Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [225]
Note that if your professor directs you to work with magazines rather than journals, you should probably further narrow the focus—to a Time cover story, to the New Yorker’s “Letter from [the name of a city],” or another such recurring feature. Even gossip columns and letters of advice to the lovelorn in teen magazines adhere to certain evident, though not explicitly marked, formats.
Write up your results. Cite particular language from at least two articles in support of your claims about the implicit format. In presenting your evidence, keep the focus on the underlying form, showing how the different articles proceed in the same or similar ways. Don’t let yourself get too distracted by the articles’ content, even though there may be similarities here as well. Instead, work toward formulating a rationale for the format—what you take to be its rhetoric of form. You will need, for example, both to lay out the typical form of the introduction and to account for its taking that typical form. Devote several paragraphs to this rationale, either at the end of your report or integrated within it.
2. Find the Organizing Principles of an Essay
Excerpt a skeletal version of an essay, using the model of the 9/11 essay by James Peck located at the end of the chapter. Copy out the opening sentence of each paragraph as well as sentences that state the essay’s working thesis and its final form in or near the concluding paragraph. Your aim is to discern the shape of the thinking in the essay at a glance.
3. Practice Induction
Study a group of like things inductively. You might, for example, use greeting cards aimed at women versus greeting cards aimed at men, a group of poems by one author, or ads for one kind of product (jeans) or aimed at one target group (teenage girls).
Compile a set of significant details about the data, and then leap to a general claim about the group that you think is interesting and reasonably accurate. This generalization is your inductive principle. Then use the principle to examine deductively more data of the same kind, exploring its implications as you evolve it more accurately.
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Chapter 16
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Introductions and Conclusions Across the Curriculum
THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES two perennial trouble-spots in all kinds of writing— introductions and conclusions. The chapter gives special attention to strategies for solving two problems: trying to do too much in the introduction and not doing enough in the conclusion.
There are no absolute rules for writing introductions and conclusions, but there does seem to be a consensus across the disciplines that introductions should raise issues rather than settle them and that conclusions should go beyond merely restating what has already been said. Insofar as disciplinary conventions permit, in introductions you should play an ace but not your whole hand; and in conclusions, don’t just summarize—culminate.
Throughout the chapter, we will point to differences in the language that the various disciplines use in their prescriptions for introductions and conclusions, but once you have learned to see past differences in style, you will recognize that the jobs introductions and conclusions do are actually quite similar across the curriculum.
The introduction isolates a specific question or issue and explains why, in a specified context, this question or issue matters.
Think of the concluding paragraph as the site of the paper’s final So what?, which is shorthand for “Where does this get us?” or “Why does this matter?”
Rather than just restate and summarize, the concluding paragraph should leave readers with your single best insight and put it into some kind of broader perspective.
INTRODUCTIONS AND