PS03: Have an A1 Day

On the arrangement of ideas.

I agree with this site about Walter White’s ability to teach. It’s a good roundup of fictional teachers — worth a read, if you can get past the fact that Keating, the “foregone conclusion” from Dead Poets Society is actually a terrible teacher.

The title of this section comes from Breaking Bad, and you can read a bit about its language here. That same site — worth a serious perusal when you have the time — also has this post on the phrase broken windows, which is more or less the current approach being taken in your school with regard to keeping the halls clear.

(Note two things: One, that sentence is in the passive voice to avoid making this a teacher-centric issue; two, the fact that broken windows policing may not work doesn’t preclude its usefulness in a school. Schools are weird, weird places.)

Your synthesis essays will be sorted and flipped back to you in early January. Exemplary papers or papers that illustrate key concepts will be posted with commentary — a process that should light up the “proxy feedback” part of your brain, since those exemplary writers should become the facilitators of discussion. This post will illustrate that concept a bit.

A1 and ¶ing

Our universal rubric, DAMAGES, needs to be internalized. That was your summer assignment, but the summer never seems more distant than during the doldrums of winter. You need to read the guide again, I think, and then it’s about practice — about using the guide to read and to write over and over again until it’s second nature.

Arrangement has two parts: intra¶ing and inter¶ing. The concept is simple, though: How do you connect the ideas in your writing? How do you move between elements? The key is the use of the pilcrow — the ¶.

This is Megan L.’s most recent essay, used with permission:

It’s time consuming, but giving you models from currrent essays — as they are written — is far more effective than using what was written in previous years. You can ask Megan about her conversation with me, if she hasn’t already given proxy feedback to you through reddit or another interstitial forum. Remember that you can make yourself into a model by conferencing with me.

These first 8–9 sentences are ¶1. Actually, before we talk about that: You are going to spend some time learning to recognize logical fallacies, so let’s note that there is a kind of straw man logic to the last rhetorical question there. I’m not sure that anyone still relates bullying solely to “beating someone’s face in,” especially not with the systemic focus on cyberbullying and emotional abuse taken by most public schools.

Regardless, the most interesting thing about this opening is its manipulation of the elements of arrangement. This is one section, or ¶, and the author’s intention is to isolate ideas and emphasize imagery through some creative paragraph arrangement within that ¶.

Further down in Megan’s essay, a series of short sentences could be combined into one paragraph, because they are really one ¶:

One other bit of feedback: Using all caps or italics for emphasis is fine, but it needs to be done judiciously. This article explains the importance of being wise — and we will eventually look at presentation as a part of communication.

This ¶ is about the universality of the earlier, more specific example; the third paragraph here really needs to be folded into the preceding two with transitional language — markers of the relationship between ideas. Here’s a great website for that sort of thing.

The passive voice in this is interesting, too. It works to emphasize the bullied girl (“She’s been bullied,” “She’s been told”), but it also removes focus from the bullies. It obscures their identities — probably on purpose, since the focus of this section (again, ¶) is the victim.

The key to working on arrangement is in the second step of that post-writing process: You break down your work into ¶s, looking for main ideas and how those main ideas support a central thesis. The paragraphs might match up, but the focus is on sections — discrete, clear sections where there is one focus.

Again, this uses the definition of pilcrow from our writing guide, which needs to make its way into your regular reading schedule. ¶s might mean stanzas, scenes in a play, or verses in a song; as long as you have a clear idea what you mean, you can look for order and coherence — and, above all else, efficacy.

You should do that second post-writing step as soon as you finish writing, by the way. Waiting until you are ostensibly finished gives you less chance to correct any errors in arrangement that you might find.