families.  Mother and Father have room at corner.  See?  Big window.  Mother and Father sleep there, we eat there, table there.  Then other little room, mostly just two beds, for half brother, Vladimir, and me.  In other rooms, other people.  For fifteen, sixteen people, one kitchen, one toilet, one bathroom, room with bathtub.  But no hot water for bath.  On Tuesday and Saturday, Vladimir and I go with Father to public bath."

      I open the front door of the building and peer into the dark hallway.  Let's go up," I suggest.  "No," he says.  "I can't."  It is more than a quarter century since he was here last.

                                                                                      from "The Soloist," by Joan Acocella

Most of our stories are of events not so unusual; they are of events more homely, domestic, ordinary. These events are no less potentially interesting and dramatic. An important strategy is to narrow your account down to the one or several key events and not to swamp the telling by including too much or anything that does not work to make your dramatic purpose clear, flowing, and forcefully delivered. Dialogue used sparingly may heighten the sense of immediacy and reality. It should reflect real conversation, minus whatever does not move the action forward or reveal character. Simple words and short sentences work best.

Writing Assignment #2, due week 3

:   In 500-600 words explore some element(s) of your life and identity in terms of both the past and present. Use some concrete means, some material possession or thing--be it only an image of a person, place, or object--to make the connection between your past and present. You will want to present this memento, as it were, and use it as a means of developing and providing structure to the essay. You, your life, your history, identity concerns, interests, etcetera are the actual focus of th essay. Remember, you want to create a relatively sharp portrait of yourself and some revealing moment or event that serves the narrative element. Begin in present tense, and create a clear sense of present setting or place.

The opening lines and/or paragraph should at least hint at the central idea. Supporting paragraphs should develop the promised topic by narrative and/or descriptive means. The conclusion should underscore your main idea and bring a sense of finish.  

Title the essay, double space the lines, indent for each paragraph.

The following is a list of topic suggestions:

*A now-I-know-better experience.

*An experience that shows something of what people are made of, or of what you are made.

*An experience that shows the power of love, anger, desire, fear, etcetera.

*An experience that brought about a significant change in you.

*An experience that reveals the kind of family you have.

*An encounter with a "stranger" you can't now forget.

SENTENCE TYPES

Sentence Type 1: The simple sentence has one subject and one predicate, the base of which is always a verb or verb phrase. And in English, the subject usually comes up front, followed by the verb and any other predicate elements. This subject-verb combo is called a clause, an independent clause, because it expresses a grammatically complete, stand-alone thought.

Jesus wept. Nuts! (that is nuts, this is nuts, he is nuts, etc., where that, this, he are the subjects and "is" the verb, with "nuts" describing the situation or person, as an adjective or subject complement).

Style has meaning. Choices resonate. What is the subject in each of the two preceding sentences? Style and choices, of course. And the verbs? Has and resonate, of course.

And in the following?

The house is surrounded by razor wire.

He and I fight too often. We cannot be good for one another.

After spring sunset, mist rises from the river, spreading like a flood.

From a bough, floating down river, insect song.

He drove the car carefully, his shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.

They slept.–intransitive (takes no direct object of the verb)

The girl raised the flag.– transitive (the flag is the object of the verb)

Inverted order: Lovable he isn't. This I just don't understand.

Tall grow the pines on the hills.

A fly is in my soup. With expletive (which delays the subject): There is a fly in my soup.

Sentence type 2: The compound sentence has at least two independent subject and verb combinations or clauses, and no dependent clauses. Each independent clause is joined by means of some conjunction or punctuation that serves to join:

Autumn is a sad season, but I love it nonetheless.

Name the baby Huey, or I'll cut you out of my will.

The class was young, eager, and intelligent, and the teacher delighted in their presence.

The sky grew black, and the wind died; an ominous quiet hung over the whole city.

My mind is made up; however, I do want to discuss the decision with you.

Sentence Type 3: The complex sentence is composed of one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

Many people believe that God does not exist.

Those who live in glass houses should not cast stones.

As I waited for the bus, the sun beat down all around me.

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Any of the seven short coordinating conjunctions can be used before the comma to join independent clauses:  for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so:  they can be remembered as FANBOYS.

*A semi-colon (;) must be used before adverbial conjunctions joining independent clauses:  however, indeed, therefore, thus, in fact, moreover, in addition, consequently, still, etcetera.

Sentence Type 4:  The compound-complex sentence has at least two independent clauses and one dependent clause.

As I waited for the bus, the sun beat down all around me, and I shivered in my thoughts.

Because she said nothing, we assumed that she wanted nothing, but her mother knew better.

She and her sister Amina are dancers, and they work at parties around town when they can.

While John shopped for groceries, two armed men forced their way into his home; fortunately, his wife and children were away.

Examples of subordinating conjunctions––those used in from of dependent clauses–– include the following:  because, that, which, who, when, while, where, wherever, though, as though, although, since, as, if, as if, unless, et al .

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