A. Pettit:
Notes on Writing Persuasive Papers
The purpose of this handout is to
give you some sense of the written work that I expect from you, to offer you
assistance in meeting these expectations, and to enumerate the criteria that I will
apply when I evaluate your work. My
central
point is that good writing takes time and energy. I’ve known very few people who could write
competent
academic essays at the last minute.
My main example in what follows is
Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717). The poem concerns the love
between a medieval
student, Eloisa, and her teacher, Abelard.
Angered by their illicit affair, Eloisa’s brothers ambush
and castrate
Abelard. They send Eloisa to a nunnery,
where she lives a life of piety, often reflecting, however, on her
passionate
relationship with Abelard. The poem is
written in the form of a letter from Eloisa to Abelard.
I. What
is a Persuasive Essay?
A persuasive essay states and
defends a thesis. A thesis is a claim
that can be defended and that must be defended
if it is to be
accepted; it is a substantiated critical observation that can teach
other people something about the material
that you have read and on which you
are writing. Another angle: a thesis is
a claim that your reader won’t take on credit,
but that he or she might come to
accept if you give him or her reason to.
The thesis is based on your own reading and
interpretation of the literary
work or works; the defense tells your reader precisely what about the work or
works authorizes
you to present your thesis.
Consider the following claims: 1)
Shakespeare’s sonnets are often about nature; 2) Gulliver’s Travels is
an attack on
organized religion in which the Yahoos represent people who
believe everything that they are told; and, 3) In Eloisa to
Abelard,
Pope suggests that the attempt to separate piety from passion is artificial and
unhealthy. The first claim disqualifies
itself because it doesn’t need to be defended: anyone reading the sonnets will
presumably notice that there is quite a bit of
nature in them, so this isn’t
“teaching.” The second claim is a
personal response, but is conclusively beyond the reach of
textual support. So it too can’t teach us anything about the
text. The third claim is
intriguing. There are certainly many
other ways to read Pope’s poem, but this one might be meaningfully defended by
a judicious reading of the poem. I can
imagine learning something from such a reading—if, that is, the author has demonstrated
the validity of his or her reading.
Don’t despair if at first you come
with more 1’s and 2’s than 3’s—they are okay for starters. A large part of learning
persuasive writing
is allowing yourself to begin with simple and safe observations like #1, then
challenging yourself to
complicate and refine them: how does Shakespeare
modulate his tone through his descriptions of changing nature? what
does
Shakespeare accomplish when he abandons natural images? Posing and probing questions like these (and the
possibilities are infinite) are great ways to use what is self-evident to reach
what is arguable and instructive. Even
#2
can be useful as an early “working thesis”: often a bold but tenuous claim
will give way to a more reasonable thesis when
it is checked carefully against
the literature. The point here is that good
essays don’t always start with sophisticated ideas
but often do result from the
smart handling of simple ones.
Good writing about literature
demands careful reading and re-reading of the literature in question. To read a work
once is to sample it, not to
understand it—it’s a first meeting rather than a meaningful conversation, so to
speak. I’m a big
believer in marginal
notations—sometimes I annotate my book from the first reading on, sometimes I
don’t start doing this
until later readings.
I don’t try to come up with anything earth-shattering in my marginal notes,
but I do try to keep writing.
My
marginalia tell me what is really interesting me about the work that I’m
reading. Chances are that if I have read through
six or eight poems by a
certain poet a few times, I will have jotted down comments on goings-on within
the poem, or among
the poem and others that I have been reading. Then I review my notes and find out just
what’s been on my mind--a curious
approach, maybe, but it works for me and many
of my students.
Marginal notes for Eloisa to
Abelard, for instance, might develop like this: “Eloisa is passionate” (a
Category 1,
right?); “Abelard has been castrated” (a clarification of narrative
fact); “El. longs for God--maybe the simple God of her
youth?”; “Is Pope
satirizing pious people untested by experience?
He doesn’t seem to be satirizing piety”; “El. imagines Ab.
both as
sexual (he can’t be, right?) and as remote/spiritual”; “Ab. can’t be what El.
needs him to be”; “El. probably neurotic.”
And so on. See?
Prewriting is a relatively
undisciplined activity but for some writers it proves to be a very important
one. The idea is
to begin to collect
ideas and to get some words on paper—maybe to sketch out tentative responses to
some of the questions
that you have posed in your notes or to elaborate on some
of your responses. To stick with the
example from Pope, now you
begin to work with the basic contradiction—the
essence of the heroine’s sickness—that you are starting to see in Eloisa to
Abelard. This is not the time to
worry about syntax, organization, spelling, punctuation, or anything
that will keep you from
writing. Just
“blow,” as jazz musicians say.
One useful technique (“freewriting”)
is to set a timer for ten minutes and to write without stopping for the whole
time.
If you can’t think of anything to
write, just write, “I can’t think of anything to write”: the activity at this
point is so numbingly
dull that more productive observations will tend to force
themselves on you! (Trust me.) Another technique (“brainstorming”)
is just
to jot down phrases and ideas, perhaps drawing arrows among them to suggest
connections that you would like to explore
and perhaps cross-referencing them
to passages from the literature.
Marginal notations can help fuel both techniques or some
combination of
them. These are just general
suggestions; the larger points that some lax and carefree scribbling can be a
useful
way to get started on your paper, and that sitting and thinking about
what to write rarely works (of, for me, never works).
The distinction between prewriting
and early drafting is not absolute, the more so as we now tend to do all our
writing
on computers, tweaking and thus effacing files as we go. Both are “thesis-seeking” activities. In both, you are writing to discover
what you want to say rather than to say it and defend it; in both, that is, you
are seeking the thesis that you will ultimately support.
Trying to start right off with a killer
thesis is usually a lousy idea—how can you defend something that you don’t
possess, after all?
One way to move from prewriting to
drafting is to identify a part of your freewrite that, upon reflection, seems
interesting
to you, however simple it might be.
(I usually find that 90% of the stuff that I put into a freewrite is
pretty silly; but, more to the
point, 10% of it isn’t.) Jot down this section--or idea--at the top of
a page and write out a few more, and more precise, thoughts
on the matter. Write out a (very) rough draft, again not
worrying about spelling, syntax, and punctuation, but being a tad more
mindful
of overall organization (it’ll happen naturally, anyhow). Chances are that you will still be seeking a
thesis. Often either at
or near the end
of a freewrite or an early draft, you will find an interesting idea starting to
take shape—something that your thinking
has led you to. Many promising (but only promising) essays
stop at this point; often I will comment to a student that his or her
paper
really began to make sense to me in the last paragraph or even in the last
sentence. Careful writers learn to
identify moments
at which they declare their own argumentative purpose and to
highlight these moments, typically by moving the pertinent text from
the end to
the beginning of the essay. Here that text—that
idea, more importantly—serves as a “working thesis,” or a tentative
claim that
needs to be tested against the text and then modified, perhaps toned down or
perhaps complicated (for instance by
asking yourself questions like the ones I
offered above). By placing the working
thesis at or very near the start of your paper,
you’ve moved from a “thesis
seeking” activity to a “thesis supporting” one and are probably within two or
three drafts of your
final version.
An outline might help at this
point. In my opinion, one of the best
times to outline is right after you have structured a
working thesis; the
outline then becomes one of the first ways to “test” the working thesis. You’ll probably monkey around with
the
thesis; the firmer the thesis gets, the more useful it is in helping you determine
what stays in and what gets cut from the essay.
It might help to imagine the process as the gradual synchronizing of
thesis and support: if your thesis and your evidence don’t
match up, you either
need to re-think the thesis or (carefully!) to re-appraise the evidence—maybe
both. Of course what you
don’t
want to do is suppress evidence that doesn’t fit your thesis; look at this
complicating material as a challenge, not as an obstacle.
Something that my students have
found helpful is what I call the “assertion/ defense rhythm.” Narrative literature (a
detective
story is a particularly useful example) often works from a position of
uncertainty (something has happened, but we don’t
know quite what it was or who
did it) to one of certainty (we discover the details and retroactively make
sense of the previous data).
And many of
us, for good reasons, are accustomed to thinking of writing as a narrative
process; after all, much of what we read, or
see on television or at the
movies, works this way. But rhetoric—or persuasive
writing—doesn’t work this way at all.
The
rhetorician tells the reader precisely what he or she is going to
argue, then goes ahead and does it. Does
this spoil the paper?
Of course not;
it’s like being told what you are going to have for dinner and the order in
which the courses will be served. You
know more or less what’s coming and your appetite is whetted, not stunted. If you
don’t state your thesis promptly, I have
data without context—observations
serving no evident end. Consider: if you
tell me that so-and-so hit a home run in the
fifth inning off of so-and-so after fouling off eight straight pitches, the information has narrative
value (action tending
toward a conclusion) but no rhetorical value. But if you produce the home run as evidence
in support of an argument that the
hitter in question is particularly effective against
left-handers, tall left-handers, or simply Randy Johnson, then you have a claim
and some support for it. Telling a story
and arguing a case are inverse activities.
Early drafts are often more narrative than
rhetorical, and that’s okay.
But as you move through the drafting process, make sure that your essay is
becoming more rhetorical.
Now is the time to be really tough
on yourself. Check your work carefully
against the grading criteria. Is your
thesis
stated clearly and does everything in your paper have a clear relation
to the thesis? Make sure that your own
voice is the
strongest one in the paper; make sure that you have resisted the
temptation to make a claim and then to replicate a bunch
of quotations that
address it. It might help to imagine
your final draft as the transcription of a discussion between you and
your
source or sources—a discussion that you are leading, controlling, if you
will. Note, to continue to example, that
when
a talk show host surrenders the microphone, he or she only does so when she wants
to and only then to ensure, as much as
possible, that she will get the effect
that she is seeking. What Pope (or
Oprah’s guests) has to say is important, but only
insofar as it relates to your
(or Oprah’s) argument. If I want to hear
Pope first and foremost, I’ll go right to Pope.
What I want
here are your observations about Pope, all tied clearly back
to your single controlling idea, or thesis.
In general, avoid long
quotations (4 or more lines) in short papers.
Make sure that you are using clear
topic sentences for your paragraphs.
Your reader should be able to get an accurate
representation of your
argument by reading the first sentence of every paragraph. Again, the point is
that your voice
predominates; and again, this is the assertion/defense
rhythm.
I have three more suggestions that
will help you produce readable final copy.
First, read your essay out loud before
you make final changes. Awkward sentences and murky transitions have
a way of declaring themselves when you do this.
Read your work backwards, too.
This will help you pick up spelling and spacing errors--even spelling
errors that your
computer might not catch. Finally, whenever possible, have a
friend or a colleague proofread your work.
The central questions
that he or she should answer when reading your
essay are simple: “Does it make sense?
And if it doesn’t, where doesn’t it
and why?” On the subject of computers, please remember
that spell-checking is a part of proof-reading, but is not proof-reading
itself. “Two” doesn’t mean “to” or
“too.”
Here’s what I’m looking for, folks:
THESIS: Does your paper give a clear sense of why
you’re writing, and why I should be reading?
Does it make a
claim on your reader’s attention? Does it supply a “So What”?
FOCUS: Does your paper focus clearly on your thesis,
excluding what is irrelevant? Do you
make clear what the
different parts of your paper have to do with each
other? Does the paper make
organizational sense?
FULLNESS: Do you give your arguments enough time? Do you stay with your subject long enough
that you
convince your reader that you know what you are talking about? Do you develop your ideas sufficiently that
your argument can be followed, and that your reader will grant you authority
for what you say?
SPECIFICS (OR GROUNDS): Do you make
your argument in terms that are as specific as possible? Do you
particularize each of the grounds you
give for accepting your claim, or for following and understanding your
thesis? Do the particular grounds you give
make sense? Most importantly, are your
claims based on solid
evidence from the work or works in question and, if this assignment stipulates their use, from secondary sources?
MECHANICS AND STYLE: How well have
you edited your paper? Are there
spelling errors? Awkward
sentences? Punctuation problems? Is documentation (when necessary) handled
correctly; does it interfere with
the flow of your paper? Does your style fit your purpose? Is the voice clear? Is your diction appropriate? Are
your sentences varied? Is your paper “readable”?
every aspect of your paper in my notes. But by referring to these categories you
should be able to come to a good understanding
of your grade, and more
importantly, of the art, craft, process, or, simply, practice of good academic
writing. And, trust me:
none of your professors will ever object to their
students’ meticulous consultation of these categories.
For the numerical component of grading, see elsewhere on
this website. We’ll discuss the use of sources—fair use and
documentation—in class.