Today’s plan:
- A Quick intro to Logical Development
- Summary Exercise
- Concision: from sentences to characters
- Homework
Logical Development and the Period
To start off today, I want to talk a bit about logical development by talking about the most basic grammatical unit: the period. Let’s think about the period rhetorically, by which I mean let’s ask what a period asks a reader to do.
I want to look at a sample paragraph from the proposals:
As society develops, more illnesses are discovered, technology and discoveries advance, and we continue into a more diverse and problematic world. Because of the sociological situations children are placed in, the unhealthy processed foods they eat, and lack of physical exercise, a lot of adolescents ranging from 13-19 experience increased feelings of depression. This causes them to be taken to the doctor and most often placed on antidepressant drugs. In this course, I want to research and studies already done to see if there is a positive correlation to adolescents taking antidepressant drugs and increased suicidal tendencies.
Summary: Getting a Handle on What “They Say,” My Magic Sentence
My heading here draws on Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say, a book that I have used a couple of times when teaching this book. Graff and Birkenstein provide a number of templates for formulating a summary. We can look at some of these templates, and pay special attention to the importance of verbs.
I have a special template for introducing a text in writing (whether academic or not). I call it the magic sentence, since it packs a lot of information into a small amount of words. I came up with this sentence while preparing high school students to take standardized exams, but I still use it myself. Here it is:
Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedy Romeo and Juliet documents the titular characters’ intense love and foolhardy demise. Shakespeare’s play leads us to question both the sincerity of young love.
I came up with this sentence while prepping high school students to take placement exams, hence the literary material. But the semantics of the sentence make it useful for virtually every kind of writing. I especially want to highlight the importance of the verbs in this sentence, because choosing the proper verb often reveals both our appraisal of the source and our thinking on the questions it raises.
[Author]’s [time period] [genre] [title] [verb] [plot summary]. [Author] [verb] [theme/purpose].
Ok, so in reality I have two sentences here. But, when dealing with non-fiction works, they can often be combined into one:
[Author’s] [time period] [genre] [title] [verb] [purpose].
As I indicated above, it is the verb that is the silent star of the show here. Consider for a minute the following example:
Malcom Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink exposes how subconscious part of our brain think in ways we are not consciously aware.
Exposes. How does the meaning of the sentence change if I use the verb:
- suggests
- argues
- questions whether
- supposes
- explicates
- details
- offers a theory of
- explores
Each of these verb choices subtly alters the way I approach the work discussed. Exposes suggests something secret and perhaps mysterious is being uncovered. Suggests suggests that an amount of doubt surrounds the issue. Supposes implies that I am hostile or at least quite skeptical toward the idea. This subtle indicator allows my an opportunity to softly align or distance myself from the source I am using. Good authors do this all the time to subconsciously prepare readers for their arguments.
I’m going to ask you to read 538.com’s piece on Trump and Sanders and write a 3 to 5 sentence summary of the piece in Canvas. We’re aiming for objectivity here–try to summarize the piece without indicating whether you agree with it! Practice using my formula here for your first sentence.
After we review some summaries, we can turn to twitter.
Homework
This is your first week of writing with your communities (or, if you are working on an extended academic project, researching your topic). Per the syllabus, you should complete the Weekly Report Form via Google Docs that we created on Tuesday by 11:59pm Monday (so that I have links to everyone’s writing on Tuesday morning when I wake up).
