Week 4

    Good afternoon/evening.  Hope your week is going well.  

    Today we will look at a few examples of the descriptive essays you finished over the week, and proceed to work on the autobiographical essay final draft (#2),  due next week, sentence work and punctuation.

  In narration, be mindful of the fullness and strength of the essay's structure.  Let images do much of the heavy lifting– clear, rich imagery.    Show us.  Make us see and hear and feel your world.  Have a clear idea of the central conflict of your story, even if you don't say it explicitly in the narrative presentation.  Have selected one or two key scenes and the climax for special attention and powerful rendering.   Narrative depends upon the use of descriptive imagery to reveal place, incident, character, feeling drama;  overall, too, a reader expects a piece to be driven or developed by a clearly implied or stated idea; we'll discuss lead-ins and conclusions, the form they may take, and the overall fluency of the sentence elements. 

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In the following poem, from the first line of the first stanza to the end of that sentence and stanza, the author uses the additive sentence pattern to build the imagery. Notice the use of examples.  The main clause is followed by ramifying clauses, phrases, or single word modifiers:

Island Cities                  by John Updike You see them from airplanes, nameless green islands in the oceanic, rectilinear plains, twenty or thirty blocks, compact, but with everything needed visibly in place— the high-school playing fields, the swatch of park along the crooked river, the feeder highways, the main drag like a zipper, outlying malls sliced from dirt-colored cakes of plowed farmland. Small lives, we think—pat, flat—in such tight grids. But, much like brains with every crease CAT-scanned, these cities keep their secrets: vagaries of the spirit, groundwater that floods the nearby quarries and turns them skyey blue, dewdrops of longing, jewels, boxed in these blocks.

In your narratives, try to build in fresh imagery, cinematic style even, so we some of your life as if in film reel, perhaps a montage effect, but without losing sight of course of your direction, the story and theme to be unwound. See the poem "Oranges," by Gary Soto.
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The reporter's basic questions are a shorthand means of remembering to get the narrative essentials:

What happened?

Who was involved?

When?

Where?

Why did this happen?

How did it happen?

Refining the Draft Idea:  Writing teachers and textbooks often refer to the angle or hook or slant as a way of luring readers to the subject article or book.  Readers have different needs and tastes, of course, but there's nothing wrong with familiarizing yourself with the common types of bait that show up in titles or headlines and lead paragraphs of various kinds of essays.   Here are some prominent ones:

*Adrenaline                          *Numbers

*Amazement                         *Promises

*Brand-New                         *Secrets

*Detailed                               *Sexy

*Funny                                  *Superlative

*Location                              *Combination

*Money

*Newsy

Exercise:   identify any slants used in the course of reading through today's New York Times or other source.   You might enjoy what is now a regular feature at the NYTimes- Modern Love-which features short personal narratives on romantic love. You can review them for slants used, lead-ins, and conclusions (http://nytimes.com/)

Ways of Beginning (lead-ins):

*Anecdotal or case history (to create a human interest appeal)

*Direct Address 

*Factual

*Journalistic

*Mythic/Poetic

*Quotation

 *Thematic

--------------------------------------Five Types of Conclusions:

• Summary
• Callback
• Thematic
• Encouraging
• Quotation

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Paragraph and Essay structure:   a composition of even a single paragraph must organize itself around an idea, stated or implied, which is the thesis or topic idea.

What is a thesis? A thesis is a single sentence statement of the point you intend to describe, explain, illustrate, argue or prove. Where is the thesis to be found? Typically, teachers ask that it appear by the last line of the opening paragraph. It thus provides a focus and a clear direction and means of selection, for whatever does not in some way help to advance the thesis idea, may not belong in the essay at all. When you and your readers know what your point is, you and they can follow the logic of your development, the order and arrangement of supporting topics and personal commentary. It is a good idea to have a draft statement of your thesis in view so that you stay on point as you draft the essay. Build key words into the thesis statement to provide you and readers references to what lies ahead. A thesis controls to some extent what will appear in the essay and creates an obligation on your part to follow through on its promise, for it creates an expectation. All that said, you may delay a direct statement of the thesis, particularly in narrative, while implying it in so many ways.

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