Today’s Plan:
- I’m Worried
- First Sentences exercise
- Brainstorming Week 2 Draft Topics
First Sentences
20, maybe 30 words. That’s all you get. That is your opportunity to grab someone’s attention before they close your tab or click the next link. The first sentence, and before that your title, present a limited opportunity to capture an audience before they move on.
I want to focus attention on an essay’s first sentence. First, I’ve collected some resources designed for fiction writers. While this might not be a creative writing class, I believe we can benefit from thinking about how their craft can relate to constructing enticing non-fiction prose.
First, from an article over at A Tate Publishing Blog, I pulled three criteria:
- excite a reader’s curiosity, particularly about a character or relationship
- introduce a setting
- lend resonance to a story
These criteria are the goals for an effective first paragraph, but I think any of them additionally apply to a first sentence. I want to break the idea of setting down into three more distinct notions: time, place, and mood. Time and place are fairly straight-forward when it comes to fiction, but mood is more complicated. I want to think move in relation to Heidegger’s sense of our “being-in-the-world“]. The post then gives two questions to ask of a first sentence:
- Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about?
- Can you make it more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, something will surprise the reader?
Given my favorable disposition to Peter Brooks’ psychoanalytic treatment of hermeneutics, I boil that second question down to “suspense”: does the first sentence pose a question we want answered?
From a creative writing handbook, I pulled two more criteria for evaluating good sentences:
- Flashes a picture in your mind, using concrete details
- Puts you right in the middle of something happening
Not every first sentence has to be shocking. But it does have to at least have a kind of gravity, something that pulls a reader in, something that makes them want to read more.
Next, let’s read the short article Killing the Babies and Captivating First Sentences” over at footnoteMaven. I like this article not only for its title, but also for its pragmatic advice. When revising, fM focuses on identifying the most compelling sentence in a piece, and then finds a way to “rock” that piece up to the very beginning of a document.
For non-academic writing instructors out there, this makes for an excellent exercise. Come to class with a document that contains every first sentence your students have written for a particular project. Have the students select their three favorites from the list; additionally, have them mark off the three sentences that need the most work. After tallying results, have students apply fM’s theory to whichever piece of writing received the most critical votes–can they, looking through the entire paper, find a compelling sentence that could be crafted into a more engaging opening? And, then, can they use this principle on their own writing?
And, of course, I hope the critical attention such an activity fosters is applied to every sentence they write.
What’s in the News?
Here’s a list of topics:
- Politics
- Movies / Television
- Superheroes, Comic books, Graphic Novels, Manga
- Star Wars
- Harry Potter
- Video Games
- Dungeons and Dragons
- Education
- Technology and Science
- Sports
- Feminism
I’ve put up a discussion board on Canvas. I’d like you to post in there, using the following as a template:
[Topic in boldface] Politics
[This week the Senate is expected to deliberate another repeal of the healthcare bill.]
[Two articles using the same template] In the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein, Robert King and (Links to an external site.)Kimberly Leonard contrast the new Graham-Cassidy sponsored Republican reform to the single-payer resolution introduced by Bernie Sanders. (Links to an external site.) Of interest is how they argue that the Republican bill transfers handling medicaid from the federal government to individual states.
In the Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II argues that the new Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill covers fewer people than the rejected BRCA healthcare bill proposed by Republicans earlier this summer (Links to an external site.). Of interest is how Newkirk shows that the reform drastically reduces the amount of money provided to states already enrolled in the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid.
Here’s the template: In the X [publication, maybe over at X if it is more of a website], [Author(s)] VERB (argue, compare, detail, explain, etc) FOCUS OF FIRST ARTICLE. Of interest is how he/she/they FOCUS ON ONE SPECIFIC CLAIM IN THE ARTICLE.
Homework
I need three workshop volunteers who can have drafts ready on Thursday.
PLEASE make sure you have completed both discussion forums from class today (if you don’t have a laptop with you).
