English 114 Course Reader
Michael J. Martin
English Department
San Francisco State University
Fall, 2014
Grade Tracking Sheet (record your grades here)
Revisions (date submitted/
Assignment
Grades
Grades)
Averages
Notes:
•
All grades must be passing (C or better—R grades must be revised); the course grade equals
the average of the passing essay averages minus the lowest passing grade.
•
Add averages and divide by the number of assignments (e.g., E1=3/E2=3.50/E3=2.75 for a
total of 9.25 grade points, divided by 3 = 3.08, which yields 3 or B. The lowest passing grade is
dropped in computing the final average, would raise the above example to a B+.
•
+/- = .25 (one quarter) of a point (e.g., 3.25-3.74 = B+; 3.75 = A-).
•
The fourth paper carries double weight (e.g., A- = 7.5 grade points).
•
The final of the four grades on each paper is for editing; corrections should be made on the
original final draft (or revision) and on your disk file; part of this grade for revisions reflects the
separate proofreading analysis.
If you have questions or concerns about any grading issue, please see me as soon as you can.
English Composition Reader
2
Contents
Grade Tracking Sheet (record your grades here) ............................................................................................2
Contents ..............................................................................................................................................................3
This reader uses the Times New Roman font at 11 points. .............................................................................3
Proofreading Key ...............................................................................................................................................4
Sample pages—returned and revised ...............................................................................................................7
Michael’s Brief Style Guide............................................................................................................................. 10
Revising for stronger style: ............................................................................................................................. 13
Some Essay/Book Openings ............................................................................................................................ 14
Some conclusions... ........................................................................................................................................... 16
An Essay Makes a Point .................................................................................................................................. 18
An Approach to Topics .................................................................................................................................... 20
On College......................................................................................................................................................... 22
Sentence and paragraph focus: Connect new information to previous! ..................................................... 25
Anaphora: Connecting New Information to Old ........................................................................................... 28
Noun Phrase Appositives ................................................................................................................................. 29
Appositives with adjective clauses: ................................................................................................................. 32
Verbal Modifiers .............................................................................................................................................. 34
Absolute Phrase Modifiers .............................................................................................................................. 38
Concessives ....................................................................................................................................................... 41
Correlatives ...................................................................................................................................................... 42
Adjective Clauses ............................................................................................................................................. 43
Punctuating Adjective Clauses ........................................................................................................................ 44
Simplified Comma Rules ................................................................................................................................. 45
"Big Punctuation"............................................................................................................................................ 46
Brief Overview of Punctuation: Semicolon, Colon, Parenthesis, Dash, Quotation Marks, and Italics .... 47
Semicolon ; ........................................................................................................................................................ 47
Underlining and Italics ..................................................................................................................................... 48
Sentence Development Recap.......................................................................................................................... 50
Sentence Boundaries ........................................................................................................................................ 51
Sentence focus: Characters and actions ......................................................................................................... 53
Weak sentence focus: Students and professionals ......................................................................................... 54
Sentence and paragraph focus ........................................................................................................................ 56
Examples of good style ..................................................................................................................................... 57
Using quotations and textual support............................................................................................................. 58
Documenting Sources....................................................................................................................................... 59
Writing Under Time Constraints.................................................................................................................... 60
The Art of Conducting a Great Interview...................................................................................................... 65
A Sample Source Paper ................................................................................................................................... 69
All Things Being Equal? (Anon., Eng. 414, F98) ........................................................................................... 69
A sample essay on technology ......................................................................................................................... 72
Reality Television: Where are the Limits? ..................................................................................................... 76
Sources: ............................................................................................................................................................. 78
This reader uses the Times New Roman font at 11 points.
English Composition Reader
3
Proofreading Key
RTS: Run together sentences: sentence clauses connected with only a comma (also called "comma splice"
or "fused sentence").
Example of error: *Cultural difference has made this community an exciting place to live, it is one of the
most interesting in the world.
Example of solution: Cultural difference has made this community an exciting place to live, because it is
one of the most interesting in the world.
FRAG: Incomplete sentences (fragments), which need to be connected to a complete one.
Example of error: *But differences in culture also bring difficulties. Problems that seem impossible to
solve.
Example of solution: But differences in culture also bring difficulties, problems that seem impossible to
solve
Focus: Something is off in the S/V relationship, the way the words are arranged, or the sentence has an
unnecessary passive or expletive construction.
Example of error: *There were three problems that he saw in the arrangement. [expletive]
Example of solution: He saw three problems in the arrangement.
Example of problem: *Most marriages are a result of poor communication. [predication]
Example of solution: Most marital problems result from poor communication.
Example of problem: *The situation was made worse by government inaction. [passive]
Example of solution: The government's inaction made the situation worse.
PP: Missing endings for past tense or descriptive verbs; other past tense or past participle problems.
S/V, V/S, V/A: Agreement between subject and verb either in main sentence clauses or in adjective
(that/which/who) clauses.
PL: Plural -s endings missing on nouns.
POS: 's or s' missing for nouns possessing other nouns or a confusing of 's with the plural -s.
PNA: Pronoun agreement with its referent is off.
Example of problem: *A child who fails in school begins to feel inadequate in other ways, since they
apply the negative lesson generally.
Example of solution: Children who fail in school begin to feel inadequate in other ways, since they apply
the negative lesson generally.
TS: A tense change (shift) that doesn't make sense.
English Composition Reader
4
HOM: Homonym confusion.
Example of problem: *I went their to find myself, but failed miserably.
Example of solution: I went there to find myself, but failed miserably.
COND: Unnecessary conditional verb use (would, should, might, etc.) or missing when appropriate.
CFH: Extraneous (unnecessary) commas, usually corresponding to an oral pause, rather than a
grammatical division or commas missing when they’re needed.
ID: A problem with idiomatic usage:
My mother is a very high classed woman who grew up in Lima, the cosmopolitan capitol of Peru.
Correction given: high class woman
+: Spelling error.
<NTO?> Missing connection between paragraphs or sentences.
NOTE: Electronically returned papers use green highlighting for grammar problems (other than sentence
boundary mistakes, which are underlined), light blue for sentence style concerns, and yellow for spelling.
While a few other problems may show up, these are the main kinds of editing errors. They're
fairly simple to correct but difficult to find. When you put on your copy editing hat, during that time
block you plan for that purpose, to go over the copy you'll give me, remind yourself of what your past
demons have been, read aloud slowly, checking each sentence for mistakes. Don't read for meaning, but
just look for mistakes, checking for agreement, inflections like -ed, the plural -s, spelling, and so on. You
might also try reading through the paper backwards, aloud and sentence by sentence, again, looking for
your particular editing demons. Allow enough time! Also at this time, check to make sure you have a title,
page numbers or headers, a list of sources and write them in if you don't. (See comment sheet for more
details.)
If you've got a lot of editing problems and feel uncertain about them, see me. I'll work with you
after I grade the papers, of course, but I'm willing to go over drafts with you, too. The reference section of
the main library has a selection of handbooks as well, which can help you develop your understanding of
this stuff. (And remember, after "internalizing" the right/wrong concept about error categories, you'll
eventually stop making them, or make them much less often.)
The Bedford/Saint Martin company's writers' handbooks by Diana Hacker are the best general
guides to grammar rules and conventions that I know of. For clues to idiomatic usage of words, try
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Fog City Fundamentals, by the SFSU English
Department staff, has very good exercises for improving proofing ability.
A few Internet resources:http:
http://owl.purdue.edu
http://www.eslcafe.com/
http://www.dianahacker.org
A final note on proofreading: We all have our editing demons. I make the same errors I made in seventh
grade, but I’ve gotten much better at finding and correcting them. This should be your goal, too—not to
English Composition Reader
5
stop making errors, but instead to become a more effective proofreader of your own writing. Part of the
“post production” work on your writing will be to make corrections (that should ideally have been made
at an earlier point) and to work with one example of each type of error after copying it (the actual
mistake) onto an analysis sheet and explaining the technical problem (why it’s an error and what the
correct form is).
This contrastive analysis (the error side by side with the correction) will help you learn new editing and
style techniques and deal with spelling and formatting problems, too. If your first language was not
English or if you spoke a dialect very different from “standard English,” looking at the contrast between
“correct” and “mistake” can also develop a stronger sense of the given problem and its solution.
I will be happy to work with you on such problems in conference or via email.
English Composition Reader
6
Sample student pages—returned and revised
My mother was the first to tell me the news about the Islamic Center, but when she broke
the news, she said that somebody was going to build a mosque near Ground Zero. This is a great
example of the bullshit the media feeds us. My mother got the wrong information from the news
channel, just like almost everyone else in America. My instant reaction to that news was that it is
Comment [MJM1]: Exactly. (Though
misinformation or lies might be a better choice in
terms of the stylistic register of the paper?)
absolutely legal because religion and past events should not be mixed with government, it is true
that sometimes we must learn from our past, but to me the Islamic Community Center does not
Comment [MJM2]: This seems a little odd to me.
In some ways, it’s true, but people more often say
that the founding ideal, enshrined in the 1st
Amendment, was the separation of state and church.
look to be a threat. People say that this country has a government based on the Bible; if so, then
it is absolutely hypocritical and wrong. If America wants to prove that religion does not tangle
[QF]xwith the government, then people should not make the Islamic Center “controversial”. If
the government is able to control what a land owner should or should not build based on
Comment [MJM3]: double negative here?
something that happened in history, then certainly our country will not be free no more.
Although the building of the center is legal, there is a sentimental factor that we need to
consider as well. The 9/11 attacks left people angry and upset. Many innocent lives were taken
and Americans and the media like to blame the whole group rather then just those who were
responsible. Since then, Muslims have been disliked by the general public and are often targeted
Comment [MJM4]: would or may seem?
in the news. If the center is built so near to where the 9/11 ashes lay, then it seems disrespectful
and hurtful to all of those who suffered a loss in the attacks, including those who work in the area
. There are a lot of people who are not against the building of the center, but they are against the
idea of the center being so close to Ground Zero. However, I believe that, especially if they do
not live in the area, these people should not have a say because it really has nothing to do with
them or the rest of country.
English Composition Reader
7
Revised version (the student’s changes are underlined)
The New York City Islamic Center that is being planned to be built a few blocks away
from Ground Zero has brought back a lot of these memories and feelings. My mother was the
first to tell me the news about the Islamic Center, but when she broke the news, she said that
somebody was going to build a mosque near Ground Zero—a great example of the
misinformation the media feeds us. She got the wrong information from the news channel, just
like almost everyone else in America. I instantly felt that building the center must be absolutely
legal because religion and past events should not be mixed with government. True, we must
learn from our past, but to me the Islamic Community Center does not look to be a threat.
People say that this country has a government based on the Bible; if so, then it is absolutely
hypocritical and wrong. If America wants to prove that religion does not tangle with the
government, then people should not make the Islamic Center “controversial.” If the government
is able to control what a land owner should or should not build based on something that
happened in history, then certainly our country will be free no more and Americans will be no
better off than Iranians.
Although the building of the center is legal, some the argue that we should learn from our
past that Islam cannot be trusted. The 9/11 attacks left people angry and upset. Many innocent
lives were taken and Americans and the media like to blame the whole group rather than just
those who were responsible. Since then, Muslims have been disliked by the general public and
are often targeted in the news. If the center is built so near to where the 9/11 ashes lay, then it
would seem disrespectful and hurtful to all of those who suffered a loss in the attacks, including
English Composition Reader
8
those who work in the area . Most people do not have a problem with the concept of building
thee center, but the oppose the location because it is so close to Ground Zero. However, I believe
that, especially if they do not live in the area, these people should not have a say because it really
has nothing to do with them or the rest of country.
Analysis
Corrected missing header and page number
it is absolutely legal because religion and past events should not be mixed with government, it is
true that sometimes we must learn from our past,
I instantly felt that building the center must be absolutely legal because religion and past events
should not be mixed with government.
RTS mistake: Two sentences can’t be connected with just a comma.
Sentence style: Use something besides it is
“controversial”.
“controversial.”
Quotation format: Period and comma before quotation mark.
rather then just let
rather than just let
Than for comparing and then for time or conclusions
English Composition Reader
9
Proofreading/style Contrastive Analysis
The United States rolled up to the border
dotted with new
The United States rolled up to the border, dotted
with new
Problem: Use comma to set off modifier
There seemed to be a collective
consensus to keep children out of it. The
it being the fact….
Adults seemed to have a collective consensus
to keep the children unaware of the fact we
lived two hours away from abject poverty
and a literal third world country with all that
entails.
Problems: Sentence focus /sentence fragment
English Composition Reader
10
Michael’s Brief Style Guide
To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and
inside of the human body--both go together, and they can't be separated.
--Jean-Luc Godard
This guide outlines some of the standard typographical and stylistic conventions for academic writing,
generally accepted by most audiences. It's a good idea to check on these expectations with different
instructors or other audiences, though, and keep in mind that different kinds of writing have differing
requirements.
Appearance
•
8.5 x 11" paper, no cover or folder. Pages should be stapled or clipped.
•
Separate title pages are unnecessary.
•
Your name, the date, course and section, draft description in upper left corner, page 1. Also your
email address.
•
No number on page 1.
•
A title that reflects content or point of paper and creates interest.
•
An epigraph after the title. (Optional)
•
Page numbers, preferably in a header with your name or the title of the paper.
•
12 font in a readable typeface (Times New Roman, the Windows default, is fine).
•
.5" paragraph indentations.
•
Be sure to spell-check and proofread for spelling.
Style
•
For a clear, readable sentence style, try to use real characters doing real actions.
•
Avoid passive constructions (e.g., "Mistakes have been made”).
•
Avoid there is/it is constructions.
•
Try not to overuse "to be" or linking verbs and perhaps avoid them altogether as main
independent clause verbs.
•
Try for a balance of sentence types and lengths, avoiding overly choppy stretches and difficult to
read, turgid writing with lots of long sentences.
•
Avoid It is X that… sentences. (They work in oratory much better than in writing.)
•
Try to use some "big punctuation" for variation, as well the different kinds of modifiers.
English Composition Reader
11
Global Coherence
•
Remember to connect previous information to new information.
•
Understand your point of view, your argument, and consistently make connections with it.
•
Try to use backward referring nouns and pronouns for coherence.
•
Work to explain what your readers should see in examples or argumentation.
•
Tangents or topic shifts are good things if you bring out connections to what comes before them.
•
Consider using a draft conclusion as the introduction, since they often provide a strong
"umbrella" point, indicating the content and argument.
•
Consider outlining drafts (after you write them) and rearranging paragraph order—but also
connect them.
Proofreading
•
Proof or copy edit final drafts and make corrections to errors, omissions, and spelling.
•
Proofread for your particular editing demons, maybe with a list of what they are.
•
Proofread aloud to slow down your reading. (Some people find reading backwards, sentence by
sentence, helps avoid reading for content.)
•
Expect to find about the number of errors you've made in past papers.
•
A grammar handbook (like Diana Hacker's The Bedford Handbook for Writers or A Pocket Style
Manual) might help answer questions.
•
Proofread for formatting (like page numbers and quotation marks), as well as grammar and
spelling.
Quotations
•
Source material should be used according to an accepted format (we’ll use MLA style).
•
All direct quotations should be "…" quoted and attributed..
•
Phrases, individual words, and portions of sentences can be integrated with your sentence.
•
Use colon or comma to lead to a quoted sentence or passage, normally.
•
Quotes of more than four lines should be block indented.
•
Refer to authors by their last names, after introducing with full name.
•
Avoid writing, According to Jane Smith, she says…. Instead, just write, Jane Smith says, "…" or
English Composition Reader
12
According to Jane Smith, "…."
•
Try to explain what readers should see in the quote or understand from it, rather than letting it
stand on its own.
•
Consider summarizing and describing key sources, as well as quoting from them.
•
Interior quotations get single quote marks: Smith writes, "The central argument, that 'reform'
equals 'repeal' certainly rings true with welfare 'reform.'"
•
Periods and commas go inside quote marks; large punctuation goes inside if it's in the original
and outside if you add it.
•
Always cite page numbers and provide a full bibliographic citation at the end in a source list.
•
For more information and reference, use a style manual or handbook. Our class will use the
Chicago Manual of Style citation system, with footnotes and a source list at the end. See
examples at http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/chicago.html or
http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c10_s1.html. This system is most often used in history
writing, but will give you practice with using any set citation system. (Note that some examples
use endnotes rather than footnotes, though the citations are in the same format.)
Revising for stronger style:
•
Getting rid of unnecessary words
•
Strengthening verb/subject cores
•
Combining sentences when that seems appropriate
•
Using phrase or clause modifiers
The dissimilarity between my life and the lives of those two hours down the five freeway was something
around the general area of unjust. But injustice concerning economic disparity is not something you talk
about on the summit of the capitalist pyramid that I lived on.
The dissimilarity between my life and the lives of those two hours down the five freeway, the economic
disparity, felt generally unjust, but not something you talk about on the summit of the capitalist pyramid
where I lived.
English Composition Reader
13
Some Essay/Book Openings
Introductions to some non-fiction books and articles.
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire, I happened upon a
path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.
—Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
Often I have gazed into a chimpanzee's eyes and wondered what was going on behind them. I
used to look into Flo's—she was so old, so wise. What did she remember of her young days" David
Greybeard had the most beautiful eyes of them all, large and lustrous, set wide apart. They somehow
expressed his whole personality, his serene self-assurance, his inherent dignity—and, from time to time,
his utter determination to get his way. For a long time, I never liked to look a chimpanzee straight in the
eye. I assumed that, as is the case with most primates, this would be interpreted as a threat or at least a
breach of good manners. Not so. As long as one looks with gentleness, a chimpanzee will understand and
may even return the look. And then—or such is my fantasy—it is as though the eyes are windows into the
mind. Only the glass is opaque so that the mystery can never be full revealed.
—Jane Goodall, "The Mind of the Chimpanzee"
A bit of wisdom from cowboys of yore: "Always drink upstream from the herd." This is—and
always has been—sound advice for swallowing journalism, too. The conventional media overwhelmingly
impart the message of officialdom, of the economic powers, of the status quo…of the herd. Consume it at
your own risk.
—Jim Hightower, Forward to Media Looking Glass
I come from a generation who didn't do sports. Being a cheerleader or a drum majorette was a far
as our imaginations or role models would take us. Oh yes, there was also being a strutter—one of a group
of girls who marched and danced and turned cartwheels in front of the high school band at football
games. Did you know that big football universities Actually gave strutting scholarships? That shouldn't
sound any more bizarre than football scholarships, yet somehow it does. Gender politics strikes again.
—Gloria Steinhem, The Politics of Muscle
We all come from the factory wired for language. By the time we know what it is, we've got it.
Toddlers don't think about language; they just talk. Grammar is a later addition, an ever-evolving set of
rules for using words in ways that we can all agree on. The laws of grammar come and go. English today
isn't what it was a hundred years ago, and it's not what it will be a hundred years form now. We make up
new rules when we need them, and discard them when we don't. And when do we need them? When our
wires get crossed and we fail to understand one another.
—Patricia T. O'Connor, Woe is I
English Composition Reader
14
Advertising is a funny thing. We tell it our dreams, we tell it what to say, but after a while, it
starts telling us.
—George Felton, "The Selling of Pain"
The 11 Mexican migrants found dead in a sealed rail car in Iowa last week were twice
victimized—directly by smugglers who callously left them to die, and indirectly by a U.S. immigration
law in conflict with the realities of American life.
Daniel Griswell, “Mexican Workers Come Here to Work: Let Them!”
Wall Street Journal, 10/22/02
Through the ages, women's lives have centered about their sex role. Little girls have been told as
soon as they could toddle that some day they will be brides, and a little later, mothers, and, finally, if they
live, grandmothers. Every other activity--learning to spin and weave, cook and bake, dance, sing, and
skate, whatever the current accomplishments of young girls are--has been directed at achieving a lifelong
career as wife and mother. Where for men actual sex activity, however insistently it may intrude upon
attention, is a matter of a few minutes, for women each of these few minutes is laden with commitment
before and commitment afterward.
Margaret Mead, “Modern Marriage”
The Nation, October, 1953
It was an unbearably steamy August afternoon in New York City, the kind of sweaty day that
makes people sullen with discomfort. I was heading back to a hotel, and as I stepped onto a bus up
Madison Avenue I was startled by the driver, a middle-aged black man with an enthusiastic smile, who
welcomed me with a friendly, “Hi! How you doing?” as I got on, a greeting he proffered to everyone who
entered as the bus wormed through the thick midtown traffic. Each passenger was a started as I, and,
locked into the morose mood of the day, few returned the greeting.
Daniel Golman, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ
English Composition Reader
15
Some conclusions...
Here are a few conclusions from various non-fiction books and articles.
Each of us can begin to infuse science with heart and humor. We can reach out to colleagues and
build cooperative networks based on love, trust, and curiosity. In doing so, we become living
Philosopher’s Stones. Everyone we touch with our lives will see the value in this way of doing science. I
believe in the power of the small, the cumulative power of individuals leading conscious, ethical lives. As
chaos science teaches us, once we reach a critical threshold, the institutions of science will reorganize
themselves.
Linda Jean Shepard, Lifting the Veil: The feminine face of science, 284
Perhaps most of all there is a need for both partners, but especially for the woman, to
individualize their marriage, to think more about each other's rhythms, each other's capacities for change
and fulfillment. The kind of sex literature which merely gives statistics on frequency of sex relationships
and reported types of satisfaction, so that a man or woman can compare his or her record with some
national norm, is the least fitted to inform. Rather, women--and men--need to know how infinitely varied
the sex capacities of human beings are, how complex the patterns which release emotion, how various and
wonderful the ways that lead to ecstasy. As they come to realize the extent and depth of sex feeling--in
the feelings of the young child and the parent, in the young lover who lives on in the middle-aged, and the
vision of old age which makes the kisses given by the young already falter in uncertainty--the place of sex
in the world, the importance of understanding sex, should take on a new dimension.
Margaret Mead, “Modern Marriage” (The Nation, 12/19/1953)
Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you,
look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study
the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how and
where it was made, about what is set in motion by every single fast food purchase, the ripple effect near
and far, think about it. Then place your order. Or turn and walk out the door. It’s not too late. Even in this
fast food nation, you can still have it your way.
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream.
Paul Krugman, “The Death of Horatio Alger” (2004)
Ironically, organizations like Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace have now
become the real capitalists. By addressing such issues as greenhouse gases, chemical contamination, and
the loss of fisheries, wildlife corridors, and primary forests, they are doing more to preserve a viable
English Composition Reader
16
business future than are all the chambers of commerce put together. While business leaders hotly contest
the idea of resource shortages, there are few credible scientists or corporations who argue that we are not
losing the living systems that provide us with trillions of dollars of natural capital: our soil, forest cover,
aquifers, oceans, grasslands, and rivers. Moreover, these systems are diminishing at a time when the
world's population and the demand for services are growing exponentially.
Paul Hawkin, “Natural Capitalism” (Mother Jones 4/97)
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an
instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have
come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for
advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle
against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the
present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about
some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the
worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid
remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true
of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a
moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers
loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting
pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1953)
Current immigration law has made lawbreakers out of millions of hard-working, otherwise lawabiding people--immigrant workers and native employers alike--whose only “crime” is a desire to work
together in our market economy for mutual advantage. Death in a boxcar is perverse punishment for
seeking a better life.
Daniel Griswold, “Mexican Workers Come Here to Work: Let Them!”
Wall Street Journal, 10/22/02
English Composition Reader
17
An Essay Makes a Point
Watsonville
My hometown is Watsonville, California. Watsonville is a small town of about 20,000 which
originated around the year 1860. The main source of business in Watsonville is agriculture. Located in the
fertile Pajaro Valley between Monterey and Santa Cruz on the Pacific coast, Watsonville's climate is ideal
for growing lettuce, strawberries, artichokes, and especially apples. Watsonville is the official apple
capitol of the world.
The people of Watsonville are like those of any small town, very conscious of what goes on and
how things look to the public. In a small town, news travels very fast--especially bad news. Such is the
case in Watsonville. We have our socially prominent families giving elegant dinners every Christmas
Eve--you know, the ones to which everyone who is anyone is invited. We have the Mayor who used to
own a photography shop on main street. We have the old section of town, with our small town department
stores and grocery stores. Very few chain stores come to Watsonville.
Watsonville is small now, but it used to be a very important railway stop, so what town there is
grew fast. We even had a section where the laborers lived. But the agriculture had to stay, so the city had
to stop growing.
We still have the city plaza, which is as old as the city, and we still have the migrant workers. We
have the problems of any small town. I could write volumes.
English Composition Reader
18
San Jose
My hometown is San Jose, California.
San Jose used to be a fairly decent place to live. It was not a hick town, yet it didn't have the
clutter or sprawl of San Francisco or L.A. Being such a nice place to live, however, had disadvantages in
that many people who feel the same way but who are not residents decide to become residents.
The result is that over the past fifteen years or so, San Jose has gained about 500,000 new
inhabitants. Now I don't know about you, but I have a hard time getting along with 500,000 strangers-especially when it necessitates a complete change in the face of the city. Examples: Capitol Expressway, a
four to six lane monstrosity. Or take that huge field that used to be down the street from my old house;
my friends and I used to chase squirrels there on our way to school--and during the winter rains, ducks
would migrate to wallow in the makeshift ponds. Now that piece of land has an apartment complex, a gas
station, a Banco de San Jose, and a McDonald's, as well as assorted housing tracts here or there.
I could name further examples, but it seems pointless to try to "go home again"─even in my
mind. I regret that being so young I could not more fully appreciate those fields and orchards and little
two lane roads.
My memories are very vague and it is often very hard to me to picture San Jose as being any
other way than it is now. This, to me, is the saddest fact of all.
English Composition Reader
19
An Approach to Topics
To just say "an essay makes a point" and leave it at that means little: What is a point? How do
you get there? Aren’t some points better than others? How can you know? To answer these questions,
vital concerns for the effectiveness of any expository writing piece, think about this kind of procedure.
Take any topic—from quantum mechanics to trains to motorcycles—and think about what it means from
your own perspective. I know a lot about motorcycles, a little about trains, and next to nothing about
quantum physics. Say I’m required to write about it by an English teacher. What can I do? How can I
come up with a "thesis"?
•
Step one: Use my response (writer↔topic). (I know nothing about it. I’m fifty-seven years old,
have had 20 years of school, college, and grad school, but I know nothing about q.m. and little
about physics in general. For that matter, I don’t know a lot about science, which will affect how
my daughter learns about science, too, probably. I think it's wrong that I didn’t learn much
science or math….)
•
Step two: Connect to audience (writer and topic↔audience): So what? How does it apply to other
people, society, community? This is a connection with audience, and it helps you realize your
point. Here, it might be that MOST or nearly ALL of us know little about science or math for
whatever reason…is it kept shrouded in mystery? Maybe we don’t need to know much about it?
Or we’re just not very good at teaching it? We might say it’s too late for old dogs to learn, but can
we turn it around for kids? (Ahh…an ARGUMENT POINT.)
•
Step three: Recurvetake this point to the opening. Now the draft has a focus, an argumentative
point, one you can get behind. Connect all that you write next to this point, thinking about how
development and examples relate logically (illustration, causation, alternative, or conclusion-and/or/but-yet/so).
•
Step four: show with real examples from experience, memory, people you know (such examples
can be generalized) or material from sources (quotations, paraphrasing, summaries), always
connecting to audience and to your own central purpose.
So working with any topic becomes a combination of your response to it, figuring out its relationship to
others or to an audience, and writing about that relationship. The process is enriched, but not created by,
the use of textual sources. The writing is generated by your relationship to the topic. With literary texts, a
similar process can be engaged, as you write about your response as a reader and work to convey a point
about the text to your reader: your related experiences can a way "into" the text, just as your experience of
reading it does. In the example above, in writing about Delillo’s Ratner’s Star or Pirsig’s Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance (two novels about science and scientific method), I might have the same kind
of response and could use it in the same way.
English Composition Reader
20
Rhetoric: Basic Considerations
TOPIC
The
rhetorical
triangle
WRITER
AUDIENCE
o Motivate the audience and listen to its responses
o Make length commensurate to purpose and audience
o Organize discourse logically and coherently
o Balance abstract and concrete statements/evidence
English Composition Reader
21
Showing development
In this piece, humorist Dave Barry shows his analytical point about college with a wealth of concrete
examples from experience and imagination. Imagine this as a commencement address.
On College
College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to
memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time
sleeping and trying to get dates.
Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are the things you learn in
classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these
things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you
become a professor and have to stay in college for the
rest of your life.
It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize -don't ask me why -- the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to
forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw.
Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember something important
like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw
just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.
After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the
subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of
advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you
must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual
facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the
professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate
your result to five significant vertices."
If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true
of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your
professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists
have agreed on.
Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects
in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no
actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just
before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a
book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-
English Composition Reader
22
Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the
characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper,
you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading
papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly
come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.
PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as
reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists
are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a
certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My
roommate is now a doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should
major in psychology.
SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject.
I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never
once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be
considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into
scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For
example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down.
You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated
isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or
'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government
grant.
English Composition Reader
23
Version 1 paragraph:
Since English is my second language, I always encountered difficulties in my English classes,
especially in writing essays. Grammar and sentence structure are probably the two most problems I have
with writing. The English teachers I have had always commented that I should work on my verb tense and
sentence structure. It is not hard to understand that the highest grade I received in all of the English
classes I took was a ‘C’.
Version 2 paragraph:
Since English is my second language, I always encountered difficulties in my English classes,
especially in writing essays, and more effort never equaled improvement. I remember many times
sitting and staring at the blank screen and waiting for some miracle to happen and the essay to
start, but this never got any easier for me. Though the whole process is hard, grammar and sentence
structure are probably the two most difficult problems I have with writing. The English teachers I have
had always commented that I should work on my verb tenses and sentence structure. But no matter how
hard I worked on these things, in the next paper, I always get the same response and all that red ink
all over my paper. It is not hard to understand that the highest grade I received in all of the English
classes I took was a ‘C.’ Thus, I have none of the confidence when comes to writing essays.
To realize:
Making and focusing on a point about what you’re saying.
Showing (representational and textual) v. telling
Explanation or analysis: what do the examples show? How should readers understand the content?
Showing in exposition also takes the form of quotations, paraphrasing, and summaries, and the same
development concerns apply.
English Composition Reader
24
Sentence and paragraph focus: Connect new information to previous!
1. The means by which Asian products have successfully competed with your products in the
Western Pacific markets will constitute the objective of the first phase of this study. The labor
costs of competitors and their ability to introduce new products quickly are the first issues to be
examined. A plan that will demonstrate how your industry can take advantage of unexpected
market opportunities, particularly on the Pacific Rim, will be developed from this study.
2. In the first phase of this study, we will examine how Asian products have successfully competed
with your products in Western Pacific markets. The study will first examine labor costs of
competitors and how they are able to introduce new products quickly. We will develop from this
study a plan that will demonstrate how your industry can take advantage of unexpected market
opportunities, particularly on the Pacific Rim.
English Composition Reader
25
Group work: Revise the following to improve flow and cohesion. (Hint: you may need to use the passive
to follow the old to new rule, and that’s okay. In the second problem, take a look at how the topics of
sentences relate.)
1) The Hart Queen is one of the best skis for beginning skiers. A thin layer of tempered ash from
hardwood forests of Kentucky makes up its inner core. Therefore, two innovations for strength and
flexibility are built into its outer construction. Two sheets of ten-gauge steel reinforce a layer of ash for
increased strength. A wrapping of fiberglass thus surrounds the two steel sheets for increased flexibility.
Most conventional bindings can be used with the Queen. The Salomon Double is the best, however. A
cushion of foam and insulation firmly cradles the foot and ankle, yet freedom of movement is still
permitted.
2) The power to create and communicate a new message to fit a new experience is not a competence
animals have in their natural states. Their genetic code limits the number and kind of messages that they
can communicate. Information about distance, direction, source, and richness of pollen in flowers
constitutes the only information that can be communicated by bees, for example. A limited repertoire of
messages delivered in the same way, for generation after generation, is characteristic of animals in the
same species, in all significant respects.
English Composition Reader
26
From "With Economic Inequality for All," James K. Galbraith, The Nation, 9/7-14, 1998, 24.
Since 1970 pay gap between good and bad jobs in America has grown. It is now so wide that it
threatens, as it did in the Great Depression, the social stability of the country. It has come to undermine
our sense of ourselves as a nation of equals. Economic inequality, in this way, challenges the essential
unifying myth of American national life.
The most visible sign of this challenge emerges not in the marketplace or on the factory floor, not
in civil society or ordinary life, but in politics. It surfaces in bitter discussions of budgets, welfare and
entitlement programs. A high degree of inequality causes the comfortable to disavow the needy. It
increases the psychological distance separating these groups, making it easier to imagine that defects of
character or differences of culture, rather than an unpleasant turn in the larger schemes of economic
history, lie behind the separation.
High inequality has in this way caused our dreadful political condition. It has caused the bitter
and unending struggle over the transfer state, the ugly battles over welfare, affirmative action, healthcare,
Social Security and the even more ugly preoccupation in some circles with the alleged relationship
between race, intelligence and earnings. The "end of welfare as we know it," to take just one example,
became possible only as rising inequality insured that those who ended welfare did not know it, that they
were detached from the life experiences of those on the receiving end. The present attack on Social
Security, custom-designed to increase poverty among the old, likewise cannot imagine trading places with
those who would lose.
But what caused this rise in inequality? According to popular perception, a high level of
inequality is a kind of black rain, a curse of obscure origin with no known remedy, a matter of mystery
covered by words like downsizing, deregulation, or globalization. Some believe capitalism has simply
become more savage, that there is a new brutality of markets. Many speak of a paradox, in which the
social evil of rising inequality accompanies rising average incomes and general prosperity for the country
as a whole.
And there is a darker possibility….
English Composition Reader
27
Anaphora: Connecting New Information to Old
The Republican wilderness bill proposed to allow road construction, transmission lines, water
projects, pipelines, motorcycles and the like in areas where, by law, "man himself should be only
a visitor."
The excess produced a startling public backlash, so strong that the president made
environmental protection a centerpiece of his campaign. Speaker Gengrich, fearing looming
political losses, tried to tone things down, but the party, with the bit in its teeth, was in a headlong
gallop. A leadership memo advising members on how to avoid trouble could not restrain itself
from referring to "the environmental lobby and their extremist friends in the eco-terrorist
underworld."
Americans were repulsed and showed it in November.
How does the author maintain coherence in this passage? In the column, she outlines the history of the
‘92-’94 Congress (the 103rd) on environmental actions, the response of the public, current legislation,
ending with a prediction that the conservative majority will have to come back with a more progressive
stance, which will push Democrats to be more progressive in turn. ("Then we’ll see real progress," she
concludes.)
Notice the "old to new" principle. The end of the paragraph before the full one above gives a final
example (and comment, with the quote from the law). The full paragraph begins with "the excess," which
refers back to the development of the two paragraphs before, both on the dismantling of environmental
law. This is "recursion," in Sommers’ terms, and "listening to yourself" in my terms. This is one of the
most important aspects of coherency, since it works from paragraph to paragraph or from section to
section, and gives the reader the sense of developing meaning in a well focused way.
But it works on the micro level, too: The second part of that sentence starts with "so strong was,"
which refers to the "backlash" in the first part. It goes on to give new information (Gengrich), but keeps
things tight with "political losses," which again refers to "backlash." You might say it depends on
"backlash" to make sense, and continues with the new information of the momentum of the party. The
"leadership memo" that the paragraph ends with is another example of the Party’s tie to antienvironmental action, which connects with the opening paragraphs and the beginning of this one. It also
offers development direction: the difficulties the Party has run into in the face of public opinion that does
not mirror the direction it is taking.
Implication for writing: What all this means is that you have to pay close attention to what you say:
Since readers want what you say later to grow out of what you said earlier, the operative trick is to always
look at how you can carry forward the meaning of what you say at point N to point O. You can often
force this to happen by beginning sentences with "anaphoric" pronouns and nouns, words which, like
appositive phrases, refer back to a previous noun, agent, or situation. Here’s an example: This is
important because one of your goals is to build a web of meaning, fully inter-connected. When you use
quotations or other support, tie it to previous information. When you introduce a new character, tie
it/her/him to previous information. The same goes for new points and examples. Readers need to have
large and small portions fit in with the overall structure, and this is done with such connections.
English Composition Reader
28
Noun Phrase Appositives
1) The home of good talk, then, is the third place—a meeting ground between the work place and the
family circle, between the "rat race" and the "womb."
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, 120
2) Looked at in this way, disease seems a violation of nature, an appalling mistake. There must be a better
way to go.
Lewis Thomas, Medusa and the Snail, 133
3) When I first started to read about the emerging science of chaos, I was immediately struck with
similarities to characteristics that had been ascribed to the Feminine: unpredictability, nonlinear
processes, the importance of context, and the inseparable relatedness of the parts to the whole.
Linda Jean Shepard, Lifting the Veil: The feminine face of science, 90
4) But deep in the coke trade's shadow, marijuana, the dowdy green matron of the drug scene, has become
one of the largest cash crops in the United States.
The Examiner, 9/25/88, A7.
5) But overall, these classrooms were exciting places, places of reflection and challenge, of deliberation
and expression, of quiet work and public presentation.
Mike Rose, Possible Lives 416.
6) The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer—a scribe, not a poet.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 89.
7) But the intervention of consciousness also leads in time to the idea of art as a conscious idea--the
greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.
John Dewey, Art as Experience
8) Malawi's cash cropspeanuts, tea, coffee, sugarcane, and tobaccowere unchanged, though their
value on the world market continued to fluctuate.
Paul Theroux, "Malawi," National Geographic, 9/89, 377.
9) This was the old slap-on-the-fingers-if-your-modifiers-were caught-dangling stuff—correct spelling,
correct punctuation, correct grammar, hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,183
10) I understood what she was describingthat post-feminist erotic polarization in "sensitive" men.
Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities, 213.
English Composition Reader
29
Sentence Combining: Appositive Noun Phrases
Example: The Republican candidate for governor of California is William Simon.
He is the son of a former secretary of the Treasury.
He is a wealthy businessman.
William Simon, son of a former secretary of the Treasury and a wealthy businessman, is the Republican
candidate for governor of California.
Son of a former secretary of the Treasury, William Simon, a wealthy businessman, is the Republican
candidate for governor of California.
William Simon, the Republican candidate for governor of California and a wealthy businessman, is the
son of a former secretary of the Treasury.
1) A range of icy peaks stretches across northern New Mexico.
They are the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
It means "Blood of Christ mountains."
2) The President of the U.S. spoke in Egypt this week.
His name is Barak Hussein Obama.
He is the first African-American President.
But he is also the first with an Arabic name.
3) A San Francisco Giants player hit his 600th home run this week.
His name is Barry Bonds.
He is only the 7th batter in history to do so.
4) Her music lessons covered the basics.
The basics were scales, chords, arpeggios, and harmony.
5) She sold four paintings.
She sold a portrait of her friend.
Her friend's name is Jeneil.
She sold two landscapes.
She sold her beautiful and dark depiction of a rainy night on the corner of Hyde and Green
Streets.
English Composition Reader
30
6) All of these have undermined confidence in the economy.
The stock market is falling.
Many corporations have big scandals.
The "Internet economy" has collapsed.
8) Massive floods hit many European countries in 2002.
The countries included Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia, France.
English Composition Reader
31
Appositives with adjective clauses:
1) Scores are important, but not as important as the process that produces them, a point of view that
should surprise no one, since America was the first nation to be argued into existence.
—Neil Postman (1995), The End of Education, 72
2) Since the other girls are often at odds over boys, Becca, the one who is less socially adept, tends to take
on the role of the peacemaker.
—Peggy Orenstein (1994), SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, 67
3) I see a few familiar names among the fifteen students on the roster: LaRonda, of course, along with her
friend Sacha, a light-skinned African American girl who frequently explodes at her teachers.
—Orenstein, 167
4) I see a priest from an inner-city parish, Father Dowling, who appears on ABC, but he interests the
network only for his ability of deduce the murderer of a prostitute—tracking down the cop gone bad, but
not even getting to deliver a homily about it.
—Bill McKibben (1992), The Age of Missing Information, 92
5) Nearly all the youth violence increase that has occurred nationwide over the past decade has been
among nonwhites, a fact [that is] obscured by national crime totals that do not separate whites and
Hispanics.
—Mike A. Males (1996), The Scapegoat Generation, 110
6) Martin Luther King, who lived in this neighborhood in 1966, said there was a 10 to 20 percent "color
tax" on produce, an estimate that still holds true today.
—Jonathan Kozol (1991), Savage Inequalities, 42
7) Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a numb public,
people who are insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.
—Neil Postman (1984), Amusing Ourselves to Death (111)
8) Poincaré then hypothesized that this selection is made by what he called the "subliminal self," an entity
that corresponds exactly with what Phaedrus called preintellectual awareness.
—Robert M. Pirsig (1974), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 267
English Composition Reader
32
Appositives--Explanation
Noun phrase appositives are elaborative additions to sentences based on a N + N (+ phrase or clause)
pattern. Normally, they are separated with a comma or other punctuation:
1) The fog was heavy tonight.
With appositives:
The fog, a thick and freezing mist, was heavy tonight, the sixth cold summer night in a row.
Appositives are especially useful for defining and specifically identifying key terms and characters.
2) A neurotransmitter, serotonin is one of the keys to the neuro-musculature process.
3) Smith ( former CEO of a major auto company) spoke to the graduating class of the virtues of
free trade.
4) The head of the company's engineering unit, Linda Tan, testified about how they had
developed the software.
Appositives also allow you to emphasize (often with great stylistic effect) things that you think need
emphasizing:
5) The dinner became a disaster for him, an unmitigated failure that he would never live down…
and because you can keep adding them in parallel sequence, they can build even stronger responses from
your readers:
, a collection of burned, underdone, inedible lumps, things that might have once been food but
now bore little resemblance to it.
Appositives can also be simple examples:
7) Some major newspapers--the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Enquirer, for example-still do real investigative reporting.
Any noun can be paired with an appositive noun phrase. When you feel like you need to sharpen the
meaning or increase the weight of a noun, especially an important character in a sentence, you can add to
it with this kind of addition, improving the depth as well as the voice of your writing.
Exercises:
─Write a paragraph retelling something that happened today, for real or in the news, then go back and add
noun phrase appositives to the key characters.
─Look around you now and write down some of the things that you see in a list, then go back and try to
add appositives to what you named to further define/show what they are.
─If you want to get a surer sense of how they work, go through a few pages of published writing and try
to spot some. Though I think being able to identify them is less useful than having a feel for when you can
use that added noun, it may help clarify your sense of what they are.
English Composition Reader
33
Verbal Modifiers
When President Nixon first learned of the "trouble" at the Watergate apartment complex, he was
apoplectic. He told his aides that it was an unfortunate turn of events. In their frantic search for solutions
over the coming months, especially after Woodward and Bernstein of the Post broke the news to the
public, they offered many solutions. At one point, Nixon was advised to arrest the Congress. The Nixon
staff wanted to preserve his presidency at all costs. They were ready to do anything for Richard M. Nixon.
Here's a "generative" version in which I rewrote the paragraph, using a certain kind of free modifier:
When President Nixon first learned of the "trouble" at the Watergate apartment complex, he was
apoplectic, sputtering angrily that he would not be blamed for the idiocy of the CREEP operatives.
Searching frantically for a way to characterize the problem which wouldn't seem so negative, he told his
aides that it was an unfortunate turn of events, ordering them to disavow any knowledge of it. In their
frantic search for solutions over the coming months, especially after Woodward and Bernstein of the Post
broke the news to the public, they considered many options, desperately searching for ways to minimize
the damage, trying to find someone to blame everything on, grasping at ever more outlandish ideas. At
one point, Nixon was advised to arrest the Congress and the Supreme Court. To preserve his presidency at
all costs, Nixon's staff became strangely single-minded, not caring anymore about the constitutionality of
their actions, only fearing the reprisal of the other branches of the government and the wrath of the same
people who had effectively ended the Vietnam war. Lost in their blind loyalty, his staff was ready to do
anything for Richard M. Nixon.
English Composition Reader
34
Examples of Verbal Modifiers
1) People were learning things, both cognitive and social, and doing things, individually and collectively,
making contributions, connecting ideas, generating knowledge.
Mike Rose, Possible Lives, 416
2) It is so hard to have insight into a spider’s mind that it is almost impossible to guess whether it loves its
eggs, based on present knowledge.
A.M Masson and S. McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Life of Animals, 68
3) Eating disorders themselves can have harrowing long-term consequences, including anemia, liver and
kidney damage, infertility, and loss of bone mass that may contribute to osteoporosis.
Peggy Orenstein, School Girls:Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, 93
4) Having no choice but to be what they were—Ben and Jerry selling ice cream—their message was
"unpretentious and down home," to use Ben’s term.
Paul Hawkin, Growing a Business, 33-4
5) Even where the actual difference in spending between districts is not so vast, the poorer districts—
waiting often up to the last minute to receive part of their budget from other sources—find themselves
repeatedly held hostage to decisions of suburban legislators who have no direct stake in the interests of
low-income children.
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, 204
6) This is the greatest danger for our species, to try to pretend that we are another kind of animal, that
we do not need to satisfy our curiosity, that we can get along somehow without inquiry and exploration
and experimentation.
Lewis Thomas, Medusa and the Snail, 75
7) Since they were found at Ocean Beach a week ago, the two rare beaked whales—named Nicholas and
Alexander—have inspired a remarkable but very human effort to save them.
S.F. Examiner, 8/31/89
8) As I approach [the building], I see two eighth grade boys, students at Audubon, sitting the curb,
watching for slow cruising cars whose drivers might be interested in buying crack; they smile and wave
as I pass by.
Orenstein, 173
9) In defiance of a federal judge's temporary restraining order, about 250 anti-abortion protesters blocked
an Oakland Planned Parenthood clinic for nearly four hours, singing hymns, reciting prayers and taunting
pro-choice counter-demonstrators.
S.F. Examiner, March 12, 1989, B-1
English Composition Reader
35
Verbal Modifiers: A brief explanation
Verbals are phrases based on one of three verb forms which modify sentences:
• Verb + -ing
• Verb + -ed (or whatever its normal past tense form is)
• The infinitive or to + the verb.
The only rule, besides punctuating them, is that the logical or implied subject for the verb in the verbal
should be the nearest grammatical subject to it. (If not, it is said to be "dangling," which just means a
phrase that doesn't fit right, or that is not anchored (attached or connected) to a logical subject for it.
Otherwise, you're free to pile them up, mix the different kinds, play around, be creative, and so on.
Verbals of the -ing variety are great for showing simultaneous action, as when you're describing a
scene or someone's thought process.
Feeling a little overwhelmed, she walked to the podium for the first time, trembling noticeably, and
addressed the audience.
Trembling and feeling form the bases for the two modifiers. Notice how they show these things happening
at once. This kind of verbal is probably the most common, and if you watch for them in things that you
read or hear--from fiction and poetry to formal essays to sports broadcasting--you'll find a lot of them.
The -ed verbals are also very descriptive, and in fact more explicitly so. They have an unspoken full
sentence beneath them:
Dressed in a red suit with a blue tie and one of those beanie caps with a propeller on it, the guy didn't
expect to be taken seriously at the interview.
Verbs that have an irregular past participle use that in modifiers, like this:
Dismayed at the lack of progress and left with few options, the students finally took over the
administration building.
Infinitive verbals imply a logical connection, usually meaning in order to plus the verb.
To overcome his feelings of inadequacy, he took up the sport of jousting.
Again, as with all additions or elaborations to basic sentences, verbals are way to become a little more
creative, instilling a strong sense of movement and detail or groundedness in your writing. The types can
be mixed and moved around (but keep in mind the subject rule), and you'll find that using them creates a
strong sense of style in your writing. They also generate content. Say I want to write this:
I'm sitting at home the day before school starts.
But I think, "I could do more in this sentence." So I add, before or after I write the basic sentence:
Tired after a long day of long meetings, I sit at home the day before school starts, staring at my keyboard,
wondering how I will ever get done all the work I'd planned.
The addition adds content, giving me something I can go on from and sharpening for me the sense of
what I might actually be writing about. They do the same thing for my reader. Again, having the sound in
your mind or the possibility of using them in any sentence you write is probably more important than
being able to recognize them or understanding their syntactic structure, and the main thing is to be willing
to try them out, to play around with the language, to increase what you say as you say it.
Exercises
1) Write brief description of a scene--real, imagined, or fictive--using verbals consciously to get in all the
detail you can.
2) Write a choppy paragraph with no additions to sentences, then go back and add verbals to sentences,
making sure that they connect with the subjects.
3) Write two or three sentences with each kind of verbal modifier to get a feel for how they work and
sound.
4) Take a look at a page of published work, especially fiction, and try to identify the verbal modifiers.
English Composition Reader
36
Verbals: Sentence combining
Example: The students continued their occupation of the building
They were stubbornly refusing to give in to the administration.
They were running low on food and water.
They were sleeping in shifts.
They were surrounded by squads of police and soldiers.
One possible solution: Stubbornly refusing to give in to the administration, the students continued their
occupation of the building, surrounded by police and soldiers, running low on food and water, sleeping
in shifts.
1) The 49ers won a stunning victory.
They came back from an 18 point deficit.
They scored three touchdowns.
They forced two turnovers.
They stopped the other team from moving the ball.
2) The administration released its budget proposal.
They claimed that helping the rich would help everybody.
They refused to raise taxes.
They used calculations economists found odd, to say the least.
3) The president deferred to her advisors.
She claimed that they had studied the issue thoroughly.
She argued that her own involvement should minimal.
She looked tired and worn.
4) The class rebelled against his unfair policies.
They refused to turn in work.
They wrote letters to the college president.
They boycotted class meeting.
5) Her argument was for the boycott.
She spoke passionately for nearly an hour.
She held that the company had violated international standards.
6) The students had learned an important lesson.
They discovered their own way of solving the problem.
They taught younger students how to do.
Then they taught the teacher their way of getting the right answer.
7) He tried a new way of doing the recipe.
He added good salsa, lime juice, sea salt and cilantro.
It made the best guacamole he'd ever had.
But he failed to make enough.
8) The parents held fundraisers for the school.
They ran car washes.
They sold candy and tee shirts and raffle tickets.
They even rented a hall and sold tickets to a concert.
English Composition Reader
37
Absolute Phrase Modifiers
1) With so many oil spills in recent years, most notably the Exxon spill in Alaska, oil companies such as
Chevron have to concentrate not only on winning back the trust of oil and gasoline buyers, but also
creating confidence for future customers.
Tricia Salaman, "Advertising: Slick as Oil"
2) Marxism is dead, the Communist system utterly discredited by human experience, but the ghost of
Marx hovers above the landscape, perhaps with a knowing smile.
William Grieder, One World, Ready or Not
3) The remaining two [women] are toiling away on the farm, one gathering hay while the other plows
the field. (K Brown)
4) We catch our breath as we approach over the moat, its water tangled now with green growth in which a
man and a bullock stand knee-deep.
Caroline Drews, "Report from Cambodia"
5) Two little girls, one dressed in blue jeans, the other in purple tights, are sound asleep at their desks.
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in American Schools
6) European cities are beginning to experience many of the problems of urban social dislocations—
unemployment increasing, poverty becoming more and more concentrated, ethnic conflicts heightening—
that have traditionally plagued American cities.
William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
7) There almost has to be a person in charge, someone running matters of meticulous detail beyond
anyone’s comprehension, a skilled engineer and manager, a CEO, the head of the whole place.
Lewis Thomas, Medusa and the Snail
8) A handsome man dressed in shiny leather shoes and freshly pressed pinstripe suit, Paul stood out
from the other men, most of whom wore jeans and leather jackets.
Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here
9) But the auditorium is all in ruins, two thirds of the stained-glass panels missing, replaced by
plexiglass, chunks of wall and sections of the supporting pillars blasted by rot, lights falling out of the
ceiling.
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in American Schools
10) A remarkable 70 percent of Amsterdam's addicts are registered and monitored, mainly through a
pioneer mobile methadone clinic designed by the Medical-Social Union for Hard Drug Users, a
functioning, government-financed bargaining union composed of hard drug users.
Rone Tempest, "Amsterdam's War on Drugs," SF Examiner, 10/4/89
11) Cultivating an ability to imagine these vast basins [aquifers] beneath us is an imperative need. What is
English Composition Reader
38
required is a kind of mental divining rod that would connect this subterranean world to the images we see
every day: a kettle boiling on the stove, a sprinkler bowing over the garden, a bathtub filling up.
Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream:
An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment
Sentence combining for absolutes (reduced sentences in which the verb has been changed to the present
or past participle or, if a form of to be, may be deleted).
Example:
The landlord has made her final decision.
The renters gave up their protest.
The landlord having made her final decision, the renters gave up their protest.
1)
The school was closed for the day.
Students partied on the quad.
2)
The jazz band played incredible solos.
The saxophone sounded like fire and ice.
The bass provided a driving rhythm.
The guitar reached new heights.
3)
The town looked like a ghost town.
The shops were all closed.
The streets were eerily silent.
The few pedestrians looked shocked and dismayed.
4)
The professor seemed confused.
The students were restless but wary.
The blackboard was covered with indecipherable scribble.
A sheen of chalk dust covered everything, including the clock, which could not be read.
5)
His car was falling apart.
It was held together with duct tape and baling wire.
English Composition Reader
39
His pants were so old that they shined.
His eyeglasses were broken.
His shoes had hole in them.
The man was the picture of poverty.
6)
The Office of Strategic Information was charged with misdirecting enemies.
The WWW strategists sent out emails.
The journalists created false stories.
The Congressional Liaison fed selected tidbits to the House and the Senate.
English Composition Reader
40
Concessives
1) Although it had considerable impact in the short term, the Diab case soon disappeared from the press
and the loss of media attention effectively put an end to its public discussion.
--David Macy, The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), 313.
2) The danger is that, although the first generation of immigrants usually works hard, the next may not.
—Lawrence M. Mead, The New Politics of Poverty (1992), 229.
3) While the drift toward inequality is undeniable, the extent is disputed.
--Mead, 97
4) While cyberspace may be filled with words, a growing portion of the American population will not be
able to use, understand, or benefit from those words.
--D. Burstein and D. Kline, Road Warriors (1995), 345
5) Though more and more patients seek a more humane medicine, it is becoming endangered
--Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1995), 184.
6) Although quantum theory has great predictive value, the meaning of the theory remains mysterious.
--Linda Jean Shepard, Lifting the Veil (1993), 243.
7) Whereas in principle all subjects are worthy pretexts for exercising the photographic way of seeing, the
convention has arisen that photographic seeing is clearest in offbeat or trivial subject matter.
--Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), 136-7.
8) Further, although the skulls indicate that the brains had been extracted through the base, we do not
know if the flesh and marrow was eaten.
--Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (1967), 18.
9) What is seen stirs emotion indirectly, through interpretation and allied idea, whereas sound agitates
directly, as a commotion of the organism itself.
--John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934), 189.
10) Although objectivity has its origins in moral philosophy and aesthetics, the natural sciences have been
thought to be its fullest realization.
--Shepard, 99.
11) The poorest districts in [New York] receive 90 cents per pupil from these legislative grants, while the
richest districts have been given $14 for each pupil.
--Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (1991), 98.
English Composition Reader
41
Correlatives
A very simple--almost mathematical--strategy for making a comparison at the sentence level in writing is
to use what we grammarians call the "not/but" correlative. Similar to this are "either/
or" and the negative "neither/nor" set-ups; "both/and" constructions; and the very emphatic "not only/but
also" arrangement. Correlatives can compare full sentences as well as phrases or embedded clauses. Here
are some examples:
1) It was not I, but your other son Johnny who broke the window.
2) Not only has the Greenhouse Effect caused some dramatic meteorological changes, but it may also be
responsible for the intense El Niño we have this year.
3) Either a student gets the English composition requirements out of the way early on in her career, or it
seems to drag on forever.
4) The essayist must aim to both inspire and to educate her readers.
5) We can either create another a new program to solve the problem, or we can write an addition to the
existing program.
6) The instructor could neither inspire his students to really get into the work, nor could he get many of
them to come to class on time, if at all.
7) Both the character--the style and voice--of his writing and the content of the essay are very strong,
although its development leaves something to be desired.
8) Not only does the evidence from his biography show an essential connection to US history, but it
makes clear the overall significance of his life to our concept of democracy.
9) The CSU is not only not only exploring the possibilities of forming partnerships with private
corporations, but some argue the it should be privatized.
10) While it is true that Shakespeare is both difficult to read silently and he uses archaic words that are
impossible to understand, one can easily see why he is still considered the best English playwright when
he is read aloud.
English Composition Reader
42
Adjective Clauses
1) Like other cities around the country, Hollywood, which lies between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, has
seen an explosion in the number of homeless people over the past decade.
—SF Chronicle, 8/7/89
2) An elegant elderly Asian woman with shadowed eyes, who carries a bird cage covered with white
cloth, sits near.
—SF Examiner, 9/10/89
3) These [poultry] processors have shifted almost all their production to the rural South, where the
weather tends to be mild, the workforce is poor, unions are weak, and farmers are desperate to find some
way of staying on their land.
—Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 139
4) Writing is the principle medium that allows you to interact with yourself.
—Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers
5) Wall Street had always been the locus of the greatest financial evil of them all, the faceless "money
power" that senselessly and arrogantly brought boom or bust, flush times or despair, prosperity or ruin to
industries, businessmen, and workers alike.
—Thomas Frank, One Market Under God
6) The leaders must believe in the potentialities of the people, whom they cannot treat as objects of their
own action; they must believe that the people are capable of participating in the pursuit of liberation.
—Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed
7) Ben would pause--the thoughtful pause that was characteristic of him--and then point out the fact that
the sessions, by all the signs, were valued by these folks, that just using English in the company of native
speakers was a good thing.
Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary
8) The discourse of academics is marked by terms and expressions that represent an elaborate set of
shared concepts and orientations: alienation, authoritarian personality, the social construction of the self,
determinism, recursion, reinforcement, and so on.
Rose, again.
9) It is important to realize the concept that a text file such as pressure.dat is simply a sequence of
characters.
J. Adams, et al., C++: An introduction to computing
English Composition Reader
43
Punctuating Adjective Clauses
Some adjective clauses take commas to set them of, and some don't. The noun that the clause modifies
determines whether the clause will be a comma clause or a no-comma clause, instead of something in the
clause itself. Here are some general guidelines:
Comma clauses modify these kinds of nouns:
1.
Proper nouns
Maria Torres, who works at Xerox, was recently promoted.
Golden Gate Park, which borders Ocean Beach, has a museum, a tea garden, and an
arboretum.
2.
Any noun indicating all members of a class of things or group of people or other living
creatures
Telephone numbers, which have many important new uses, are becoming scarce.
Homeowners hate crabgrass, which spoils the appearance of lawns.
Japanese cars, which are very well built, have captured a large share of the American
market.
3.
Nouns preceded by possessive words usually take comma clauses.
My neighbor, who moved in a year ago, likes loud music.
Johnson's theory of turbulence, which is not well accepted by economists, may prove
itself right this year.
No-comma clauses modify nouns that require further identification.
The man who lives next door also has sixteen cats.
But economic theories that win broad acceptance need to apply for several years.
Sometimes we do or do not use commas around a clause depending on whether we want to indicate that
in information in the clause refers to all the members of the class indicated by the noun, or only to some
of those members.
Presidents, who lie, should be impeached. (indicates that they all lie)
(indicates all presidents lie)
Presidents who lie should be impeached.
English Composition Reader
(indicates that only some lie)
44
Simplified Comma Rules
•
Use commas before (not after) coordinating conjunctions (for, and, but, or, yet, so) when they
connect sentences.
I think it might rain, but I'm not sure.
•
Don't use them when coordinating conjunctions connect less than a sentence, except when
separating items in a series of more than two.
They took my wallet, my keys, and my shoes, but they left my hat.
•
Use a comma to set off an introductory phrase.
In case of fire, jump quickly out the window on the north side of the room.
•
Use a comma to set off who clauses when they follow proper nouns.
Mr. Jones, who teaches economics, is a sad, strange little man.
•
Use commas to set off which clauses when you mean them to refer to all of the group the noun
referred to.
Yugos, which were some of the worst cars ever made, were very inexpensive.
•
Don't use them with which clauses when you don't mean all.
Hondas which last over 200,000 miles are rare but not unheard of.
•
Don't use them with that clauses.
•
Use commas to separate two coordinate adjectives:
She left the crowded, noisy store in disgust. But, She drove off in her big old SUV.
•
Use them to set off verbals, appositives, absolutes.
•
Use them before or after quotations.
Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your
country," a line that rings hollow in this age of the “war on terrorism.”
•
Don't use them between subject and verb or between verb and object unless you're adding a
phrase.
WRONG: I think, this is not a good idea.
WRONG: My father, thought that it was a good idea, but he was wrong again.
And Mike’s general comma rule: When in doubt, leave it out.
English Composition Reader
45
"Big Punctuation"
1) You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently,
and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two--hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and
humanistic--and the split is clean.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 218
2) [Brent] Berlin's hypothesis makes this prediction: People from, say, an urban culture that treats trees as
basic level should still have the general human capacity for gestalt perception and should thus be capable
of learning to discriminate among trees.
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 37
3) Now, the new gene-splicing technologies allow researchers to produce commercial volumes of vanilla
in laboratory vats--by isolating the gene that codes for the vanilla protein and cloning it in a bacterial
bath--eliminating the bean, the plant, the soil, the cultivation, the harvest, and the farmer.
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work, 124
4) Just look at this place. Depression and decay. The rusted sign waves and rattles in the wind: capitalism
gone bad. We pass on.
Edward Abbey, The Best of Edward Abbey, 89
5) Haitian and West Indian immigrants have brought entrepreneurial ambitions with capitalism; it will be
interesting to see what becomes of the West African sidewalk vendors who have become a New York
fixture, also.
Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black, White, Separate, Unequal, 154
6) The Vai, like their neighbors, practice slash-and-burn rice farming using simple iron tools, but they
have attained a special place in world history as one of the few cultures to have independently invented a
phonetic writing system, (Dalby, 1967; Gelb, 1952; Koelle, 1854)
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, "Unpackaging Literacy" 76
7) We know, for example, something about how our spaceship was created. We know when our spaceship
was created. We know where we are in the universe--on a planet orbiting a star that is situated at the edge
of a spiral galaxy, which is near the outskirts of a supercluster of galaxies.
Neil Postman, The End of Education, 112
8) These are the costs of greed coupled with market power--power unrestrained by the normal checks and
balances of the free market, or by any fears of getting caught.
James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves, 21
9) The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience: it's dualistically called a "discovery"
because of the presumption that it has been in existence independent of anyone's awareness of it.
Pirsig, 311
English Composition Reader
46
Brief Overview of Punctuation: Semicolon, Colon, Parenthesis, Dash, Quotation Marks, and Italics
Punctuation marks are signals to your readers. In speaking, we can pause, stop, or change our tone of
voice. In writing, we use the following marks of punctuation to emphasize and clarify what we mean.
Semicolon ;
In addition to using a semicolon to join related independent clauses in compound sentences, you can use a
semicolon to separate items in a series if the elements of the series already include commas.
Members of the band include Harold Rostein, clarinetist; Tony Aluppo, tuba player; and Lee
Jefferson, trumpeter.
Colon: Use a colon in the following situations:
After a complete statement in order to introduce one or more directly related ideas, such as a series of
directions, a list, or a quotation or other comment illustrating or explaining the statement.
The daily newspaper contains four sections: news, sports, entertainment, and classified ads.
The strategies of corporatist industrial unionism have proven ineffective: compromises and
concessions have left labor in a weakened position in the new "flexible" economy.
in a business letter greeting.
Dear Ms. Winstead:
between the hour and minutes in time notation.
5:30 p.m.
Parentheses (...)
Parentheses are occasionally and sparingly used for extra, nonessential material included in a sentence.
For example, dates, sources, or ideas that are subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence are set
apart in parentheses. Parentheses always appear in pairs.
Before arriving at the station, the old train (someone said it was a relic of frontier days) caught
fire.
Dash break -- Use a dash break (represented by a pair of hyphens with no spaces on a typewriter, a
computer with no em dashes in the type font, or in a handwritten document) in the following situations:
to emphasize a point or to set off an explanatory comment; but don't overuse dashes, or they will
lose their impact.
To some of you, my proposals may seem radical--even revolutionary.
English Composition Reader
47
In terms of public legitimization--that is, in terms of garnering support from state legislators,
parents, donors, and university administrators--English departments are primarily places where
advanced literacy is taught.
for an appositive phrase that already includes commas.
The boys--Jim, John, and Jeff--left the party early.
As you can see, dashes function in some ways like parentheses (used in pairs to set off a comment within
a larger sentence) and in some ways like colons (used to introduce material illustrating or emphasizing the
immediately preceding statement). But comments set off with a pair of dashes appear less subordinate to
the main sentence than do comments in parentheses. And material introduced after a single dash may be
more emphatic and may serve a greater variety of rhetorical purposes than material introduced with a
colon.
Quotation Marks " " Use quotation marks in the following situations:
to enclose direct quotations. Note that commas and periods go inside the closing quotation mark in
conventional American usage; colons and semicolons go outside; and question and exclamation marks
should go inside if they were in the original, but outside if they are your own.
He asked, "Will you be there?" "Yes," I answered, "I'll look for you in the foyer."
to indicate words used ironically, with reservations, or in some unusual way; but don't overuse quotation
marks in this sense, or they will lose their impact.
History is stained with blood spilled in the name of "civilization."
For more information on writing research papers and using quotations, see our workshop on writing
research papers at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/hypertext/ResearchW/index.html.
Underlining and Italics
Underlining and italics are not really punctuation, but they are significant textual effects used
conventionally in a variety of situations. Before computerized word-processing was widely available,
writers would underline certain terms in handwritten or manually typed pages, and the underlining would
be replaced by italics in the published version. Since word processing today allows many options for font
faces and textual effects, it is generally recommended that you choose either underlining or italics and use
it consistently throughout a given document as needed. Because academic papers are manuscripts and not
final publications and because italics are not always easily recognized with some fonts, many instructors
prefer underlining over italics for course papers. Whichever you choose, italics or underlining should be
used ...
to indicate titles of complete or major works such as magazines, books, newspapers, academic journals,
films, television programs, long poems, plays of three or more acts
Faulkner's last novel was The Reivers.
The Simpsons offers hilarious parodies of American culture and family life.
foreign words that are not commonly used in English
English Composition Reader
48
Wearing blue jeans is de rigueur for most college students.
words being defined or discussed in a sentence
The English word nuance comes from a Middle French word meaning "shades of color."
words or phrases that you wish to emphasize
The very founding principles of our nation are at stake!
After reviewing this handout, you can try the Purdue OWL exercise on semicolons, parentheses, dashes,
quotation marks and italics (and then check your answers). You can find it here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_overvwEX1.html
The following information must remain intact on every handout printed for distribution.
This page is located at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/print/grammar/g_overvw.html
English Composition Reader
49
Sentence Development Recap
Since finding your unique voice in writing becomes important in terms of both impressing your readers
and finding the most effective way to say what you want, feeling comfortable with stylistic options can be
important. We've looked at a range of modifiers─free and bound─and many of you are using them well.
But let's take a minute to look at them once more and practice their use. These are some of the most
important:
• Appositives: William Jefferson Clinton, our beleaguered president, received a summons to testify
before a grand jury, a panel investigating allegations of sexual impropriety.
•
Appositives and adjective clauses: The investigation, an inquiry that has cost us more than
$45,000,000, is seen by many as a partisan witchhunt, but has continued for nearly six years,
most of the time that Clinton has been in office.
•
Verbals: Struggling to maintain a sense of dignity, Clinton has spent a lot of time out of the
country, while back at home Kenneth Starr, the lawyer in charge of the investigation, has dogged
his every step.
• Absolutes: Starr, a man driven by a need to convict the highest officials that he can, has lost the
respect of much of the public, many of whom feel now that the whole thing is ludicrous.
• Concessives: While Starr does have legal grounds for the investigation, some think that the
"crimes" Clinton is accused of are not really serious enough to warrant the expense or the
publicity that it creates.
• Correlatives: Not only has Clinton been shamed by the process, but the country itself has been
embarrassed internationally.
• Parallelism: This has gone on for a very long time, dominating the headlines, appearing nightly
on television news, taking up all kinds of time in Congress, and costing the Clintons and others
millions in legal defense fees.
Finally, the other major stylistic factor that we've looked at has concerned how sentences are focused.
The focus is what readers pay attention to—like what's in the center of a photograph—and what looks
best in a sentence, what makes the clearest meaning, is a focus on characters doing things. This means
that you should avoid verbs that aren't actions and, assuming sentences have action verbs, use subject
that are the people or things doing them. Also:
• Avoid the passive construction: Ø *The grand jury process is seen as out of control by many.
(Many think the grand jury process is out of control.)
• Avoid "There is"/"It is": Ø *There are some good reasons to think this. (People have some good
reasons to think this.)
• Avoid overusing "to be" verbs: *The cost of the investigation is what disturbs many people. (The
cost of the investigation disturbs people most of all.)
• Avoid "It is this…that": Ø *It is this enormous waste that angers me the most, personally. (I am
most angered by this enormous waste.)
English Composition Reader
50
Sentence Boundaries
One of the editing problems that shows up often in student writing (at all levels) concerns sentence
boundaries. There are two key abilities that you need to develop: Knowing when a sentence is incomplete
(known as a fragment) and knowing when two sentences are punctuated as one (a "run-togethersentence").
Identifying fragments:
1) The day was rainy and cold.
2) A terrible day to be outside.
3) My brother is talking about going to back to school.
4) His goal to be a political scientist and work in politics.
5) A beautiful park, which is located behind the campus so no one can see it.
6) The school has at least one great feature.
7) The video showed Rodney King on the ground while four to six officers beat him with clubs. As if they
wanted to kill him.
8) It was a terrible thing to watch on your nightly news. Something most people thought no longer
happened.
9) Even though there's a lot of talk about it now doesn't mean anything is going to change.
10) What we need is someone like Martin Luther King to get the people excited again. To get everyone
concerned about injustices going on everywhere.
English Composition Reader
51
Identifying RTS problems
Technical problem: An RTS (or comma splice) error occurs when writers connect two or more
independent (full sentence) clauses with a mere comma.
1) I feel this class will make me a better writer, without it I feel like I just would not have the confidence I
need.
2) Ron Kovic was a good boy, he was from a proud home in a small town in New York.
3) Even though he knew what he was doing when he went into the army, what he learned as a young man
wasn't true, it was mostly myths about what a hero was.
4) One thing Malcolm X did to become a writer was to study words by copying the whole dictionary.
5) He did it one page at a time, he filled many writing tablets while he was in prison.
7) It's good to know about because he was a good role model for people to follow, he was an intelligent
man, but not really different from anyone else.
8) When he followed orders, he thought he was doing good. But it wasn't always true, he didn't know
sometimes orders are wrong.
9) One thing to learn from Kovic is that you don't always know what you'll become, if you follow your
conscience, you can end up being someone different from who you thought you would be.
English Composition Reader
52
Sentence focus: Characters and actions
Revise the passages below, substituting characters (concrete subjects) and actions for a clearer focus.
Remember that character : action structures go hand in hand with clear subject : verb (or
object/complement) arrangements, which lead readers to stronger understanding of your meanings.
1) The existence of differences in interpretation about the meaning of the discovery of America has led
to a reassessment of Columbus’s place in Western History.
2) A solution to the UFO problem is impossible without a better understanding about the possibility of
extraterrestrial life.
3) Decisions about forcibly administering medication in an emergency room setting despite the inability
of an irrational patient to provide legal consent is an on-scene medical decision.
4) In recent months preliminary data have been collected which are beginning to define the economic
burden of the disease.
5) There are five categories into which the severity of this disease have been divided.
6) Resistance has been growing against building new mental health facilities in residential areas because
of a distrust founded on the belief that the few examples of improper management are typical. There is a
need for a modification of these perceptions.
7) It was found that data about resources allocated to the states must be obtained, which action is needed
so that it can be determined how resources can be redirected when conditions change.
8) An investigation was begun into why so few interviews were done.
9) Of concern is the increasing cost of protecting museum artifacts. Their mere storage is a contributing
factor to deterioration, to say nothing of the effects of their display. The concept of conservation means
that higher expenditures are necessary to ensure the availability of skills and equipment to ensure their
preservation for future generations.
10) Recent assertions about failures to present information with fairness are accurate in regard to
journalism in the Middle East today. A comparison of press coverage from different countries reveals
many inaccuracies in reporting by politically biased newspapers. The omission of facts and the slanting of
stories show the failure of the press to carry out its mission with objectivity. As a result, lack of
knowledge has resulted in a public opinion based more on emotion than on reason.
English Composition Reader
53
Weak sentence focus: Students and professionals
Revise for stronger focus using characters and strong verbs, eliminating unnecessary words, aligning
focus or relationships of modifying clauses. Feel free to make all changes needed.
1) There is research that shows that parents who are always having conflict would be better for their
children to be divorced than to stay together.
2) In the article, “Pedophilia Not Curable Data Show,” using his studies, Amitai Etzioni, the writer using
his studies, points out that a child molester is almost never cured
3) The document fails to grapple with the real issue of whether our Air Force will be welcoming to a
diverse group of cadets, where many views about religion will be allowed.
—Rev. Barry Lynn, AUSCS
4) [I]t's a myth to think I don't know what's going on. It's a myth to think that I'm not aware that there's
opinions that don't agree with mine, because I'm fully aware of that.
—George W. Bush, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 12, 2005
5) The response that parents might give to the goverrnment is that if a child is in an After School Program
he/she may learn how to solve conflict- resolution.
6) I presided over most of those briefings -- there was no great concern expressed that somehow we
needed to come get additional legislative authority.
—Vice President Dick Cheney (PBS, 2/7/06)
7) We are not forced to eat something we don’t want to eat or spend our money where we feel isn’t worth
our money.
8) Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, which is also part of Homeland
Security, said that as its officers process 86 million air travelers a year and enforce 400 different laws,
"there are unfortunately going to be a few instances that do not demonstrate perfect discretion." New
York Times, 2/10/06
English Composition Reader
54
9) Validating discriminatory laws through religious beliefs are the cause to marriage civil rights being
overlooked and undermined for the gay community.
10) 'We clearly have to do some things inside the departments, and we clearly have to do quite a bit in
finding ways to provide you more promptly with the information you need,'' Deputy Treasury Secretary
Robert Kimmitt told the Senate Banking Committee.
11) Continuously studied and proven with intensity, that it is hard to imagine that any American could
possibly be unaware of the potential associated health risks of fast food.
12) They say that delaying space missions can be a death sentence if there is not money to continue
developing technology and to keep teams together until the mission is ready to fly again. NYT 3/2/06
13) Writing well in the English language is useful for the reader identify the writer’s intellect as well as
their message they bring across
English Composition Reader
55
Sentence and paragraph focus
Compare these passages:
1. The means by which Asian products have successfully competed with your products in the
Western Pacific markets will constitute the objective of the first phase of this study. The labor
costs of competitors and their ability to introduce new products quickly are the first issues to be
examined. A plan that will demonstrate how your industry can take advantage of unexpected
market opportunities, particularly on the Pacific Rim, will be developed from this study.
2. In the first phase of this study, we will examine how Asian products have successfully competed
with your products in Western Pacific markets. The study will first examine labor costs of
competitors and how they are able to introduce new products quickly. We will develop from this
study a plan that will demonstrate how your industry can take advantage of unexpected market
opportunities, particularly on the Pacific Rim.
Group work: Revise the following to improve flow and cohesion. (Hint: you may need to use the passive
to follow the old to new rule, and that’s okay. In the second problem, take a look at how the topics of
sentences relate.)
1) The Hart Queen is one of the best skis for beginning skiers. A thin layer of tempered ash from
hardwood forests of Kentucky makes up its inner core. Therefore, two innovations for strength and
flexibility are built into its outer construction. Two sheets of ten-gauge steel reinforce a layer of ash for
increased strength. A wrapping of fiberglass thus surrounds the two steel sheets for increased flexibility.
Most conventional bindings can be used with the Queen. The Salomon Double is the best, however. A
cushion of foam and insulation firmly cradles the foot and ankle, yet freedom of movement is still
permitted.
2) The power to create and communicate a new message to fit a new experience is not a competence
animals have in their natural states. Their genetic code limits the number and kind of messages that they
can communicate. Information about distance, direction, source, and richness of pollen in flowers
constitutes the only information that can be communicated by bees, for example. A limited repertoire of
messages delivered in the same way, for generation after generation, is characteristic of animals in the
same species, in all significant respects.
English Composition Reader
56
Examples of good style
A pond, especially, has the fascination of the miniature. It forms a world clearly limited by the shores and
bottom and surface: a sufficiently self-contained world, a world small enough so that one should be able
to figure out everything going on there, describe it, analyze it, perhaps fit the relationships among the
living things into neat equations—and, solving the equations, solve all the mysteries. But the mystery of
the pond still eludes me.
—Marston Bates, "There’s Magic in a Pond," in The World Around Us
The key note [of pretentious style] is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such
as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase made up of a noun or an adjective tacked on to
some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever
possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination of instead of examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and deformations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not unformation.
─George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
Generations of students have struggled through prose that they could not understand, blaming themselves
because they thought they could not read well enough or were not smart enough to comprehend the ideas
so seemingly complex. Some have been right about that, but most could have blamed the tangled writing
they were trying to understand.
─Joseph M. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Grace and Clarity
Only a month after he announced his bid for the White House, [Newt] Gengrich deserted the [campaign]
trail for a different odyssey: a two week vacation, including a Greek cruise with his Greek-named wife,
Callista—meaning most beautiful.
—Maureen Dowd, “Newt Loves Callista,”
New York Times, 6/11/2011
English Composition Reader
57
Using quotations and textual support
Example in APA style:
In a 1998 report, Calvert et al. presented the most recent estimate of the number of polar bears in
western Hudson Bay. “Our best estimate of this population, they wrote, “is 1,250-1,300 [plus or minus]
274 animals. From a management perspective, it is probably prudent to continue to manage the
population on the basis of an estimated 1,200 polar bears.” (355) Stirling, Lunn, and Iacozza noted that
from 1981 to 1998, these bears were growing thinner and had fewer cubs. “Over this same period,” they
wrote,
The breakup of the ice on western Hudson Bay has been occurring earlier… We suggest that the
approximate cause of the decline in physical and reproductive parameters over the last 19 years
has been a trend toward earlier [ice] breakup, which has caused the bears to come ashore in
progressively poorer condition. The ultimate factor responsible for the earlier breakup appears to
be a long-term warming trend in April-June atmospheric conditions. (355-6)
Cub survival depends on well fed nursing females and, after weaning, a reliable food supply. As
temperature climbs and the ice breaks up earlier, more of the bears will suffer. We can trace a direct
correlation between thinning ice and the decline of the condition of the bears—which will only be
exacerbated as the bears move north onto ice that is also thinning.
Ellis, R. (2009) On Thin Ice: The changing world of the polar bear. New York: Knopf, 159-60. Print.
•
•
•
•
•
Active source use (Calvert presented/they wrote
Combines description (“report), paraphrasing, direct quotations, and analysis/explanation.
Provides references for each author cited in a formal bibliographic citation.
Replaces +/- symbol with words (bracketed to show the change).
Ellipsis shows the Ellis left out some of their words.
Most publications and instructors have required methods for citing; you can usually check to see how this
should be done. Universal requirements for information include:
author or authors' name (at place of reference or in your writing, and in the bibliography)
• title (formatted to show whether it's a book or article)
• source (periodical, book, URL, and so on--what it's in)
• place of publication (for books)
• date of publication (for URLs, date of access or last update)
The process is pretty straightforward, but source citation has a lot of arcane conventions, too, so having
something to check--a handbook or informative web page--can be the biggest help.
English Composition Reader
58
Documenting Sources
Use a recognized system of citation such as MLA or APA, or footnotes (the Chicago style), to
consistently give credit for direct quotations, paraphrases, or information that comes from a source,
including personal interviews, course readers, lectures, and so on. The library has information on these
systems, and you can purchase handbooks at a relatively low price. Also cite internet sources by giving
the URL.
When possible, use the author's name in the your writing and describe the source. Quotations should be
integrated with your writing, made to fit. Full sentences or longer (5+ lines) blocked quotes are usually
preceded by a colon, which leads to the quote: "Shorter quotes--of phrases or words--are preceded by
commas usually." (Smith, 99) Page numbers in line systems like MLA/APA go after the period with the
author's name(s) if the author’s name does not appear in your text. Each source should be listed in
conventional format at the end of the paper.
I realize this stuff may sound nitpicky, unimportant, but it improves the overall appearance of a paper,
lends credibility, and avoids plagiarism. Writing, like most fields, has conventional ways of doing things
that require attention to detail, as when you learn to do quadratic equations, write a computer program, or
run a chemistry experiment. If you want more information or titles of decent handbooks, see me or my
web page (see "Brief Style Guide" and the link to MLA).
Central sources should receive fuller treatment: longer descriptions, more about the author(s), paragraph
length or longer summaries, but working directly with the text, except in book reviews, should not
overcome your own writing: it should be balanced, with the weight on your own work. This is not true
when your task is to primarily deal with text, as in a bibliographic essay or a
Finally, when you use quotes, don't just throw them in. Do some writing about them, analyzing and
explaining what they mean. You might consider defining the writer's key terms, making connections to
other parts of the paper, evaluating the writer's point of view or perspective, comparing the quote to other
writers. A research paper is not necessarily less creative than other kinds of writing, despite how formal it
looks. Try to respond honestly to other writers, writing with or against the material, so that your own
view and argument is made clear, too. Explaining what readers should see in or understand from source
material can be crucial to readers understand your own argument, or to whether or not they accept it.
English Composition Reader
59
Writing Under Time Constraints
Timed writing, including examinations, differs from "take-home" writing in several important ways, but
the most important factor remains the same: the essay must be clearly focused on a main point. Most
topics will present a problem of some kind, and the writer’s first job is to is discover a point of view about
the problem, then focus the essay on that point after narrowing the topic down to something specific and
manageable. The classic five paragraph essay cannot do this well, normally, since it encourages listing,
not logic.
The time constraint severely limits writers’ ability to develop, revise, discuss—to do all those "writerly"
things we do as writers. You’ll still need to develop as fully as time allows, using concrete examples and
making connections to the main point of the essay. Stylistic maturity—some embedded modifiers, use of
mature punctuation, a varied sentence style—is also something readers/evaluators will look for. While
readers do not expect perfection in pressure writing, they do expect reasonable correctness or, at least,
evidence of your ability to proofread. To this end, you might do well to plan for a little time at the end to
proofread (for grammar and spelling) the first paragraph or two, and revise (say, combining a couple of
shorter sentences or correcting errors in a visible way) a little to show that you can do it.
I. So a plan or template, also known as a rubric, becomes important. An essay structure from classical
rhetoric serves well in terms of focusing the development and giving you a clear path to follow:
•
Thesis: Once you look at the topic, decide on a main point to focus the argument. Say you are
presented with the task of recommending that a specific social program is worth maintaining.
You’ve narrowed it down to the AFDC program, which you know a little about, and construct a
thesis something like this:
In order for the US to have any chance for equality between the children of different economic classes, we
must fully fund the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. This program provides….
You go on to develop a picture of how the program works and connect this development to the main point
or thesis, or, if supporting information is provided, you can draw on some of it to support/develop this
first part of your argument. Imaginary or fictional examples can also work fine, but be sure to focus them
clearly and let the reader know that they are fictional. (For example, Imagine a typical poor family:…) It's
usually not a good idea to make up factual claims or statistics, though. You take it as far as you can, using
concrete examples, but keep an eye on the clock. At this point, you don’t have to generalize or make
higher level points, at least not extensively, about the examples, but just explain briefly what they show.
•
Antithesis: This is the con side, the view or views of others or another that run counter to your
point. In this case, you might consider the argument that we simply can’t afford to continue
programs like this, that the tax payers will no longer support them. As with the thesis, this works
best if you keep it simple::
Admittedly, some people feel that welfare programs like AFDC are counterproductive and that the
economy can no longer afford them. Their argument is that….
As with the thesis, you develop this side of the argument. You might write about the erosion of wages
(which decreases tax revenues), the explosion of child poverty rates, the need for people to take
responsibility for their actions (e.g., having kids), presenting these aspects as the views of people who
believe this antithesis; if information is provided, you can use it in the same way as the first section.
While you don’t necessarily need to give as much space to this argument, you need to develop it far
English Composition Reader
60
enough to show that you do understand it.
•
Synthesis: In this final section, you find a way to bring the two sides together. This can be a
process of denying the validity of the antithetical view, emphasizing the "rightness" or imperative
nature of the thesis or offering a compromise approach:
While there is some validity to the view that we can no longer afford programs like AFDC or Head Start,
we must look beyond immediate costs and consider the long-term impacts of not having them. Children
who grow up in poverty are much more likely to have later problems in school, with the law, health
problems, and other difficulties, all of which will cost us more to take care of later than they when they
are young. Kids need to be fed. They need safe places to learn. When they do not have these things….
Or it can be and more often is a compromise between the two "poles" of the sides:
Perhaps what we really need is a way to convince voters that this program really does work.
Much of the news about welfare and government aid programs is full of stereotypes and negative images,
but if the stories of these kids and their parents were truthfully told, if people saw how they struggle, how
much they appreciate the aid, most voters would support AFDC gladly. But until we change the
stereotypes, we'll fight this battle over and over again.
Note: These development elements are not individual paragraphs, necessarily. A three paragraph essay is
less likely to pass than a six paragraph essay. Each section requires development and each section needs
to be connected to previous writing (e.g., "new to old" connections or transition- marking words).
II. Pro/con: The above is basically a "pro/con" setup, developing the pro side first, and then moving
to the con side, and ending with an argument against latter and for the former or with a
compromise between the two. Other ways to do pro/con include focusing paragraphs on
development points on one side and the other. For instance,
While some believe that the economy now longer can support social welfare programs, we should
recognize that it costs more in the long run not to continue them. True, our government has less than it
used to for such programs, but….
•
As you shift from paragraph to paragraph, you’ll need to keep in mind that you need to deal with
both sides. This is a little more difficult than the previous rubric, since you have to answer
specific examples. For instance, if you were to construct a fictional family to support the
argument for maintaining the program, you would have to write about how it also shows the
futility of or opposition to such programs.
•
If you work from a pro paragraph to a con, then back to a pro, then to a con, you can also make it
work, with perhaps a little less attention to answering each specific example, but remember that
in this delimited time period, you still need to maintain focus on the main point of the essay and
make connections between paragraphs. Each paragraph, then, needs to be related to that point—
through an explanation of how it shows, in this case, the AFDC must be maintained.
III. A third successful approach might be to begin by constructing an anecdotal example, moving to a
thesis paragraph in which you give your argument, then to development of the argument. In the
conclusion (1 or more paragraphs), you can give some space to antithetical view(s), but focus
mainly on your argument. This is a riskier approach, since it gives much more space to your point
of view, although it can work.
English Composition Reader
61
In all of these setups, you’re doing three basic things:
•
You’re establishing a clear position for yourself, your thesis or argument.
•
By giving space to opposite views, you’re showing that you’re aware of them, that their concerns
are not all that different from yours (we’re all in this together), that you are a reasonable person.
•
You’re answering their arguments and asserting strongly the weight of your own.
Readers respond less favorably to writing that seems canned or very elementary in structure.
•
While something like the classic five paragraph essay—three part “thesis statement” which
includes topics of the three development paragraphs—can work, the overall structural template
will work against rather than for you. Similarly, an essay that just gives your view, without
recognizing and answering in some way the views of the "other side" will be less convincing (and
less likely to succeed) than more fully considered arguments. It is okay to use classic tag lines,
like In this essay I will argue…, but avoid canned structures that are more constraining than the
ones given above.
•
A basically narrative structure, whose primary purpose is to tell the story of an example
(including personal experience), will be seen as less than successful, even if the writing itself is
fairly competent.
•
Often, students fail when they try to write something cute, rather than something substantive.
Although creativity, as always, is important in this kind of writing, you might want to consider
creativity more important at the sentence level than globally. (In other words, it’s safer to just
play the game, get it over with.)
Written exams test for knowledge of material, as in a history test, but they also test your proficiency at
written communication. As proficiency tests, they look for evidence of your ability to write in several
ways, aside from the focus and structure of the paper:
•
Paragraphing: That paragraphs be well focused and developed is important. They should
normally begin with a clear point and have development, both representational and textual, if
possible, to support it. This is ideally followed with explanations of what is important for readers
to see from the examples.
•
Given information: When exam questions give you information to use, either in the exam topic
questions or actual factual information, use it as fully as you can to develop the points. If you can
organize the information in terms of pro/con-thesis/antithesis beforehand, you’ll find this easier to
do. Maintain accuracy by quoting correctly, and avoid making up facts or statistics.
•
Style: As I mentioned before, readers look for evidence of mature style. If your writing has been
characterized as "choppy" or in need of fuller development, you will need to look for ways to
combine some of your more basic sentences as you write. Readers respond well to elaboration
based on appositives, verbals, absolutes and embedded modifiers like adjective clauses. They
don’t expect a lot of this, but they do look for a balance of sentence styles.
•
Grammar and spelling proofreading: One of the main drawbacks to this kind of assignments is
English Composition Reader
62
that you have little time for these niceties, but you can make time to show that you can do it, time
permitting.
Pressure writing is a fact of academic life (and in many professions), with more and more entry and exit
examinations including written sections, as do some job application processes. If you go into such tasks
with clear paths to completion, you are more likely to succeed. The biggest danger, I think, is in feeling
"stuck," struggling to begin or go on from any place in the allotted time period. If you come armed with a
template or two, you can avoid this and get the writing done, which is, after all, the main goal. Keep in
mind -the other concerns, but don’t let them stop you: reasonable, well developed write often is well
received, even in the face of lesser deficits.
Brainstorming and other kinds of planning, including outlines, can be efficient uses of time. Again,
though, having an idea of how you can proceed, of a pattern you can follow, will help you accomplish this
more quickly and effectively.
Using given information in exams:
Many written exams have only a small amount of "given" information, which you’ll find in the prompt or
exam question. One of the common strategies for beginning answers is to turn the question into part of the
introduction. For example, the task in a history exam might be something like,
In a well developed answer, discuss the effect of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 on later
American foreign policy and its antecedents in the events of post-WWII politics.
And you might start your answer with something like:
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which grew out of the US response to growing Soviet influence
in the 1950s, served to shape US relationships to both Communist and "Free World" nations
throughout the decade. Kennedy’s forceful reaction to the USSR’s building of a missile base
became a model for how we responded to many threats, both real and imagined.
From here, you go on to display your command of the material in an essay focused on how US attitudes
developed and maybe what’s important to learn from this history.
Some exams, such as the GRE, and, in its current incarnation, the JEPET exam, give some background
information or a range of support detail—statistics, quotations, specific information about the problem the
exam asks you to write about. The actual exam assignment will be as well focused and specific as the
example above, but along with using that, you will be asked to incorporate additional information. One of
the best ways to think of this incorporation is as paragraph development: As we have seen, most effective
paragraphs begin with a focal point, which is then supported and analyzed, giving the paragraphs a clear
purpose and effective structure.
Say the question asks you to write to the city Planning Commission on the pros and cons of building
either a new football stadium or a museum/library complex on city land. The information you’re given
indicates the good and bad about (or the cost/benefit of) each choice. I’d like to remind you of a few
aspects of using that information.
•
Background: Most prompts of this kind will give you some context for the problem, some
background information that can be used in at least two ways. In the example, descriptions of the
site as it currently is and summaries of the plans for each choice could help in your introduction
or in a second paragraph that sets up an idea of why this is a key decision.
English Composition Reader
63
•
Statistics and quotations: Costs, information about the sizes, information about benefits to the
economy, and material about how people who would benefit give you a way to develop very
concretely. The information might take the form of numbers or comments from authorities. This
must be incorporated competently, however. Using direct quotes, specific paraphrases, citing
their sources (if given), and explaining what they show about your paragraph point—all these are
as necessary in an exam as in a regular formal essay for a class.
•
Organizing: Most problems with text will be set up in one of three ways:
1. With two competing outcomes, you’re expected to compare and contrast the information.
This can be done in sections, each focusing on the pros of one side, but bring in counterinformation, too, from the other side. Or you could take three or four main points of
contrast (cost, community benefit, cultural benefits, existing alternatives) and write a
section for each, drawing conclusions about what would be better, either for each part of
for all of these at the end. (A good choice—if you don’t run out of time.)
2. A problem with three or more outcomes is essentially the same problem as with two,
though a little more difficult to develop. You have more to work with and need to balance
the possibilities against each other. But the task is essentially the same: to compare and
analyze, drawing conclusions about the relative outcomes.
3. One of the ways test writers make such problems challenging is by using comments from
various sources—for example, from neighborhood groups, advocates for one choice or
another, independent analysts. One the very good things you can do is to write about why
a source might see the problem as he, she, or they do. For instance, the football team
owner arguing for the stadium might be said to speak about the "public need," but to do
so with the underlying motivation to make more money. Or a neighborhood group might
speak of the cultural benefits of a museum/library complex, motivated by fear of periodic
huge crowds versus a steadier and much small attraction to the alternative. Analyzing the
perspectives of concerned parties is a powerful way to write about the material and show
off your critical thinking skill.
Quotations should be smoothly integrated with your writing, attributed, and accurately copied. The same
goes for paraphrases and statistics. The primary job is to show your understanding of the topic or
problem, but to do so as a writer, using conventional ways of developing and supporting your points. The
best thing about exams that actually give you the supporting information is that much of the actual writing
is either done or mostly done already.
But once again, the most important aspect for many writers is to simply define a clear position for one
outcome or the other in the very beginning, which invites the thesis/antithesis/synthesis setup and allows
a clear and logical sense of organization.
English Composition Reader
64
The Art of Conducting a Great Interview
Thanks to Adam Bessie
A great interview, which yields crops of information for your research project, does not occur by
accident. Usually, the effectiveness of the interview is grows out of the quality of your questions; asking
solid questions is an art—a vital, eminently practical one—which requires practice. As in any art, timehonored techniques can serve as guidelines to help you refine and improve your skill.
A good question inspires people to discuss their experience fully and honestly, perhaps making them
reflect on it in a new and interesting way; a poorly conceived question, conversely, results in a trickle of
information that does not build to much more.
HOW AND WHY QUESTIONS
Remember the “five Ws”? Who, what, where, when, why (and how). Though we use all of these
interrogative pronouns in interviews, HOW and WHY questions can spark particularly thoughtful
responses, driving prople to think more deeply.
Both types push people to consider causes and motives—“HOW did you get arrested?” “WHY do you
think you decided to drive after drinking so much?”
RICH QUESTIONS
The Hypothetical WHAT IF question: Ask the interviewee to imagine what might happen in a
particular situation:
• “Imagine this is your first day in prison. What would you expect?”
• “If you received a D- on the assignment, what would that tell you?”
The Devil’s Advocate Question: Challenge the interviewee to consider an opposing point of view:
• “The CHP office I talked to believes the punishment is commensurate with the crime. What
would you say to her?”
The Ideal Position Question: Ask the interviewee to imagine an ideal situation.
• “What would the ideal diet for a fairly active 30 year old woman be?”
• “What’s the best kind of exercise for cardiac patients?”
The Summary Question: Gives you a chance to check your own understanding and to get the
interviewee to move more deeply into an area of interest:
• “It seems like you’re saying that a certain state mind is as important as diet and exercise. Can you
say a little more about that?”
QUESTIONING VERBS
Describe, explain, summarize, paraphrase, clarify, illustrate, interpret, imagine, conceive, conclude,
judge, compare, contrast, classify, identify, propose, argue
PROBING MORE DEEPLY
Questioning resembles jazz music in the sense that what you ask often depends on or plays off of the
answers that you get, which means you have to think on your feet:
English Composition Reader
65
PROBING QUESTIONS
•
What do you mean?
•
I’m not sure I follow you.
•
Could you explain that?
•
What did you say/think/do when ______?
•
Can you give me an example?
•
Take me through your experience.
•
How did that make you feel?
•
How did the experience change your view of ________?
QUESTIONS TO AVOID
1. YES/NO QUESTIONS
“Do you think she was right to do that?” “Yes./No.”
2. MULTIPLE QUESTIONS
Example: “How do you feel about the cuts and their effects on students and our sports program?
Revision: “What, to you, is the worst effect of the cuts?” “How are the affecting students in
particular?” “What impacts do you see on the sports program?”
3. LEADING QUESTIONS
These are questions based on your opinion or those that imply and answer.
“It must be hard to balance family and a job. Tell me how it’s difficult”
Better: “Can you tall me what it’s like to balance work and family life? What do you experience
every day?”
“Don’t you think the government fails to meet its responsibility?”
Better: “How do you think the government could help?”
English Composition Reader
66
A Sample Source Analysis (of an article on childcare)
In an article of about 1200 words, journalist Tom Diemer reports on the "Child care debate: Who
will pay? And how much?" for Newhouse News Services. The article focuses on recent interest in
Washington over "meeting the needs of working families in the 21st century" and the problems that make
it an important question. He also outlines some of the basic ideas proposed by politicians--tax credits,
expanding public schools to include day care, discounting corporate taxes for companies that offer
childcare. Diemer attempts to balance his writing by including thoughts of Darcy Olsen, an analyst for the
"Libertarian" think tank, The Cato Institute, which has supplied the Right with much of its rationale in
recent years. Although the article seems to report objectively on the question of childcare problems,
Diemer writes from a perspective that sees only the centrist, mainstream political view and the
conservative response to it, ignoring more liberal or radical ideas. Even the title suggests that it is
primarily a matter of financing, not of social morality and fairness.
The article appeared on the third page of the Examiner. It caught my eye because I so rarely see
much written on child care or the problems of parents meeting the demands of employers. Near the top of
the piece, Darcy gives space to the example of a single father in Oregon--interestingly, since the vast
majority of caregivers are women, many of them single. Iran Doss, the father, makes $18,000 a year as a
pest control company employee and spends around $4500 for childcare. He says, "If the car breaks down,
I am probably not going to be able to pay the day care, or pay the rent." (Diemer A5) Diemer goes on to
write that Doss is who politicians are talking about when they discuss the daycare crisis: "Who pays, how
much and the quality of care are major questions these days both at the White House and Capitol Hill,
where lawmakers are eager to please the soccer moms and '90s dads who hold the key to their electoral
futures. No consensus has emerged." I wonder if Diemer thinks Doss belongs to "soccer moms and '90s
dads," or if he is making here a subtle reference to how the electorate is more and more made up of wellto-do, established voters, with fewer and fewer minority and working class voters.
But in any case, he does give readers an idea of the three main proposals for helping parents pay
for childcare, balancing that against Conservative opposition to government involvement. He cites a plan
by Senator Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.), for instance, to give corporations a 25% discount on corporate taxes
for each dollar they spend on childcare. He then goes on to give a critical view, held primarily by
conservatives. They question whether the government should have a role in childcare and, in fact, whether
or not there is a crisis in the first place. As their evidence, he says, the Cato Institute cites "the relatively
modest increase in childcare" and a 1990 study "showing most parents are satisfied with cost and quality"
of daycare.
Nearly a quarter of the article is focused on the view represented by the Cato Institute, but there is
little critical examination of their claims. How does the fact that daycare costs have risen only 15% show
that we have no crisis? Why cite a study that is nearly a decade old? Do more recent statistics exist?
When they say most parents, what percentage do they mean? Ninety-nine? Fifty-one? Who was
surveyed? The Soccer moms or sweatshop workers?
Beyond the content of the evidence Demer cites from the Cato Institute, even more disturbing is
the total omission of thoughts on the matter from the left, from feminist thinkers, from those who
advocate for the poor. He cites three mainstream political ideas, a right-wing response, and even a line or
two from Hillary Roddam Clinton's It Takes a Village, but shows us nothing of what, for example,
Barbara Ehrenreich or bell hooks has to say on an issue that nearly every social critic on the left has
written of.
English Composition Reader
67
We are left with the impression that there is indeed a problem. The example at the top of the
article shows that at a quick glance, and Doss' working-class dilemma is one most of us can empathize
with. But the ideas for solving it that he actually gives us may make it harder for readers to realize that
solutions are indeed possible. Now when we see one or two proposals go down in flames in Congress, or
when we see an idea like extending school hours fail from lack of funding, we will understand what they
were trying to address a little better, but we will not have, unfortunately, a very rich idea of other
possibilities. To Diemer's credit, he does mention France's national daycare program, although near the
end of the article, but the organization and content of the article suggest that dramatic solutions—like
really revamping how we conceive of childcare, employers' responsibilities, the basic right of all children
to a safe, nurturing upbringing—are off the table.
Source
Diemer, Tom. "Child care debate: Who will pay? How much?" San Francisco Examiner. April 25, 1999.
A5. Online: www.sfgate.com/news/042599/34290007.htm Accessed 5/1/99.
English Composition Reader
68
A Sample Source Paper
All Things Being Equal? (Anon., Eng. 414, F98)
I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
Most of us have heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, or part of it, at some point in
our lives. In 1964, one year after the speech was given, Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order
11246, which signaled the birth of affirmative action. Affirmative action refers to efforts to increase
educational and employment opportunities for minorities and women. In November, 1997, California
voters did away with affirmative action [at the state level] by passing proposition 209. They were
convinced that it was no longer needed, that it gave minorities and women special rights. Governor Pete
Wilson wrote in 1996 as part of his campaign against affirmative action:
Let me be clear: we haven't yet fully achieved Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind
society. Discrimination still occurs, and we must aggressively and conscientiously enforce our
civil rights laws which prohibit discrimination. But we won't achieve that dream until we also end
the system of preferential treatment that, in fact, judges people by the color of their skin rather
than the content of their character. (Curry 169)
They even went so far as to call proposition 129 The Civil Rights Initiative. This is a misconception fed to
the California public. Affirmative Action is an attempt to fix the inequality in American society between
races and gender. Although the goal of equality has not yet been reached, affirmative action has brought
us closer. In "Black Women and Men: Partnership in the 1990s," bell hooks, a black female writer, and
Cornel West, the director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton, discuss many of the issues facing the
Black community. Bell hooks says, "Since capitalism is rooted in unequal distribution of resources, it is
not surprising that we as Black women and men find ourselves in situations of competition and conflict."
(Brunk 331)
Cornel West, a professor of theology at Princeton and one of the leading intellectuals in the U.S.,
continues the thought:
And this is not only between male and female relations but also Black and Brown relations, and
Black and Red, and Black and Asian relations. We are struggling over crumbs because we know
that the bigger part hss been received by the elites in corporate America. (Brunk 331)
An example of this fighting over crumbs is the California proposition 209. White people felt they were
not getting jobs, scholarships, into college, because the jobs, scholarships, etc., were being given to less
qualified people of color. Some people of color were also against affirmative action because they didn't
feel like they made it on their own accord but were hired or admitted to college, etc., because of their skin
color and not because of their merits. One might say that voters were made to feel this way by the
demagogues who pushed the initiative, but the argument that special programs for minorities (and
women) help create a feeling of being essential less has some merit. This inferiority complex is shared by
Richard Rodriguez, an American essayist and teacher. According to the biographical sketches in
English Composition Reader
69
Literacies, "Despite his academic success, Rodriguez left the university partly because he was
uncomfortable with advantages he felt he received because of his minority status." (Brunk 697)
To understand affirmative action we must look back in history. According to Cornel West,
The fundamental aim of affirmative action was to put a significant dent in the tightly controlled
networks of privileged white citizens who monopolized the good jobs and influential positions in
American society. (Curry 32)
Affirmative action is not about discriminating against white men. The goal is to give people of color and
women the same opportunities as the white men have had since this nation was founded.
We must remember that slavery had been in effect in this country a century before 1776. Article
V of the US Constitution says that no amendment may be passed limiting the importation of slaves until
1808. Slaves were considered to be 3/5 of a human for the purpose of determining the population in terms
of states' representation in Congress, which was the only way that they “counted, legally, as human
beings. Such racism has roots before the Constitution was even written, but it was reinforced in the
Constitution. Although racism is no longer official policy, it still exists in our minds and hearts and, even
if it is no longer codified in law, it exists also in our legal and business/economic policies—and its effects
cannot be denied. According to Lyndon B. Johnson,
Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scar of centuries by saying: Now you are free
to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a
person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting
line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe
that you have been completely fair." (Curry 17)
We have by no means achieved an equal society where people of color and women have just as much of a
chance of getting a good job, getting a higher education, being a politician.
Another reason why we must have affirmative action is because we need a way of making sure
that companies, for example, are not discriminating. Affirmative action policies set quotas partly to
encourage companies to seek out qualified people of color and women and partly to ensure that they aren't
discriminating. Minorities and women face a nearly impossible task to prove that they were discriminated
against as individuals. Affirmative action made it so companies that happened to only have white
employees would be seen as discriminating against groups of people, not on an individual basis, but 209
prevents this.
Affirmative action was a temporary plan to reach a certain goal of equality between races and
sexes in the work place, education, and the rest of American society. That goal has not been reached yet,
although with affirmative action it was getting closer. When the goals the civil rights movement had
planned for affirmative action have been reached, then we can take it away, but if we do it before then, we
are setting ourselves back. We are limiting opportunities for people of color and women, just as we were
before affirmative action was put into effect. We must stop fighting amongst each other for the "goodies"
bell hooks talks about and work together to make this a more equal land for all. Otherwise, we will face
continual strife and conflict and we will all pay economically for the costs of maintaining great segments
of society in poverty. Can we truly afford that?
English Composition Reader
70
Sources
Brunk, Terrance, Suzanne Diamond, Pricilla Perkins, and Ken Smith (Eds.). Literacies: Reading, Writing,
and Interpretation. New York: WW Norton 1997.
Curry, George (Ed.) The Affirmative Action Debate. Reading, NY: Addison Wesley, 1996.
hooks, bell and Cornel West, "Black Women and Men: Partnership in the 1990s." In Brunk, et al., 325337.
Johnson, Lyndon B. "To Fulfill These Rights." In Curry, 16-24.
hooks, bell and West, Cornel. "Affirmative Action in Context." In Curry, 31-35.
Wilson, Pete. "The Minority-Majority Society." In Curry, 167-8.
English Composition Reader
71
A sample essay on technology
Karen Chan
English 114
10/18/99
What Technology Brings To Us
I have selected television as my technology subject because, on a global level, television has the
greatest impact on the largest number of people of all the technologies available to us today. I have found
that television has become widely distributed for many reasons, the most important being the fact that
television sets have become more affordable over the years. Poor people in poor countries also desire to
have the same gadgets that are owned by the people in rich countries and only television can satisfy that
need. Television can also be the means by which all levels of government can communicate with their
populations.
Thanks to satellites, television signals can be received just about everywhere on the planet. In the
Third World, a single television can bring people together in order to watch a program on the communityowned set. In less educated cultures, television must seem like magic and its magic can draw those people
closer together for the common experience of seeing a TV program. However, that same technology in
the hands of advantaged societies tends to drive people apart.
In America, you can often find a TV in every room (and sometimes in the bathroom), and various
family members can spend hours and hours watching their own programming preferences on their own
TV sets and not interacting with each other at all except during meals. Even the dinner hour cannot
guarantee family communication. Too often, after-school activities such as sports and other outside
interests draw people away from a shared meal. Those who eat alone often do so with a television for
company, thereby replacing two-way conversations with the toxins of modern television programming.
Television unifies the poor and separates the rich. It is both an anesthetic and a pacifier but it is never a
reliable source for the truth.
Thanks to the wealth of this nation, American television has always had the resources needed to
do very great things for the citizens of this country. It could bring profoundly important documentaries to
the attention of those who are removed from those stories, it could teach children who have outgrown
Sesame Street foreign languages and critical thinking skills plus it could easily spread the truth with each
news broadcast. A higher level of entertainment could encourage more sophisticated tastes and cultural
expectations. Instead, American television offers a disgusting collection of trash at all levels and that trash
makes Americans a very proud but ignorant people.
America has a very strong class system that nobody wants to recognize. In the case of TV, the
affluent, highly educated that can’t be bothered with it but the rest of the population gets fed the lies and
distortions that have been packaged by the upper class communications elite. It is in the interest of the
affluent, stock-holding upper classes to alter truth in order to maintain the ignorance of the second class,
consumerist culture.
In spite of television’s capacity to provide a great deal of accurate information, it lies and spits
out more of a toxin than a treasure. News programs rarely cause people to think and the political spectrum
runs from gray to grayer. We never hear debates over this, just the usual brainwash that is set up to
English Composition Reader
72
pretend that America has a "right" and a "left," but that is just one of the lies.
Through its loud and senseless claims on "the truth," American television has become the greatest
propaganda machine on earth. In the kitchen you have a dishwasher, in the laundry room you have the
clothes washer, and, wherever you have a television, you have a brainwasher. It is the brainwasher that is
the most efficient machine in America otherwise Americans would be asking some very tough questions
of both the TV networks and their advertisers. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t like to ask tough
questions.
The news is so distorted that it only amounts to carefully packaged propaganda. This absurd
nonsense gets delivered to millions of people with their brains stuck on hold! How else can one explain
the fact that the three main networks all cover identical stories at identical times and never seem to
challenge the lies they are telling. Why doesn’t anybody revolt over this situation? The only excuse I can
find is the fact that Americans have been brainwashed all their lives and, as it turns out, they like it that
way! It is truly amazing that so many people believe everything they see on TV.
A powerful force keeps international stories fairly trivialized with limited coverage and minimal
analysis: the sound of money talking, shouting and finally screaming out loud. That noisy money is in the
pockets of the advertisers. Their influence is sufficient to keep the networks in a constant state of selfcensorship, hiding from view any story that paints a true and critical picture of the network’s advertisers
or exposes failures of America’s monstrous foreign policies.
Tiananmen Square is a prime example of that self-censorship. Most of the outside world watched
in horror as that young man challenged the massive tank during the democracy demonstrations. Nobody
in the United States actually got to see the next horrible scene where the tank drove over that hero in a
show of murderous hostility towards their fellow countrymen, the pro-democracy fighters. The only
excuse for distorting this is to shield American eyes from the human rights abuses of Mainland China. If
Americans had seen the full story they might not be so eager to embrace China as a trading partner until
China cleaned up its act. It is reasonable to assume that the voters just might not reelect a Congressperson
who "looked the other way" when all of those Chinese students were killed.
The networks’ sponsors, on the other hand, don’t give a damn about human rights issues; they
just want to get their hands on the one billion Chinese who make up the largest potential consumer block
in the entire world. It is, therefore, the corporations who are deciding what truths are safe for you to see.
They just want you to suck up their vulgar commercials and not do any of that smart stuff like critical
thinking. They intend to build up the demand for their products at any cost. Commercial television has
messed up America and now it threatens to mess up the world.
The one recent development that is the most threatening to the truth involves the combining of
computer-generated images with videotaped realities. Now you can no longer trust anything you see on
television. You can no longer find reality unless you first follow the money and the money is in the
commercials. The commercials are in the interests of the corporations and it is the corporations who are
the ultimate beneficiaries of this new and dangerous combination of technologies.
Sometimes computer-enhanced (or altered) images don’t mean very much but at other times they
can be very threatening. I find the alteration of the facts on a news program to be very threatening but, at
other times, I enjoy those images very much. For example, I like MTV and VH1 because they play the
latest music and their videos are so cool. I can see all sorts of amazing technology in any one of today’s
music videos. I can see terrific styles and wonderful locations along with great sounds and fabulous
dancing. It is only when I can no longer tell what is truth or what is fiction that I am most frightened by
English Composition Reader
73
the computer-television monster.
Computer animation is scary because it is changing the ways that we view the world and those
changes have no respect for reality! When I was a little kid you could tell when somebody was messing
around with a photographed or video image. You could actually see when something wasn’t real because
the lighting wouldn’t be the same for all of the subjects in a frame or the color would be off to a certain
degree or the resolution would be low in one place but not in another. Today, that has all changed thanks
to the level of the technology that is used to fool people. The same generation who believed that
something was real because they saw it on television or in a newspaper picture is now being manipulated
with phony images that look as real as any snapshot taken of a family member. Many old people have no
idea that what they are seeing is unreal. That is understandable because they have always lived with terms
like: "I saw it with my own eyes!" or "It’s true, I saw it on television." What they fail to realize is the fact
that what they were seeing were manipulated images. This is where technology comes in to alter the
perception of many Americans. If what they are seeing has been delivered to their eyes in pixels and those
pixels have been precisely altered in order to tell them a lie, how can we expect them to know the
difference between what is real and what is phony? Technology has an evil side in that application and I
think that this is very, very dangerous.
Yes, some image enhancements are obviously fake, no matter how pixel-perfect they happen to
be. If TV broadcasts a video of Janet Reno wearing a hot pink bikini and dancing on the beach with
Michael Jordan, my logic detector would tell me that what I am seeing is a lie. However, if I saw Bill
Clinton shaking hands with Pat Buchanan, I would have no way of knowing if that event was real or if it
was phony. Some campaign manager could use such an image to persuade the voters that Buchanan has
liberal support even though the incident may never have taken place.
This is where television can become a terrorist. Dangerous, powerful people could manipulate
entire populations simply by using subtle, pixel-by-pixel falsified images. That capacity was amply
demonstrated in the film, Wag The Dog. In that case, a very believable, heavily manipulated image gets
created and broadcast in order to deflect the public’s awareness of a candidate’s illegal affair. The
message in that fantasy claimed that this country was at war with Albania. That war did not exist in reality
but pictures were there to prove that there was a war and that people were getting hurt in that war. The
entire motivation was to keep the voters from examining the presidential candidate’s morals and it
worked in the movie. Wag The Dog may be something of an exaggeration as to how far the image-makers
might go in controlling the American consciousness but there is a great deal to fear from the developing
technologies they might use in the future. The danger lies in the fact that the new developments in
broadcast/cable animations can presently alter reality down to the smallest pixel. In the future it is hard to
imagine just how much further they might go or what improved technologies might be available to help
them go that distance. What if they could get a personal history of each viewer and tailor their pitch to
suit that person’s interests and philosophy? If you didn’t know exactly what was going on, how could you
trust your own thinking?
Today, television is the technology that is available to the greatest number of American citizens
or citizen-consumers. Money is calling the shots because money is what it takes to gain access to the most
powerful technologies. The wealthy corporations control the images that everyone else is seeing and
therefore, corporations are controlling the thoughts of TV viewers. What the corporations’ gain, the
citizens lose, giving the corporations too much control over the lives of those citizens.
What has been lost in the evolution of TV is the ability to trust, to believe in what you are seeing
and to make decisions based upon what you have seen television, heard on radio or read in the
newspapers. Computer technologies will continue to improve on a level that has the greatest impact upon
English Composition Reader
74
the individual computer owner-user. For the rest of society, there is television… distorted, misinforming
television. The high-resolution next generation of televisions will simply apply that improvement to the
lies and distortions that are already coming in on low standard, high decibel cable and broadcast channels.
For someone who is interested in the truth, that objective may be very hard to locate and even to define.
Perhaps what will be needed is a warning light that flashes on the remote control and shows up on
the screen saying "BS Alert, BS Alert! What you are about to see has been poisoned by image
manipulation. Any conclusions you might draw from it are to be regarded as irrelevant and superficial.
This concludes our broadcast of the BS Alert system!"
English Composition Reader
75
F. A. S.
Eng. 414
Prof. Martin
12-03-03
Reality Television: Where are the Limits?
One reason these shows are so popular is that other people’s drama is a hell of a lot funnier and
more interesting than our own.
SFSU Junior
As humans, we crave entrance into someone else’s private life, and in the past few years, reality
television has made this concept possible. An array of shows have been created, such as Survivor, Fear
Factor, Big Brother, and most recently The Simple Life, featuring the millionaire and heiress to the Hilton
fortune, Paris Hilton. These are just a few of more than dozens of shows that have developed over the
span of three years. Society’s fascination with voyeurism has resulted in the media’s obsession in the
creation of reality television. The combination of the two passions has mutated into a disastrous overflow
of reality television shows which not only lack moral and ethical views, but are also short on any limits or
boundaries in regards to how far they are willing to go. Very clear position These types of shows have
provoked groups such as The Parents Television Council and editors like John Barry to raise the question,
“What are the limits to reality television?”
In an article in the New York Times, Barry asks does “Anything go in regards to reality
television?” He has a very curious and sincere tone that gives weight and strength to his arguments,
discussing both negative and positive sides of the ever so popular reality TV. In the first paragraph of his
article, Barry insists that “What holds most of these diverse subjects together is the voyeuristic impulse
that leads viewers to seek access to the lives of real people in ‘real situations,’ without necessarily having
it filtered through the medium of a critic or an expert.” (Barry, n.p.) Barry points out the fact that many
participants on reality television feel compelled to exaggerate and dramatize their reactions to situations.
He calls these forms of dramatizations “dramality,” considering it is supposed to be reality television.
Barry also questions the moral and ethical aspects of reality television. He points out that reality
television on the internet is not FCC regulated; therefore, “once its images are improved, many are
wondering whether there will be any way of controlling what sort of reality or psychological torment we
are to be exposed to on this medium.” (Barry n.p.) He brings up a very important issue in regards to the
limits of reality television. At this rate it seems as though there aren’t any, considering people are being
challenged to eat raw pig intestines, to couples being broken up on Temptation Island because of producer
induced scenarios.
Barry’s article brings up the very good question of “When do we say enough is enough?”
Regardless of his personal opinions, he is fair enough in his writing to note the basic positives of reality
television. For example, he concedes that reality television may be educational because it is more
interactive; therefore, it can cause viewers to think and analyze for themselves. For example, compared to
watching a regular television show, reality television viewers can vote people off via the internet or give
ideas to producers for scenarios in future shows. He also feels that it is a “vibrant and educational medium
for children, who are permitted to learn as they were meant to: by observing real life.” (Barry, n.p.)
However, Barry does not forget to note the negative aspects of reality television towards the end of his
article. His argument against reality TV is that one day it might go too far. He uses an example of an
English Composition Reader
76
individual being tempted to commit a murder on camera in order to get ratings for reality TV. In my
personal opinion I feel that something such as a murder scenario is possible but highly unlikely.
Nevertheless, I do agree with Barry that “this form of entertainment, which in certain forms results in
embarrassment and pain, should be restricted.” (Barry, n.p).
Overall, the article paints a negative picture of this kind of programming. However, I respect the
fact that Barry is open to admitting possible positive educational aspects of this form of entertainment. All
in all, his article is very precise in analyzing different pros and cons of the reality TV culture. He leaves
the final ethical and moral issues to be dealt with by the individual reader, yet he raises ethical questions
that can only be answered by the viewers of this type of television.
Another group who questions the limits of reality television is the PTC or Parents Television
Council. In January 1, 2001, the PTC began a one and a half year study on the effects and occurrences of
sexual, obscene language, and violent content on TV in reality television shows. They examined the time,
frequency, and obscenity level of the above three categories. At the end of their study, they discovered
that they had witnessed 847 instances of sex, language, and violence logged in the 89.5 hours of broadcast
reality shows. As they concluded, “The worst overall broadcast networks for offensive content were NBC
with 19 instances per hour (of reality programming), and UPN with 14.9 instances per hour.” (PTC, n.p.)
With these numbers in mind, it is important to question what we are watching on television and what our
children have access to when we are not home. Some may argue that there are such things as parental
controls, but controls cannot detect the difference between a regular TV show and a reality TV show.
Therefore, parents must either get rid of the television all together, block all the channels or take the
chance of letting their children be exposed to unlimited sex, language and violence, although in the long
run, kids will see this stuff no matter what parents do or what kinds of controls we have on content.
In the end, adults have a personal choice of whether they will watch these sorts of shows or refuse
to get sucked into the media’s trap of reality TV and avoid these shows all together. The PTC states their
view on these programs as “nothing more than producer-contrived scenarios, set up to cash-in on the
conflict and sexual interactions captured by the ever-present cameras.” (PTC, n.p.) There is no art, no
scripts, no actors, which creates a very low cost to the producers in regards to the production of reality
television. This gives networks and producers even more reason to continue creating other reality
television shows. The PTC argues “Producers and network executives often talk about how they seek to
push the envelope of television standards—reality TV serves this purpose to the extreme” They are going
way too far and refusing to take responsibility for the disastrous results. Situations such as the ten year old
boy from Kentucky that submerged his friend in a bathtub full of water to see how long he could hold his
breath, which resulted in the friend’s suffocation and near death, are only examples of the numerous
incidents inspired by extreme reality television. When the ten year old boy was asked why he did it he
stated that he wanted to recreate an obstacle he had seen on the show Fear Factor. (PTC, n.p.) Children
do not have a sense of danger when they witness a stunt safely done on television; therefore, they are
curious, and their curiosity and lack of knowledge is what causes such instances. When confronted, a
spokesmen for the NBC show Fear Factor said they are in no way morally responsible for the actions of a
child who should be supervised by his parents. The PTC concludes in their study that “reality
programming contributes significantly to the already high level of sex and foul language and violence on
television” (PTC, n.p.) As a result the more we allow the networks and producers to push the envelope,
the further we will be getting from the foundation of morals and ethics which guides and limits us as
human beings.
After looking at these two viewpoints, I slowly began to analyze my personal opinion about
reality television. I do not think we are doomed in regards to reality television; however, I do feel that we
are getting pretty close to being doomed in the sense that reality television is beginning to encompass a
English Composition Reader
77
creation of a new culture of voyeuristic obsessed individuals who live vicariously through the lives of
others. Is it morally right to find satisfaction in another person’s misery and pain? I wonder what sort of
lines have to be crossed before the network, producers and viewers realize that enough is enough. It is
true that every person is responsible for her or his own actions and destiny. However, it is not morally or
ethically right for a powerful entity such as the media to overexpose viewers to obscene language,
violence and sex. Producers and media execs need to take responsibility as social role models to educate
and inform viewers of the dangers of excessive viewing of reality television. This is especially important
for young viewers, who are most affected by the overexposure of reality TV. It desensitizes them to the
violence, sex, and foul language which it uses and encourages.
I think it is important to question the morality of reality television so maybe one day the networks
will listen and open their eyes in regards to what they are feeding the viewers. It would be nice to return
to some of the more ethically right TV concepts such as family sitcoms and semi educational game
shows. I do not think that reality television must be abolished as a whole; however, we do need to develop
guidelines and boundaries for this newly found media obsession. Regrettably, if the networks continue
developing more outrageous reality shows at the speed of light, as a society of television viewers we
would come closer and fall deeper into the dooms where morals and ethics are forgotten and thriving off
of the misery and pain of others becomes the new and accepted norm.
Sources:
Barry, John “Reality television: Does Anything Go?” New York Times, 10/08/01, D1.
Parents Television Council – 09/27/02- ”Harsh Reality: Unscripted.” Online:
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/realitytv/main.asp
Accessed 11/11/03
Speak Out.com. Online: http//speakout.com/activism/issue_briefs/1275b-1.html
Accessed 11/11/03
English Composition Reader
78