Today’s Plan:
- Williams and Bizup, Characters and Actions (20 minutes)
- Rubric and Peer Review (25 minutes)
- Peer Review (10 minutes per paper)
- Homework
Williams and Bizup
I’ve published a few articles that emphasize that writing cannot be taught, only learned. That is, there are few, if any, rules that I can teach you that will make you a better writer. And I can’t teach you them, so much as ask you to learn (understand as abstract concept, translate into repeatable practice) them. I consider Williams and Bizup’s guide to sentence syntax an exception to this claim.
Put simply, W&B ask us to check all of the subjects and verbs in our sentences to make sure that the subjects are characters and the verbs are actions. Those of you who have worked in theater will understand this: I need to be able to block your sentences: that is, I need to be able to imagine your sentences on a stage. Who is standing where? What action are they doing? To do this, the subject of a sentence can’t be some abstraction, some concept, some thing–it has to be a person or animal.
Take the following sentence:
For the rest of the semester, courses are on Discord.
Grammatically, this is a perfectly fine sentence. But it isn’t really engaging. In W&B’s estimation, it is a bad sentence. Why? Because no one is doing anything. If you think back to my “cat came through the window” bit, this is asking your reader/listener to imagine a lot. Likewise, what can get lost in a sentence like this is the agent responsible for the action–who decided courses would be on Discord? We can’t know. This can be a nefarious way to hide responsibility for unpopular (or reprehensible) actions.
Try this:
Dr Santos determined that courses will be scheduled on Discord.
OR
Dr Santos scheduled courses on Discord.
OR
The University’s administration determined that courses will be scheduled on Discord.
The first sentence has a generic noun as its subject–“courses.” But courses are not a character. They cannot act. Choosing an abstract noun as your sentence subject pretty much ensures a boring sentence. As you can see, when I change the subject of the sentence from “courses” to a character or characters, I not only make a more active sentence (that awful “are” verb is gone), but also I have to clarify *who* made a decision.
And, this can get even worse when you craft an abstraction as a subject. For instance:
During the self-isolation period, there were lots of people who did not want to follow the suggestions and so it was decided that no one could leave their homes unless essential services were their goal.
I bet there’s a bunch of you who couldn’t identify the subject of that sentence! (It is “there”). When you use an abstraction like this, you are making your reader do A LOT OF WORK, since they have to unpack the thought of the sentence to determine who is doing the action. Let me revise the sentence:
During the self-isolation period, Governor Polis implemented a stay-at-home order, meaning citizens could not leave their homes unless they needed essential services, because too many people failed to follow the CDC’s initial suggestions.
Notice how this revision inverts the order of material from the previous sentence. THIS WILL HAPPEN OFTEN, BECAUSE WHEN WE DRAFT WE DEVELOP AN IDEA CHRONOLOGICALLY AND WHEN WE ARGUE WELL WE DEVELOP IDEAS LOGICALLY (CONSEQUENTIALLY). This is why good writing requires revision. We have to dramatize a thought to make it easier to block/play on the recipient’s mental stage.
A few other points:
- Notice how I use “because” in the second sentence. When developing characters as subjects and actions as verbs, you might need to develop “If… Then” or “X because Y” syntax. Do not be afraid to use these causal transitions; they help a reader
- Often you will have to identify or invent a character. While this sometimes comes from another word in the sentence, other times it requires complete invention (so “Misery was filling the room” becomes “Tyler’s misery filled the room”)
- Try to cut out unnecessary prepositions. Prepositions make readers work hard.
My overarching goal here is to use the character/action syntax to make it easier on a reader to visualize and comprehend our prose. Or:
When we use the character/action syntax, readers find it easier to visualize and comprehend our prose.
Let’s try a few examples from W&B’s book Style to see if we can get the hang of this.
Examining the Report Rubric
Here was the collaborative assignment sheet. Highlights:
- Title Page
- Introduction
- Methodology
- Data Collection
- Methods of Analysis
- Results/Data
- Discussion
- Conclusion
What do we know about writing an introduction?
- The primary audience for this report is high school seniors planning on majoring in English. The report has been commissioned by the English department in hopes of highlighting the range of professional trajectories open to English majors and Writing minors. We can imagine a third audience for this report–the parents of those students (many of whom will be skeptical of a degree in English and/or a non-STEM degree).
- NOT A MYSTERY. TELL ME EVERYTHING. Goes beyond merely stating the purpose/intention and provides a quick
summary of the whole report. - Clear statement of the problem/project
- Nature of problem and why it should be discussed
- Concise background information, including past work, current objective, and any and all limitations
- Significant, “actionable” findings
- Is there a roadmap that lays out the order of material in the paper? [First this paper… Second it… Finally it… OR I begin by I then turn to Finally I]
What do we know about writing a methodology?
- Should be able to replicate your work
- Should discuss how objects (in this case, job ads) were identified and filtered
- Should discuss method of analysis
- Should discuss how results were confirmed (reliability)
What do we know about the data and discussion sections?
- Does the section contain graphs of data?
- Can you understand the graphs? That is, could you understand the graph if you had not done this project? Could you understand this graph if you saw it outside of the report?
- Data: Does the writer make clear and summarize the important information in all graphs?
- Findings: Does the writer make clear the significance of what the graph says?
Writing Expectations: Clarity and Style
- Are sentences easy to read?
- Do I find logical jumps between periods? Is there rhetorical continuity?
- Does the prose reflect our work with Williams and Bizup on characters and actions? Has the writer eliminated passive constructions?
Writing Expectations: Grammar
Please double-check for 2 things:
- Do opening clauses with two or more prepositions have a comma?
- Is there one consistent tense (whether past or present) throughout the report?
Business Style / Formatting
- One idea per paragraph? ONE. IDEA. PER. PARAGRAPH.
- Clear, descriptive title?
- Single-spaced (or 1.15), block formatted paragraphs? (Don’t let me see an indent people)
- Headings left-aligned in bold? Subheadings left-aligned in italics?
- Table of Contents?
- Page Numbers (that do not include the title page?) This might be useful.
Homework
There is an assignment in Canvas called Draft of Job Report for Santos’s Review. It is worth 20 points. You should revise your draft based on today’s lecture and peer reviews. Then submit the report (preferably as a Google Doc SHARE link set to “anyone can edit” but I’ll also take a Word file if that is outside of your 2020 capabilities). The sooner you submit it, the sooner I can get your feedback to you.
The final version of this report will be due next Friday at midnight.
