Week 4

Good Afternoon! I hope the past week has been a good one for you all. You left last week with an essay assigned about an individual whose life and personality make for interesting reading. Today we'll read several of these essays to see the kinds of people you've brought for us all to meet (if only in print).

Presumably, each of you focused on someone who is an exemplar of some character or type. To be an exemplar, the word is a noun, is to be a model or example, or an ideal model. This is just to say your subject serves, in part, as a living illustration of certain ideas. Where am I going with this? To another of the modes or means of developing and organizing your essay material, that of illustration or exemplification–providing examples to support a point or assertion or clarify a position. You've used all along, in tandem with description and narration and others such as comparison and contrast. Examples may be presented in lists or itemized or a single one developed at length (the extended example). To remember: an illustration is a specific instance or case, an event, story, artifact, word or thing, picture, chart, map, etc. Some examples here follow:

While viruses and bacteria cause most of the common diseases suffered by people who live in the developed world, protozoa are the major cause of disease in undeveloped tropical zones. Of these diseases, the most widespread are malaria, amoebic dysentery, and African sleeping sickness.

The idea that art does not exist among the lower animals is a primitive notion. A perfect illustration of art in the animal kingdom is the art of the amazing bower birds of Australia. These birds decorate their bowers with shells, colored glass, and shining objects. Some paint their walls with fruit pulp, wet powdered charcoal, or paste of chewed up grass mixed with saliva. One kind of bird even makes a paintbrush from a wad of bark to apply the paint.

–both examples above taken from Readings for Writers, 11th ed.

There was always a touch of seediness and sadness to pay phones, and a sense of transience. Drug dealers made calls from them, and shady types who did not want their whereabouts known, and otherwise respectable people planning assignations, and people too poor to have phones of their own. In the movies, any character who used a pay phone was either in trouble or contemplating a crime. Pay phones came with their own special atmospherics and even accessories sometimes–the predictable bad smells and graffiti, of course, as well as cigarette butts, soda cans, scattered pamphlets from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and single bottles of beer (empty) still in their individual, street-legal paper bags. Mostly, pay phones evoked the mundane: "Honey, I'm jut leaving. I'll be there soon." But you could tell that a lot of undifferentiated humanity had flowed through these places, and that in the muteness of each pay phone's little space, wild emotion had howled.

–Ian Frazier, "Dearly Disconnected"

Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer–surprise, surprise–is that Robert Lowth [author of A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762)] didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?"–merely a contraction of the same words–is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in "Many people were there"), but not when it is followed by a, as in "Many a man was there." There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon [author Thomas Tryon], the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish and, when this came hot out of the frying pan, it smelled admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enable one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.

–Ben Franklin, 1791

Essay#4 will require you come up with a topic that invites illustration. As as a class we'll brainstorm possibilities today. The essay should support a clear thesis idea and be arranged in multi-paragraph form (three to six or more paragraphs). It should be titled, double-spaced, and a well edited 500 words or so in length. It will be due next week, week 5.

Topic Suggestions:

• The role of music (or whatever art you want to name) in your life, supported by reference to specific influential musicians and particular works.
• President Barack Obama's record of achievement thus far as president, with reference to what has gotten done under his leadership, and perhaps what hasn't.
• The best of Ft. Lauderdale (or whatever city), with reference to specific places of interest, however you care to define "interest."
• Rules to Live By, with reference to the benefits gained and troubles avoided.
• What We do For Love, with reference to personal experience and observation.
• Breakthroughs in science or technology (or What's New?) or any field of endeavor you want to address, personal or public, with examples to illustrate.
• Life Is Strange (or tough), with references to all that seems to make such statement true.

Writing a summary: Handouts and discussion of sample text and summary conventions. Draft in 200 words of the article "A Waste-Free Life," by Alexandra Wolfe.

Verb Tense Use: Exercises 3 and 4. at https://owl.english.purdue.edu/exercises/2/22/51