For this second expository/argumentative essay, consider the following essays: Childhood and Poetry, To Love the Marigold, Walking with the Wind, Jesus and Alinsky, Gate A, Despair is a Lie, and The Transformation of Silence. Each of these essays suggests a unique pattern of its own and would be best discussed in relation to a specific rhetorical mode [listed below]. I will once again outline the modes and make recommendations for paper ideas.

 

A “Division and Analysis” essay represents a division of a subject into several parts to be analyzed or further classified. Break any essay/subject into parts and you have division and analysis. Maybe separate “Jesus and Alinksy” up into sections, analyze each. Track Walter Wink’s use of numbers throughout the essay [categories]. He cites many examples that you might analyze.

 

“Process” writing usually involves the separation of your subject into its components. It divides a continuous action into steps or stages. Process involves time chronology, steps, stages.  Perhaps you might write about the many stages in Susan Griffin’s “To Love the Marigold.” How did she eventually come to the conclusion that the imagination will in fact save us? From Tina Modotti painting to Robert Desnos’s experience in the concentration camp. She undergoes a process of realization.  Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” also reveals a process. This event that the poet experienced was the first in a chain and led to his point of view today. Gate A” also represents a process. First, the woman is weeping and the people around her are worried or annoyed. Then communication happens and everything begins to change…that’s process. John Lewis, in “Walking with the Wind,” identifies an event [like may of these authors] that changed him. An event led to a fundamental change in how a person sees himself. Does this happen in other essays? Yes. In Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry,” in Gate A, in Audre Lorde’s Transformation of Silence, and in “To Love the Marigold.” You might write about these essays as representing processes or you might identify the events as “causes…” See Cause and Effect.

 

“Cause and effect” writing [closest form to argument] explores “causes” and asks the question Why? Look for relationships by explaining why something is the way it is [explore causes] or by showing what the results are of its existence [explore effects], or both. Pablo Neruda identifies the first cause of his life of poetry. What caused Audre Lorde to want to discuss silence as a problem that must be overcome? You might trace causes in several essays. This would also be comparison [if you were to compare only two].  If you want to study three or more authors and the causes that led them to do certain things, you will be combining cause and effect with division/analysis. You might also discuss the “effects” on these authors or on the reader, you. An opened mind…

 

A “Comparison/Contrast” essay demonstrates a separation of two things based on how they are either alike or different or both. Take any two of the essays we’ve read and compare them in specific ways. Again, comparing causes would be a good idea. You might also compare “processes.” Several of these authors experienced things that changed them in fundamental ways.

 

Choose a subject [see any of the recent essays we’ve read—or coming essays—for subject ideas] and write an essay using any one of the methods above. You may also choose to use a combination of two or even three. Your essay will be 3-4 pages in length. Paper must be typed, double-spaced. Good luck!

 

 

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