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.
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:
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.
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"
–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
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