A prolific painter of portraits before and after the French Revolution ...

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ch07.qxd 12/2/04 11:59 AM Page 335 explaining: the writing process 335 TEACHING TIP Review your topic for research possibilities. Four research strategies are direct observation, use of memories and personal experience, field research (including interviews and surveys), and library/Internet research. (See Chapter 6 for interview and survey techniques. See Chapter 12 on using and documenting sources.) Tips to remember: Make photocopies of all the sources that you plan to cite in your essay. When you make copies, be sure to write all relevant information on the photocopies, such as author, date, publisher, place of publication, journal title, and volume numbers. When you cite sources in the text, be sure to introduce your sources. Make sure your direct quotations are accurate word-for-word transcriptions. The best approach to teaching research is to keep practicing and reinforcing research strategies, such as gathering, evaluating, citing, and documenting sources. If you are teaching a more extensive research paper later in the term, you may also wish to require students to practice keeping a research log (see Chapter 12). R EADING When you find written texts about your subject, be sure to use your active reading strategies. You may need only a few sources if you reread them carefully. Write out a short summary for each source. Respond to each source by analyzing its effectiveness, agreeing or disagreeing with its ideas, or interpreting the text. The quality of your understanding is more important than the sheer number of sources you cite. I NVESTIGATING Use sources available in the library, textbooks containing relevant information, or interviews with teachers, participants, or experts. Interview your classmates about their own subjects for this assignment: someone else’s subject may trigger an idea that you can write about or may suggest a fresh approach to the subject that you have already chosen. SHAPING As you collect information and generate ideas from your collecting activities, be sure to narrow and focus your subject into a topic suitable for a short essay. You will not be able to cover everything you’ve read, thought, or experienced about your subject. Choose the most interesting ideas—for you and for your audience—and shape, order, and clarify those ideas. ‘‘ Readers may be strangers who have no immediate reason to care about your writing. They want order, clarity, and stimulation. ’’ — ELIZABETH COWAN NEELD, TEACHER AND AUTHOR AUDIENCE AND G ENRE As you consider ways to organize and shape your explaining essay, think about a possible audience and genre. An essay directed at a general audience composed of peers like your classmates is just one possibility. A letter PROFESSIONAL COPY—NOT FOR RESALE
ch07.qxd 12/2/04 11:59 AM Page 336 336 Chapter 7 explaining to the editor, a pamphlet for a community agency, a job analysis for your employer, an article for a local or school newspaper, a posting or response to a listserve, or an essay for students in your major are other possibilities. Once you have a tentative audience and genre, you’ll have a better idea about how to organize your explanation. Reread your assignment for specific suggestions and guidelines about audience and genre. TEACHING TIP Students often describe habitual actions for examples: “I used to watch soap operas a lot to help me relax.” Encouraging them to focus on one specific time will help generate a more vivid, specific example: “To break the tension before my organic chemistry final, I reviewed equations for four hours in the morning and then relaxed after lunch with All My Children.” In effect, this more specific example illustrates how television relaxed the writer on all those other occasions. D EFINITION AND C LASSIFICATION An essay explaining what something means or is can be shaped by using a variety of definition strategies or by classifying the subject. Definition itself is not a single organizing strategy; it supports a variety of strategies that may be useful in shaping your essay: description, analysis of parts or function, comparison/contrast, development by examples, or figures of speech such as simile, metaphor, and analogy. Classification, on the other hand, is a single strategy that can organize a paragraph or even a whole essay quickly. Observers of human behavior, for example, love to use classification. Grocery shoppers might be classified by types: racers (the ones who seem to have just won forty-five seconds of free shopping and run down the aisles filling their carts as fast as possible), talkers (the ones whose phone must be out of order because they stand in the aisles gossiping forever), penny-pinchers (who always have their calculators out and read the unit price labels for everything), party shoppers (who camp out in the junk food aisles, filling their carts with potato chips, dip, candy, peanuts, and drink mixers), and dawdlers (who leave their carts crosswise in the aisles while they read twenty-nine different soup can labels). You can write a sentence or two about each type or devote a whole paragraph to explaining a single type. E XAMPLE Development by example can effectively illustrate what something is or means, but it can also help explain how or why something happens. Usually, an example describes a specific incident, located at a certain place and occurring at a particular time, that shows or demonstrates the main idea. In the following paragraph from Mediaspeak, Donna Woolfolk Cross explains what effects soap operas can have on addicted viewers. This paragraph is developed by several examples—some described in detail, others referred to briefly: Dedicated watchers of soap operas often confuse fact with fiction. ...Stars of soap operas tell hair-raising stories of their encounters with fans suffering from this affliction. Susan Lucci, who plays the promiscuous Erica Kane on “All My Children,” tells of a time she was riding in a parade: “We were PROFESSIONAL COPY—NOT FOR RESALE
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