Midpoint Transition

One crucial move in your essays will be the transition from the first body of evidence to the second. For this isn’t simply a matter of shifting focus from one set of primary sources to another. You need to gather up the threads of your initial analysis to form a midpoint understanding, then introduce the second half of your essay as an effort to complicate that understanding.

As an example of what I’m looking for, look at what Jennifer Frost does on p 118 of her essay on movie star suicide. Make a quick list of 3 or 4 specific things she does to make this transition clear and distinct, to shift her essay’s focus, and to make sure her readers know what’s been learned up to now and what new claim will be argued in upcoming pages. For each thing you list, identify its function.

Now create a transition of your own for the essay you’re writing. In the comment section below, paste the ¶ that leads into the transition along with the ¶ that makes the transition.

Presenting Evidence in a Deepening Sequence

This assignment asks you to draft two paragraphs that might appear early in the body of the upcoming essay.

The first ¶ should be a 3-4 source mashup, like we did in HW 6.1: F5 | F6 | F7.

1. Start with the collection of sources that make up your body of evidence. What pattern do you see? Write a topic sentence that names that pattern, using language like “most” or “many” or “8 of 10 ads” to convey a sense of its prevalence.
2. Follow up with sentences presenting 3-4 samples in quick succession, one sentence each. Aim to name each piece of evidence (“In a New York Times article dated 10/16/63″ or “In a 1967 ad”) to give some sense of the granularity of your evidence—but leave most bibliographic details to the footnote. Use the rest of each sentence to provide a quick description that shows how this piece of evidence fits the pattern. For example, if I was interested in how ads present women in supporting roles: “A 1965 Norelco ad shows not just a clean-shaven husband, but his admiring wife.”
3. End the ¶ with a conclusion that leaves a blank, “_______,” to be filled in once you’ve written your second ¶.

The second ¶ should do one of two things:

• Zoom in to examine one particular source from your body of evidence, in an effort to explain the pattern identified in ¶1;
• Identify a contrary trend in the same set of sources, complicating our understanding of the pattern identified in ¶1.

In either case, you’ll note how deepening understanding comes from giving a second look to the same piece or pieces of evidence.

Once you know where you plan to take analysis in ¶2, you can go back and fill in the blank you left in the conclusion of ¶1. Sum up what ¶1 argued while at the same time setting up the new insight offered in ¶2. Avoid naming the new insight—naming the new insight is the job of ¶2’s topic sentence. It’s like a comedy routine: the concluding sentence plays the role of straight man, while the topic sentence of the following ¶ gets to voice the punchline.

Paste your 2-¶ sequence into the comment below. Be sure to give two ¶ breaks between paragraphs, so as to help the website format your HW properly.

“They call me Mister Tibbs”

For Class watch the movie In the Heat of the Night. It’s available on Amazon Instant Video and on iTunes for $3.

Take notes as follows:

Make a digest of key characters, memorable lines and focal scenes from your central text.

Then, in a separate section, discuss a key theme of the work, something which might serve as a starting point for answering the question, “What is this movie about?”

In class How to take notes on a movie.

Also, preliminary analysis of how our understanding of this movie changes when we consider it in light of 1960’s American culture and society.

Presenting Evidence

Back in HW 6.1, I urged you to organize ¶s around ideas, not around bits of evidence. Here’s a list of possibilities, by no means exhaustive:

• Statistics (comparing one year to another, or noting the fraction of articles on X that also mention Y)
• A pattern identified in X articles, with specific instances discussed in the body of the ¶
• An emotional tendency in a group of related articles
• An odd exception: one article discussed in depth for a full ¶

Rather than mechanically creating one ¶ for each source in your collection, much better to fashion ¶s in response to the qualities you perceive in your sources.

To get you thinking about this in greater depth, here’s here’s an article I wrote last summer on the first fifteen years of Marvel’s character, Iron Man. It’s a long essay, so you needn’t read past page 20 (¶24) in preparation for class.

Post as a response below:
List three ¶s (identified by the # in the left margin) where you find me using primary sources. For each one:

• quote the ¶’s first sentence,
• note the kind of source being presented
• describe how sources are presented (as statistics, as examples in quick succession, as examples in depth, etc.)

In regard to that last bullet, aim for variety; in your three examples, see if you can identify three distinct ways of presenting evidence.

Making Evidence Count

In past years, many drafts for this first essay had significant problems with evidence. Some essays didn’t have evidence, others had it but lacked a preliminary understanding based on a secondary source authority. Others had evidence and a preliminary understanding, but hadn’t worked out how their evidence impacted their preliminary understanding.

For class please download and fill out this worksheet on evidence. The sheet is deceptively easy: give thought to how to briefly characterize (1) each of your bodies of evidence, (2) the particular details you plan to focus on in discussing each one, and most especially (3) why those details complicate or enrich our understanding of the topic.

Print out and fill in OR simply post the key info in a comment below.

Content moved due to snow day

Visions of Futures Past

Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” and a Star Trek episode, “The Omega Glory” (Amazon Instant | Netflix).

After reading, as HW and as preparation for our in-class discussion, fill out this handy notepad

Inventive use of a Body of Evidence

Reading HW Download this article by scholar Jennifer Frost on “Movie Star Suicide.” Read the first and last page in detail, and skim through the rest.

Frost’s article will serve as our second sample of the sort of scholarship I’m looking for in the upcoming essay, informed by prior scholarship but drawing mainly on primary sources. So, as with the chapter we read last week from Brett Harvey’s book, I want you to focus on the body of evidence that Frost assembled in order to write this article. After reading, answer the following in writing, and post here on the website:

1. What serves as Frost’s “Body of Evidence”?
2. What research question does Frost’s essay aim to answer?

Analyzing Primary Sources

Reading HW Download this excerpt from Brett Harvey’s oral history of women’s experience of the 1950s. As you read, make a list of all Harvey’s sources of evidence. I found about 10.

Harvey’s account of motherhood in the 1950s is partially interest since those suburban moms gave birth to late-60s teen rebels. But my principal aim here is to provide you with an example of the sort of scholarship I’m looking for in the upcoming essay. Harvey has assembled her account by piecing together both primary and secondary sources. But, because she’s writing for a popular audience, her book lacks scholarly source citations. So you’ll have to read carefully to piece together a sense of kinds sources she is drawing on at any given moment of this chapter.

Bring your list of Harvey’s sources to class. DON’T post it here on the website. We’ll discuss her sources briefly in class, and we’ll consider how these might be grouped together into “bodies of evidence” of the sort I’m asking you to gather for the upcoming essay.

Joint Essay Due

If you don’t have your essay printed out, come to class and turn the essay in by NOON in my office. If I’m not in, just slip it under the door.

Note that you only have to turn in a paper copy if you are in Humanities.

EVERYONE should turn in a .pdf copy on the HU-RH Joint Essay assignment page.

See you in class!

Using a Secondary Source

The HU-RH Joint Essay assignment calls for you to use at least one secondary source, in addition to primary sources from your Humanities and Rhetoric courses.

Perhaps the most straightforward way to use a secondary source as an authority in the essay body, to provide background information as context for the analysis you plan to offer. For example, if you have collected press coverage of the Watts riots, you might lead in with a paragraph summarizing what took place from Aug 11-15, 1965, with footnotes citing Spencer Crump’s 1967 book or David O. Sears’ 1973 book.

Alternatively, you can use a secondary source to inspire the analysis you offer. For example, if you were interested in arguing that Life’s coverage of Watts presented African-American residents as innocent victims, not culpable rioters, you might draw inspiration from Van Deburg’s account, in New Day in Babylon, of how the Black Power radicals were downplayed by mainstream news coverage. Note that your analysis wouldn’t be proven true by Van Deburg: he’s making an argument about how the political viability of the Black Panther Party was downplayed, not the actions of rioters on the streets. This is important because you shouldn’t spend time proving stuff that other scholars have already proven. Rather, Van Deburg’s analysis inspires your angle of attack, so you still need to present evidence to demonstrate your point about Life’s coverage of urban rioting.

For class, write a 2-¶ sequence, as follows.

1. Use the first ¶ to briefly summarize the findings of your secondary source.
2. Use the second ¶ to present your own findings. I’d prefer to see another 3-4 source mashup like the one you wrote for HW last time. But if you have a particularly interesting source you can focus on just that one source for the whole ¶.

Paste this 2-¶ sequence into the comments, below. At the start of your comment, label your use of the secondary source as “Background” or “Inspiration.”