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Here are three excerpts of student papers from different academic disciplines, followed by one evocative example from a professional writer.

The first example, from a draft of an undergraduate honors thesis in biology, shows how a writer uses Move 2—defining significant parts and how they are related—to analyze the relationship between two kinds of aquatic snails. The writer, Emily Petchler Herstoff seeks to understand why a type of snail, Crepidula adunca, attaches itself selectively to one kind of grazing snail, Calliostoma ligatum, and not to other, similar snails.

Studying the effects of predation on host choice can shed insight onto the symbiotic relationship between Calliostoma ligatum and Crepidula adunca, and may illuminate why Calliostoma ligatum is the preferred host for Crepidula adunca in the San Juan Islands. My first experimental goal was to determine if Crepidula adunca confers any benefits to Calliostoma ligatum in the form of predator defense. As Crepidula adunca has already been proven to harm its host Calliostoma ligatum (Vermeij et al, 1987), it may be that Crepidula adunca is in a parasitic, rather than mutualistic relationship with its host. To determine if Crepidula adunca may be mutualistic, I performed predation tests to see if C. adunca conferred any advantages, in the form of defense, to its host Calliostoma ligatum. I performed a series of predator preference experiments to determine if predators more frequently consumed Calliostoma ligatum without Crepidula adunca.

Here is another example, a rhetorical analysis of a commencement address delivered by novelist David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 (later published as “This Is Water”). Notice how the writer isolates parts of the speech, such as its apologies and denials, in order to arrive at claims about the rhetoric of the speech as a whole. (See Chapter 1, the short take called Rhetoric: What It Is and Why You Need It.) The writer begins by listing four quotations from the address.

“I am not the wise old fish” (1).

“Please don’t worry that I am getting ready to lecture you about compassion” (2)

“Please don’t think that I am giving you moral advice” (5).

“Please don’t dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon” (7)

A recurrent feature of the address is the author’s imploring his audience (“Please”) not to assume that he is offering moral instruction. The sheer repetition of this pattern suggests that he is worried about sounding like a sermonizer, that the writer is anxious about the didacticism of his speech.

But obviously the piece does advance a moral position; it does want us to think about something serious, which is part of its function as a commencement address. What’s most interesting is the final apology, offered just as the piece ends (7). Here Wallace appears to shift ground. Rather than denying that he’s “the wise old fish” (1), he denies that he is Dr. Laura, or rather, he pleads not to be dismissed as a Dr. Laura. So he’s saying, in effect, that we should not see him as a TV personality who scolds (“finger wagging”) and offers moral lessons for daily life (“sermon”).

Why is he so worried about the didactic function? Obviously, he is thinking of his audience, fearful of appearing to be superior, and fearful that his audience does not want to be preached at. But he cannot resist the didactic impulse the occasion bestows. In these terms, what is interesting is the divided nature of the address: on the one hand, full of parables—little stories with moral intent—and on the other hand, full of repeated denials of the very moral impulse his narratives and the occasion itself generically decree.

In our next example, Michelle Bielko, a history and English major, isolates details in the writing of 19th-century poet Walt Whitman to theorize his celebratory treatment of the Civil War.

Of interest is the fact that an analysis of Whitman’s poems and journalistic works from