Imagery: the four forgotten senses

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo.

Imagery, as we all learned in middle school or thereabouts, is writing that appeals to the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. But in practice, most imagery focuses on the first sense in this list -- sight -- and seldom touches upon the other four. Many people tend to be visually oriented in their perceptions, so perhaps our bias in favor of sight while writing imagery results from this disposition. Nonetheless, to make your imagery stand out, try including the four forgotten senses.

One way to fruitfully practice writing imagery that uses all five senses is to compose a description of a meal. Meals have abundant sights (steaming food and colorful dishes), sounds (the slurp of soup and the scraping of forks against plates), smells (the fragrance of cilantro or the pungent aroma of vinegar), tastes (duh!), and touch (the texture of the food, the feel of the tablecloth). The few examples I’ve put inside parentheses represent only the tip of the imagery iceberg (...lettuce?). What other examples can you think of?

Now go ahead and use all five senses by writing a detailed description of a Thanksgiving dinner or a wedding reception meal or a birthday party picnic. In addition to the possibilities for imagery offered by these events, human rituals such as holidays, weddings, parties, funerals, reunions, graduations, etc. make excellent writing topics because they are universal and they are often rich in family tension, conflict and drama. Now get busy writing so you can see (hear, smell, taste, and touch) what I’m talking about!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Translating your thoughts into words

Source: photo taken by author.

Frequently, when I conduct a one-on-one writing conference with a student, we will discuss the difficulty in translating the seemingly clear thoughts in the student’s mind into lucid prose on the page. "I have a problem doing that," students will tell me. My customary response to that statement is something like ... "You, me and every other writer who has ever lived has the same problem. Including the professionals." The problem with comparing our own writing against the output of professional writers is that generally we are looking at an embryonic draft of our own writing but comparing it to a published version of the professional’s. The Great Gatsby did not spring word-for-word from the pen of F. Scott Fitzgerald into the letter-perfect copy of that novel with its classic art-deco cover that we are so familiar with from bookstore shelves. No doubt, Fitzgerald labored through multiple drafts to shape his novel into the finished form we see today. We just aren’t privy to that process and so can easily become discouraged with our own ongoing efforts. But Fitzgerald and every other writer who ever lived endured the same process. The principal advantage the pros have over student writers is speed (from experience). By repeated practice they have become more adept at rapidly transforming a clumsy, vague first draft into a cogent, clear final draft. And, also with experience, the first drafts of professional writers become more accomplished (but never finished or perfect), so they start revising from an elevated position. Remember, it's not a matter of intelligence but of experience, so get busy practicing!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Put your thesis statement to work!

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo
 (with text added by the author).

Almost everyone knows that an essay requires a thesis statement. To use an analogy, a thesis statement is to a persuasive (or expository) essay what a hypothesis is to a scientific experiment. But, just like a scientific hypothesis, a thesis statement must be modified if the evidence does not support it as originally written. Ultimately, you must craft your thesis statement to fit the available evidence, not the other way around. Never attempt to shoehorn evidence that doesn't fit so that it squeezes in to match your pre-existing thesis statement. To do so would be a corruption of the process.

These are some of the reasons why I prefer to use the term working thesis statement. This type of thesis statement is a self-declared work-in-progress, decidedly not carved into stone, and it can (and perhaps should) change as a writer conducts research to support his or her ideas. Writers frequently modify a thesis statement while writing successive drafts, but this process of exploration and revision of ideas is kept hidden from view in early drafts and in the research process. The final published draft will make it appear that a writer had been confident of his or her ideas from the get-go, but this confidence is a well-crafted mirage. A working thesis statement, in fact, is not even composed for any reader, but is instead written for you -- the writer. It's purpose is to help clarify and organize your own ideas so that you can begin thinking and researching. After all, writing is thinking. Nobody truly knows what their complex thoughts mean until they have hammered them into prose.

Now, if during this drafting and researching process, evidence that you uncover persuades you to modify (or even refute) a long-held, cherished belief, will some people accuse you of hypocrisy, of being a "flip-flopper"? Sure. But ignore them and remain open-minded to change. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us in his essay "Self-Reliance" about the importance of being a nonconformist: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Instead of being foolishly consistent and frightened by the specter of change, conduct careful, unbiased research and put your thesis statement to work.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Writing description: deliver the details

In nonfiction writing, it is sometimes necessary to write an extended passage of description. A paragraph or more of description will contain many details. The most important characteristic of these details is that they must create a dominant impression. Otherwise, the extended description risks becoming a list of unrelated details that will bore and confuse readers.

Here’s an example. A passage of description may depict a place, a person, an object, an event, an action, etc., so let’s imagine a writer describing the high school building I work in. Built in 1953, our current high school building projects the solid image of its era. Before describing this building, our hypothetical student writer must decide what she wants to say about the building. Like (I fear) some students, perhaps she views high school as a prison sentence culminating a 13-year course of reluctant compulsory education. In that case, perhaps she focuses on details that project a fortress-like, dreary quality about the high school -- it’s stone walls and drab colors. Conversely (and more optimistically), perhaps our imaginary student writer views school as a venerable temple of learning, a place that encourages creativity and critical thinking. In that case, she will focus on more colorful, exciting details about the building -- perhaps music emanating from the chorus room or brightly colored bulletin boards.

The following passage, the opening paragraph from James Dickey’s novel Deliverance, exhibits masterful control of description. Dickey writes:

It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north. Lewis’ hand took a pencil and marked out a small strong X in a place where some of the green bled away and the paper changed with high ground, and began to work downstream, northeast to southwest through the printed woods. I watched the hand rather than the location, for it seemed to have power over the terrain, and when it stopped for Lewis’ voice to explain something, it was as though all streams everywhere quit running, hanging silently where they were to let the point be made. The pencil turned over and pretended to sketch in with the eraser an area that must have been around fifty miles long, through which the river hooked and cramped.

This paragraph describes two separate but related things -- a map of wild river country, and a self-assured man named Lewis -- both described through the lens of a narrator. Deliverance is a contemporary horror novel of sorts (later made into one of the scariest movies ever filmed) about four "suburban cowboys" rafting down untamed rapids in rural north Georgia before the river is dammed to create a sedate reservoir. During the course of the novel, these men run into trouble, lots of it. The first object the paragraph describes is a map of the wild country. Notice the way Dickey describes the rolled-up map curling and snapping like a viper. The map (and, more importantly, the remote river country the map traces) seems ominous because of this description and others. The man Lewis, the second subject of description, is depicted only via his hand and voice. Lewis projects an air of supreme confidence, but something in the passage suggests that even he will have his hands full in this mysterious river country.

Now consider all the details Dickey left out. The size of the map, its creases, its scale, and other information about Lewis like his hair color and age and height. None of these details are relevant to the dominant impression, and ominous mood, Dickey intends to create with this passage.

When you write description, decide what dominant impression you wish to convey and choose your details carefully to deliver it. Remember, the devil (and the delight) is in the details.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Building vocabulary: start reading NOW

Question -- How do you build a rich knowledge of vocabulary?

Answer -- A lifetime of reading. No shortcuts.

I’m always amazed by the number of high school students who freely admit to me that they never read anything, certainly not books. (I’ve even had honors and AP students tell me this). Perhaps this comes from teaching at a small-town, provincial public high school? If these students could compare their reading to students at elite private schools like Phillips Exeter Academy or Sidwell Friends School, they might be more sheepish about their admission. Inevitably, when I ask these reluctant readers what they want to do after high school, they answer, “Go to college.” I want to scream: “Do you know what you do in college? You READ. All … day … long!”

At some point, students in 11th grade begin to worry about three letters of the alphabet: SAT. When I took it, SAT stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” a name the College Board and ETS shy away from now. But this test is still used by many colleges as a cutline for admissions, and it still contains a hefty vocabulary segment. The now (marginally) worried high school students will take SAT prep classes to ready themselves for the dreaded test. Do these prep classes help? Marginally (maybe). In fact, the time to start preparing for the SAT was in kindergarten, maybe even sooner. A lifetime of increasingly challenging reading is what really builds vocabulary knowledge, not prep classes. So if you’re in 11th grade, and you’ve never read anything (or if your idea of challenging reading is the latest Nicholas Sparks or James Patterson novel), I’m not sure what to tell you. I know this isn’t what you want to hear. Start reading NOW, and maybe you can still do yourself some good in a limited time. Perhaps this blog post is directed at parents of younger children more than teenaged students. Parents, get your kids reading -- NOW!

Of course, recently, the SAT has announced it is dumbing down its requirement for vocabulary knowledge. The College Board, of course, doesn’t characterize it that way, claiming they are dropping “obscure” vocabulary words in exhange for “high utility” words (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/education/revised-sat-wont-include-obscure-vocabulary-words.html?_r=0). My translation? They are dropping sophisticated, challenging words (“obscure”) for simple, everyday words (“high utility”).

In other words, that's what I call an “SATrocity.”

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Write what you DON'T know (yet)

One of the platitudes that instructors repeat in creative writing workshops is "write what you know." There is good reason to heed this rule. Usually enforced in fiction writing workshops, “write about what you know” helps prevent 18-year-olds who grew up in middle-class American suburbs from submitting wretchedly unrealistic drafts of stories set in sub-Saharan Africa, or the trackless Amazon rain forest, or outer space. These students would be better served to set their stories in a suburban American high school, or their own family homes, environments about which they could speak with some accuracy and authority.

Of course, I have my own humorous anecdote about naively writing "what I didn't know." I still vividly recall a day 35 years ago when our inspirational 10th-grade English teacher, the late Dan Dinicola, popped open a leather briefcase in class and read to us a passage from an original short story he was writing and planning to submit to a magazine for publication. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but the idea that any ordinary person could sit down and write an original piece of fiction and try to have it published was a major revelation to my provincial, half-awake, adolescent mind. So, fired with inspiration, I rushed home after school and took out my portable typewriter (yes, this was pre-internet, pre-PC, pre-smartphone 1979...) and immediately ran up against the brick wall of a lack of a topic to write about. Now, I was a precocious reader and had just finished John Kennedy Toole's cult fiction novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Today, I recall almost nothing about this book, but I think it was set in New Orleans. So I cobbled together an "idea" about a young man journeying to New Orleans aboard a passenger train. This would be the subject of my brilliant story! Two major problems with this idea: 1.) I had never been on a train in my life, and 2.) I had never been to New Orleans in my life and knew nothing about that city. Did I just hear the conductor shout, "Next stop: total lack of verisimilitude!"? It is, of course, laughable. But I didn't stop there -- fueled by youthful hubris, I mailed off my typed manuscript to a magazine. Which one? Oh, just the most prestigious periodical in America, The New Yorker (which, by the way, I’m pretty sure I had never read a single issue of). Needless to say, the rejection slip for this story written by a 15-year-old was returned in record time!

Well, this digression down Absurdity Lane brings me to my main point: if I had bothered to conduct some research about passenger trains and New Orleans, it might have been possible (though unlikely, given my inexperience) to write a competent story on these subjects. Certainly, it would have been a better story. And in nonfiction writing, it's important to write about topics beyond your personal experience. But you must first put in the work (reading, studying, researching, interviewing, traveling) to collect the information you need and gain that experience. So don’t limit yourself to writing about what you know; write about what you don’t know … yet (after you know about it, of course!)

PS -- There is another micro-lesson in the goofy tale of my first attempt to write a short story. I didn’t allow that rejection slip to make me stop writing. Never give up. Never quit. Bad writing is a prerequisite of good writing. In the end, the only writers who fail are those who stop writing.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

The example paragraph

Here’s a true story from the trenches of public education. A few years back, an 11th-grade student handed in to his teacher (me) a typed, two-page, single-spaced essay that had no capital letters, punctuation marks or paragraphs in it whatsoever. None at all. Just one block of uninterrupted text, like some inscription on a stone monument from ancient Rome. Now, years later, in thinking about the three missing elements -- capital letters, punctuation, paragraphing -- it occurs to me that the greatest crime may have been the lack of paragraphs.

Writing these blog entries (basically micro-essays of one to four paragraphs in length) has forced me to think carefully about the paragraph as a unit of meaning. Even more than sentences, paragraphs are the building blocks of writing. This is why I think it’s so important for a composition class to require many paragraph-length assignments that demand multiple revisions, rather than a handful of long essays with no opportunity to revise. The latter pedagogy encourages reinforcing and repeating mistakes instead of correcting and improving.

So what is a paragraph anyway? Native American writer Sherman Alexie provides my favorite definition in his essay “Superman and Me” when he remembers his epiphany as a child at realizing what a paragraph is intended for:

I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say “paragraph,” but realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence.

Eureka -- that’s it! Everything in a paragraph -- every word, phrase, clause and sentence -- must have a valid reason for being grouped together and all must work together to further the purpose (thesis idea) of the essay.

The “bread-and-butter” type of paragraph in college writing is the example paragraph. Basically, there are three parts to an example paragraph (the third part is optional): a topic sentence(s); examples; and a summary sentence. The topic sentence is the mini-thesis statement of the paragraph. In a larger sense, the topic sentence is a sub-idea of the main idea expressed in the essay’s thesis statement. It can also be more than one sentence. Often, the second sentence of an example paragraph amplifies or elaborates on the first (topic) sentence and thus is part of the whole topic sentence unit. Next come the examples. These may consist of statistics, direct quotations, paraphrased information, brief summaries, anecdotes, historical precedents, etc. All of these examples must support the paragraph’s topic sentence and connect together in a logical sequence. Last comes (sometimes) a summary sentence that puts a punctuation mark on the ideas in the paragraph. Some writers (Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson leap to mind) were outstanding writers of pithy aphorisms that served as summary sentences. But you don’t always need one; an unnecessary summary sentence insults readers by rehashing what they’ve already come to understand, like explaining the punch line of a joke. Nonetheless, with or without a summary sentence, your example paragraph must transition logically into whatever paragraph follows it.

Regarding paragraphs, just imagine how you would feel if your teacher handed you a 20-page essay to read that had no paragraphs, just 20 pages of margin-to-margin unbroken text. So, in turn, never hand in a composition without paragraphs (any more than you’d like to read one).

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Responding to criticism

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo
(with text added by the author).

Writers don’t value all of their writing the same. Sometimes, we are just “grinding out a paper” or completing a “writing-on-demand” essay in response to some standardized test question that doesn't appeal to us. It can be grueling to write compositions like these, and, believe me, it’s even more grueling to read, respond to, and grade them. When we don’t care about our writing topic, it shows.

It also shows when we DO care about our writing topic. Our writing is more engaging and appealing to readers. As writers, we make an emotional investment in writing we care about. In this case, the composition we’ve created is like our baby. And then along comes the teacher, who’s going to criticize our baby. Ask any mom what happens when someone criticizes her baby; it’s beat-down time!

But with our writing, as opposed to our babies, it’s vital to divorce ourselves from this emotional attachment to the written work so that we can accept criticism about our work in a constructive way. Imagine you own a house with a leaky roof. The roofing contractor comes over and tells you that you have a major leak and your roof needs to be re-shingled. Do you then throw up your hands and say, “How dare you criticize my roof?!?” No, you’re probably more concerned with how to make it stop raining inside your bedroom. So it’s important to view your written work the same way a homeowner views a leaky roof -- as something that can be fixed or improved.

Here’s another critical factor in responding to criticism at the college level. You must take ownership of your paper. YOU own it. Your name is at the top of the paper, not your professor's, not the tutor's at the writing center -- nobody but you. You must move beyond high-school level thinking like “I didn’t fix it because you didn’t circle it.” Everything in your paper is your responsibility and no one else’s. The good part about this is that you, as the owner of the paper, are also free to reject advice about writing style and “stick to your authorial guns” when you think you’ve made the correct stylistic decision. Just make sure you have a good reason for rejecting the advice.

One final word about college-level thinking. The grade (A, B, C, etc.) is not the important part. Learning is the important part. Don’t get hung up on what grade you receive. I’ve known students who obsess about getting a B+ instead of an A-. What do those letters mean, anyway? If your sole motivation is achievement, you’ll probably be disappointed when you go from competing against students in your high school to competing against students in college, who may well be the best students from dozens of different high schools. But if you find your motivation in learning, in a passion for knowledge, that will carry you through your four years of college and for the rest of your life too. So accept criticism in the manner in which it’s intended, as a way for your written product to improve.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Choosing a major … Part 1

One of the important decisions college students face is choosing a major field of study, known as a major. Most schools require students to settle on a major by the end of their sophomore year. Some students come to college with a definite major in mind; others sample courses and decide what they want to study based on their interests and aptitudes.

Even though I arrived as a college freshman in 1982 with my major pre-determined (English), I am a believer in the other method. I think it benefits students to take a broad cross-section of courses across disciplines and thereby discover what they should major in. But be forewarned, sometimes parents who are paying the tuition bill frown on this method -- what looks to them like wasted time (although it is not -- more about that subject to follow in a later post).

While I’ve got your attention, let me put in a plug for the much-maligned English major. One tiresome myth that circulates is that English majors can’t find jobs. My own experience as an English major has been the opposite; I have never been out of work. And that includes years spent in the private sector as a newspaper reporter and editor before I became a tenured public school teacher in my early forties. By contrast, I have acquaintances in other fields, major-account sales executives and senior computer-systems engineers among them, who have endured long stretches of unemployment and subsequent hardship.

Remember -- no matter the business -- the ability to communicate with power and precision never goes out of style. Communication is still the domain of the human mind. The computer has not yet been invented that can spontaneously create the works of Shakespeare. If such a machine existed, we would have many more captivating plays to see.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

A first draft, not a rough one

"There shouldn't be anything rough about a first draft," I once heard a professor say. “It should be as perfect as you can make it.” Like that wise professor, I too do not care for the term "rough draft" but prefer "first draft." Why? Because the “rough” first draft is the one you write only for yourself. You’re telling yourself a story or explaining an argument to yourself. But the REAL first draft you hand in for evaluation should have been written for an audience (albeit an audience of one: your professor).

Bestselling horror writer Stephen King describes an apt metaphor for this process in his excellent (but unfortunately titled) book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. King’s book is a lapel-grabbing narrative about writing and the author’s apprenticeship as a writer, but (in my estimation) the ho-hum title makes it sound like a dreary textbook. At any rate, King relates an anecdote in which a veteran newspaper editor gives writing advice to King, a schoolboy intern for the paper.

King paraphrases this wily editor as saying:

[W]rite with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right -- as right as you can, anyway -- it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

In other words, revision brings the audience into consideration. So the “first” draft you hand in to your instructor (assuming you have a teacher or professor enlightened enough about the writing process to require multiple drafts) is not the first time you’ve written it. Instead, it should be the “door open” first draft written with an eye toward the reader, not the “door closed” draft written just for you, the writer. Remember, handing in a paper to your teacher is in reality a form of publication, so open the door!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

A unique perspective (remembering Robin Williams)

Source: photo taken by the author.

The recent tragic suicide of actor/comedian Robin Williams made me reflect on one of his early movies, Dead Poets Society, which I still show in school to 11th graders. Many film critics have lambasted this movie, and I too acknowledge its over-Romanticized depiction of the teaching and learning process, but I think the movie’s harshest detractors are being too cynical. Dead Poets Society speaks to teenagers who crave the inspirational while confined to an institution (school). One scene in particular -- when the teacher, Mr. Keating (portrayed by Williams), has students stand on his desk to deliver the message that “we must constantly look at things in a different way” -- made me think about the importance of going beyond the obvious and questioning conventional wisdom in college-level writing.

To find a college-level topic idea and develop an original thesis statement, you need to go beyond the obvious. Parroting conventional wisdom will not earn you a satisfactory grade in college. Deborah Tannen, in a fascinating essay titled “The Roots of Debate,” explores the “argument culture” that has overwhelmed modern life. Seldom do we listen to each other anymore, but instead we search any opposing arguments for holes and then attack with our counter-arguments. Our minds are already made up. Nowhere is this more evident than on cable TV news programs, where the “talking heads” can barely restrain themselves to listen for five seconds before shouting their own already-hardened ideas, and it’s not long before this “discussion” devolves into a simultaneous shouting match without anybody pausing to listen to anyone else.

In her essay, Tannen describes one college anthropology professor and her simple but ingenious method for prompting students to venture beyond conventional compare-and-contrast thinking. Tannen writes that this professor:

… makes a point of having her class compare three cultures, not two. If students compare two cultures, she finds they are inclined to polarize them, to think of the two as opposite to each other. But if they compare three cultures, they are more likely to think about each on its own terms. As a goal, we could all try to catch ourselves when we talk about “both sides” of an issue -- and talk instead about “all sides.”

Here’s one great example of a writer (in this case, a journalist) who went beyond the conventions of “pack journalism” in order to find a unique perspective on a subject that everyone was writing about. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the defining public event for a generation of people, just as Pearl Harbor was for an earlier generation and September 11 for a later one. As would be expected, journalists covered this story exhaustively. Jimmy Breslin, a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, realized that he couldn’t just write the same story that everyone else was writing. He needed to find a different perspective on this story, what people in the news business call an angle. He needed a unique angle. So Breslin interviewed the employee whose less-than-glamorous but solemn job it was to dig President Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The resulting story about Kennedy’s humble gravedigger provided a unique perspective on the shared suffering and grief of our nation -- a perspective no other writer had glimpsed.

So remember, in college, sticking to the conventional no longer cuts it. Instead of hunching over your desk and recycling the same, chewed-over ideas, hoist yourself up onto Mr. Keating’s desk and look around. Something startling and original awaits you.

PS -- here is Breslin’s story about JFK’s gravedigger -- you should read it! -- http://www.newsday.com/opinion/digging-jfk-grave-was-his-honor-jimmy-breslin-1.6481560

Choosing a major … Part 2

In “Choosing a major … Part 1,” I discussed my belief that college students should hold off on declaring a major until they have sampled a variety of courses to determine what they are interested in (and good at). I also mentioned that parents (some of whom foot part or all of the tuition bill) can be wary of this method. These parents might encourage their children to major in business or pre-med or pre-law or computer science, which they view as practical subjects, rather than one of the humanities or social sciences.

I will use my father’s story as an example of the dangers of majoring in an academic discipline, not because of interest and ability, but because of economic prospects. Both my father and mother grew up during the Great Depression. My dad was one of three children raised for most of their childhood by a single mother who managed through hard work (and probably some help from her large family) to give them a decent life. In 1950, a few years after graduating from high school, my dad was a student at Baker University, a small liberal arts college in Kansas. I don’t know for certain what his major was, but some old letters suggest perhaps he was an English or humanities major (or at least had a strong interest in those subjects). Later in 1950, the Korean War intervened in my father’s life and he was compelled to join the U.S. Navy. By the war’s end, his life had changed dramatically. He was a veteran with a wife and young child. So when he went back to college (at Kansas University this time), he majored in Business Administration, a very practical field, and went on to a career as a financial auditor and contract negotiator with General Electric. It gave him a solid, middle-class income.

What’s wrong with this, you ask? My dad hated his job at GE. He despised it all his life, and I am convinced it was one of the significant factors in his subsequent alcoholism, which ruined his life and significantly damaged the rest of ours in the family. I often wonder if his life would have followed a better course had he studied and then worked in a field that truly interested him. Now, as painful as it was to grow up in this environment, let me assure you I learned two priceless lessons: 1.) I didn’t want to be an alcoholic; and 2.) I didn’t want to spend eight hours a day for 40 years working at a job that I hated, regardless of how much it paid.

Let me be clear -- there is nothing wrong with majoring in business, or any other field, so long as you have a genuine interest in it. But the next time your parents pressure you about what to major in because “we’re paying for these four years,” try this reply. “If I make the wrong decision in choosing a major, and end up miserable, I’ll be paying for the rest of my life.” And feel free to use my dad as an example.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

I beg your question? Stop making me dizzy with your circular reasoning!

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo
(with text added by the author).

Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that sometimes infect our writing. In student-written essays, they are usually unintentional, but in other genres (political speech, corporate press releases and advertising come to mind), logical fallacies are frequently employed intentionally to manipulate or deceive. We need to learn about them so we can both avoid them in our own writing and also recognize them when used by others. One common logical fallacy is called circular reasoning, also known colloquially as "begging the question."

Exhausted parents are intimately familiar with this logical fallacy. They use it when their young children incessantly ask "why?" and in frustration they finally answer "because I said so!" Here's another example. Do you ever get those annoying political phone calls at home? I usually hang up on them, but let's imagine taking one and engaging in conversation. Senator X is a friend of the working man, the earnest young campaign worker asserts. How do I know that? you reply. Because he supports worker safety, comes the response. How can I tell he supports worker safety? you ask. Why, because he's a friend of the working man, of course! This fuzzy, merry-go-round "logic" will make anyone dizzy! And, of course, there's another problem. The term "working man" implies that everyone who works is a man, but correcting that fallacy will just have to wait for a future post...

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Artful transitions

Source: Wikimedia Commons public
domain photo (with text added by the author).

One time about ten years ago, I attended a professional development training session in which the Ph.D. presenting the seminar told a story about her dissertation advisor. Among his written comments on her dissertation draft was this cutting remark: “Your transitions, as I’m sure you realize, are artless.” Ouch. Now, ten years later and having read countless student essays, I can more fully appreciate what the dissertation advisor meant. Not all transitions are created equal.

We are all familiar with common transitional words like “first-second-last” and “furthermore-moreover-consequently.” There is nothing inherently wrong with these transitional words, but if you want your writing to transcend the pedestrian, then you will want to craft more artful transitions.

First off, transitions are essential for readers. If you envision your composition as a mountain range -- the Essay Mountains -- transitions are the bridges that allow a reader to traverse from peak to peak. Without these bridges, the hypothetical reader in the Essay Mountain Range will fall to his or her death. In your real essay, nothing so drastic will occur, but your real reader will notice the missing transition, pause, probably re-read the previous paragraph to see if he or she missed anything, and become confused. Then a real disaster will happen. Your reader will stop reading what you’ve written because it’s too hard to follow the path you’ve laid out.

One way to craft an effective transition is to momentarily bring the reader’s mind back to the topic of the preceding paragraph, and then project forward into the next paragraph. For example, let’s say you just finished writing a paragraph about women who disguised their gender to fight as soldiers in the Civil War (which sometimes occurred). Your next paragraph is about women serving in the modern army. Perhaps this is the first sentence of your new paragraph: “Unlike the Civil War, when women were forced to disguise their identities to serve on the front lines, today’s army allows and even encourages women to assume combat roles.” If you had jumped abruptly, without a transition, from the Civil War to today’s military, your reader would have become lost in momentary confusion.

In this essay about her decision not to take her husband’s name in marriage, Anna Quindlen uses artful transitions -- http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/04/garden/life-in-the-30-s.html

Read the essay, and identify the words and/or phrases that provide a transition between each paragraph. There are nine paragraphs.

Here is what I came up with:

1 → 2 : “Mrs. Krovatin?” → “story about a name”

2 → 3 : “political decision” → “personal and professional decision too”

3 → 4 : “personal and professional decision too” → “neither of these … reasons”

4 → 5 : “reasons” → “decision”

5 → 6 : “explanation” → “answer”

6 → 7 : “personal identity” → “identity”

7 → 8 : “decisions” → “alternative solutions”

8 → 9 : “No, this is Mr. Krovatin’s wife” → “When I decided”

Notice too how Quindlen stitches larger swatches of her essay together, not just paragraphs. Her answer “Yes” at the end of the first paragraph returns to our mind with “No, this is Mr. Krovatin’s wife” in the eighth, and the “umbrella of his identity” in the fourth paragraph returns with “my husband’s umbrella” in the ninth. She artfully weaves her essay together using these transitions as threads. I hope this example helps you. And now it’s time for me to transition to another writing topic!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Absolutely! (sort of...)

In 1980, one of my favorite rock bands, The Eagles, broke up. One of the band members didn’t leave much wiggle room when he reportedly said that The Eagles would play together again “when hell freezes over.” Then when the band reunited in 1994, their tour and album were titled, naturally, “Hell Freezes Over.” In a similar vein, actor Sean Connery, the original James Bond, vowed in 1971 that he would “never again” perform that role. Later, when Connery starred as James Bond in a 1983 film, it was titled, of course, “Never Say Never Again.”

Words like always, never, none, all, and every are called absolutes. When used in writing they leave no room for exception or compromise. Often, when responding to student papers, I will write a comment like “Never? Are you sure?” Now, am I saying here to never use absolutes in your writing? Of course not. Sometimes, absolutes are true, as in “the sun has never revolved around the earth” (despite what medieval church authorities would have had us believe). Often, however, these types of statements are not absolutely true. For example, as a new teacher I was cautioned not to make a statement like this to a student: “George, you never hand in your homework.” Why not say that? Because George will be sure to recall that one time, way back near the start of the semester, when he did indeed hand in his homework. Thus, George won’t focus on my point (that he must be more diligent about handing in his homework), but will instead obsess about finding the exception to prove me wrong. A more effective strategy would be to tell George that he needs to be more consistent about handing in his homework. When you use absolutes in your writing, readers will likewise be searching for the exception to your statement rather than listening to your argument.

Of course, the opposite of an absolute statement -- hedging and sounding wishy-washy by writing phrases like “sort of,” “kind of,” and “seems like” -- can be equally destructive to your prose. Straightforward, declarative statements are better, but always beware of using absolutes to assert the unprovable.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.