Meditations: The English Teacher

STYLE IN RHETORIC Remember to consider some of the overall frameworks of rhetoric, which Aristotle called the art of finding all the "available means of persuasion".  The largest framework is that of the rhetorical triangle, meaning audience, subject, and speaker.  In other words, you must know who you are trying to persuade, what you are trying to persuade them to do, and who is doing the persuading. Under this, consider the rhetorical appeals: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. The rhetorician, or the persuader, can use their credibility or trustworthiness, also known Ethos, to get their audience to listen to his or her every word.  In order to listen to a person, you first have to trust them.  Next, you have Logos, or reason.  Logos comes from an old Greek word that means "word" , "reason", "computation" and "account."  This is where you can use scientific knowledge, numbers, or logic to get your point across.  You are appealing to the th...

The Chase: Annie Dillard How is the girl (narrator) different from other girls in her community? In the first section of the text, it states she plays with boys who are a few years older than her. They tell her that she has a "boy's arm".   Her persona is that of a tomboy. What did the man gain from catching the kids? The man might have been just as bored as the kids--he had nothing better to do. He took the time out of his day; wherever he was going may not have been important.  The narrator notes that most adults would have just stopped.  The setting was in the early morning, during a weekday (pg. 73). He might have been groggy or irritated.  He was dressed very professionally; he could have been a businessman not prepared for rowdy kids. Why didn't the writer put more of what the guy lectured them about? We only get one set of dialogue, on page seventy-five, when the guy says "You stupid kids." The text implies that he may have said more. He...

Often, the best way to improve your writing is two combine redundant, choppy sentences into a single longer sentence using a conjunction or another connecting word.  For example, here is a sample set of a sentences from a student essay: "Their life falls apart and they end up having depression.  They end up having depression because they have spent huge amounts of money and time to attempt to look and act like their role model." In another post I talked about getting rid of "dead wood" or redundant language.  One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by removing the repeating words and hooking the sentences together using the word "because." "Their life falls apart and they end up having depression.  They end up having depression   because they have spent huge amounts of money and time to attempt to look an act like their role model." The combined sentence: "Their life falls apart and they end up having depression because t he...

"Many successful people had to have good characteristics to help them succeed, for example, courage, responsibility and good communication."  How can we help this sentence?  One way is to make it shorter, more concise. Economy of language means packing as much you can into every sentence.  It also means reading the sentence back to yourself, aloud, over and over again until it achieves the right rhythm. Try: "Successful people must have courage, responsibility, and strong communication skills."   Notice what I took out: "for example", "many", "good", "help" "to".   We went from fifteen to nine words.  As Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."  Exercise:  Look over a sentence from your writing.  Re-write the sentence, and see what you can take out.  

        "Dead Wood" is obvious cliche'd language that "floats there" and doesn't give the reader anything to latch onto. Here is a sample opening statement to a student's essay: "The internet is a culmination of technology that has been brought together to create a platform for shared information."  Doesn't "culmination" already mean "brought together"? What if instead we said: "The internet is a culmination of technology that creates a shared platform for information." Then again, what if we used active verbs? "Culmination" is an "tion" word, what many writers call "zombie words"; in other words, they are not active.  We can make words like this more alive if we put them in the present tense: "The technology of the internet culminates in shared information." Or, what if we paint a picture instead.  What if we drop the sentence entirely? Everyone knows what the...