Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [143]
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Try This 10.1: Doing 10 on 1 with Newspaper Visuals
Search out photographs in the newspaper and do 10 on 1. Or alternatively, spend some time doing 10 on 1 on a comic strip. What perspectives emerge once you have restricted the focus? List details, but also list multiple implications. Remember to ask not just What do I notice? but What else do I notice? And not just What does it imply? but What else might it imply?
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Try This 10.2: Doing 10 on 1 with a Reading
Take a piece of reading—a representative example—from something you are studying and do 10 on 1. The key to doing 10 on 1 successfully is to slow down the rush to conclusions so that you can allow yourself to notice more about the evidence and make the details speak. The more observations you assemble about your data before settling on your main idea, the better that idea is likely to be. Remember that a single, well-developed paragraph from something you are reading can be enough to practice on, especially because you are working on saying more about less rather than less about more.
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CONVERTING 1 ON 10 INTO 10 ON 1: A STUDENT PAPER (FLOOD STORIES)
The following student paper, about the recurrence of flood stories in religious texts and myth, shows what happens when a writer falls into doing 1 on 10. That is, rather than zooming in on representative examples to test and refine his ideas, he attaches the same underdeveloped point to each of his examples. Typical of the 1-on-10 pattern, the flood paper views everything from the same relatively unrevealing distance.
In the essay that follows, we have used boldface to track the “one” point—the as-yet-underdeveloped thesis idea—that the writer has attached to each of his examples (1 on 10). Brackets and ellipses […] indicate where we have abridged the essay.
Flood Stories
[1] The role of people, as reflected in Genesis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, is solely to please the gods. Men, as the gods’ subordinates, exist to do right in the gods’ eyes and make them feel more like gods; for without men, whom could the gods be gods of? […]
[2] In Genesis, for example, God created humans in his own image or likeness, and when they displeased Him, He destroyed them. If God could see wickedness in his creations, perhaps it was like seeing wickedness in himself. Further, the idea of having evidence of God being able to create an imperfect, “wicked” race of humans may have been a point God wasn’t willing to deal with: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.” It seems as though God had become unhappy with his creations so they were to be destroyed. Like a toy a child no longer has use for, humankind was to be wasted.
[3] Similarly, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, God made humanity and “fashioned it into the image of the all-governing gods.” Again here, humans were made in the gods’ image to serve as an everlasting monument of their glorification, to honor them and do good by them. In other words, humans spent less time making the gods happy and therefore made them unhappy. Some men even questioned the reality of the gods’ existence and the strength of their power. Lyacon, for example, had a driving tendency to try to belittle the gods and make them look like fools. The gods were very displeased with this trend, and now the entire race had to be destroyed. A flood would be sent to wipe out the race of men. [The writer then summarizes several examples in which the wicked are destroyed and a few upstanding citizens are preserved and arrives at the following conclusion:] Thus, the justification