Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [223]
(Empirical studies have by now shown that political liberty, health, and education are all poorly correlated with growth.)
One sign of what that model leaves out is the fact that South Africa under apartheid used to shoot to the top of development indexes.
There was a lot of wealth in the old South Africa, and the old model of development rewarded that achievement (or good fortune), ignoring the staggering distributional inequalities, the brutal apartheid regime, and the health and educational deficiencies that went with it.
(Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Liberal Arts Are Not Elitist” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 2010)
Paragraph B:
What does the contemporary self want?
The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity.
As the two technologies converge—broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection even wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse.
Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.
This is what the contemporary self wants.
It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: it wants to be visible.
If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook.
This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves—by being seen by others.
The great contemporary terror is anonymity.
If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
(William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009)
Paragraph C:
White might not have succeeded in completely ridding his life of modern civilization, but Strunk’s manual in White’s hands became a successful primitivist tract.
Perhaps that seems like an overstatement, but in fact what counts as primitivist is flexible, Marianna Torgovnick reminded us, entirely dependent on what bugs one about the modern.
The key feature of primitivism, Torgovnick offered, is defining the primitive in reaction to the present: “Is the present too majestic? Primitive life is not—it is a precapitalist utopia in which only use value, never exchange value, prevails. Is the present sexually repressed? Not primitive life—primitives live life whole, without fear of the body” (8).
For Strunk and White, modern life was verbose and obscure, so primitive life must be brief, direct, and clear.
New things are bad things, new words the worst of all.
The words offputting and ongoing appear in the third and subsequent editions of The Elements of Style as “newfound adjectives, to be avoided because they are inexact and clumsy” (Third Edition 54).
The suffix oriented is lambasted as “a clumsy, pretentious device, much in vogue” (Third Edition 55).
The Elements of Style thus had become, over a period of nearly unprecedented technological progress, the perfect complement to the manual typewriter—a deliberate rejection of “books with permissive steering and automatic transitions” that made our lives easier but rendered our prose impotent and our character lax (xvi).
For impotence and laxity, The Elements of Style offers a program of stylistic and moral restitution, word by word.
(Catherine Prendergast, “The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White,” College English, Volume 72, No 1, September 2009)
* * *
FINDING THE SKELETON OF AN ESSAY: AN EXAMPLE
We end this chapter with a skeletal version of an essay by one of our colleagues (available in the anthology version of this text). We have included only the first sentence of each paragraph, and in some cases the last, the working thesis as it appears at the end of paragraph 2, and the evolved thesis as it appears in the next to final paragraph. As