Ch. 1 Intro (start here)

Chapter I: Reading and Writing

in the Liberal Arts

This collection of readings for a composition course focuses on reading and writing in the liberal arts. The word “liberal” derives from the Latin term liberalis, meaning “free,” and liberal education was thus one that was, in ancient Greece and Rome, an education “suitable for free men.” The word reveals that such training was reserved for the sons of citizens, not for slaves or for women; it was by no means a universal education. Over the centuries, a liberal arts education has broadened in meaning and scope and is now available to a far wider audience.

Classical education was structured into three stages, called the Trivium. In the beginning stage of “Grammar,” students began learning the basic principles of several fields of knowledge, memorizing historical dates, mathematical rules, and singing simple songs and reciting passages of poetry and prose. The next stage, “Logic,” introduced students to reasoning about the facts they have learned, leading them to understand relationships between the facts and principles and to develop simple skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The final stage, “Rhetoric,” introduced students to more probing reasoning skills, leading them to draw conclusions, formulate theses, and find solutions to more complex problems. Skill in public speaking and effective writing was an important outcome. Throughout the process of the “Trivium,” students were trained in athletics and music, equipping them to be leaders in war and in society and to take their places as responsible and effective citizens.

“I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.”

--Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018)

Today the notion suggested by “liberal arts” may more meaningfully be thought of as education in the traditional subjects constituting a liberal arts curriculum—literature, history, music, mathematics, basic science, and the visual arts—equips students to become people who understand a broader range of subjects and who are not bound to narrow viewpoints or limited visions of their lives’ possibilities. By knowing of the great literature, art, and ideas of their cultural heritage—and those of other cultures—they will be better able to discern and evaluate the attitudes and thoughts of their contemporaries and the world around them. To learn to think critically, to understand thematic principles, to read widely and well, to understand and appreciate the dynamics of history and the structures of the fine arts is to make people like yourselves into independent and lifelong learners. You will certainly not learn the whole matter of any subject area in an undergraduate liberal arts education, but you will learn new information and new patterns of thinking, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating.

By reading the literature, understanding the history, enjoying and appreciating the arts of our own and other cultures, you will establish standards within your mind and imagination by which you can judge contemporary arts—movies, books, music, art, and television programs. By honing your skills of analysis and synthesis, you will gain confidence in your reasoning and be less malleable to the powerful voices speaking to you through skillful advertising and propaganda. Your opinions will tend to be formed more by thoughtful research and reflection, instead of emotional manipulation. You will realize that the attractive television appearance of a political leader may be a very minor reason to support him or her. In short, by leading you through a liberal arts education process, your teachers are empowering you to respond with critical awareness to the powerful cultural forces carried to us daily by our culture and its media. With standards based on what humans in our cultural heritage have held to be good, beautiful, and true through the ages, you can be better grounded to affirm these qualities in your contemporary culture and better prepared to reject that which is shallow, facile, manipulating, or sensationalistic. You will also be better equipped to understand and evaluate the standards of cultures beyond your own.

Developing reading attentiveness demands that different aspects of the reading experience be fully engaged; alert readers notice more than just the plot of a story or the argument of an essay. They become aware of how the author is telling the story, the “voice” or “voices” of the narration. They notice the textual surfaces that give a work its “style” and “tone.” They observe how certain diction or imagery tends to recur throughout the whole. They are aware of how they are, or are not, being persuaded by an opinion article—what items are appealing to their emotions, what to their reason. They may review the structure of a story or of an essay, questioning how the details support the whole. They are generally aware of the historical period and social context of a text. A seventeenth-century prose essay will be quite different in style, diction, and tone from an opinion article from yesterday’s newspaper, even if both are about the same subject.

Readers come to any text with a set of assumptions. Good readers frequently know of the authors they read; some have read them before, some have had them recommended by their friends; some they have heard of through magazines, newspapers, or television. If a Christian friend has recommended the fiction of C. S. Lewis to you, you are likely to assume that Lewis’ fiction will present a Christian imagination and vision. If you do not find him doing so, you may be disappointed and put his book back on the shelf. Lewis himself speaks of accepting the “fruit that is given” (that is, the experience you have before you, in this case, the assigned piece you are reading) in his novel Perelandra. One major aim of the assignments based on this collection is to examine your assumptions, testing them against the “fruit that is given,” and suspending your judgment until you have clearly understood what any given author has said in the whole of his or her text.

The Creative Word

The Bible presents God’s word as powerful, active, and creative. His word calls all creatures out of nothingness into existence, shaping them into their myriad and particular forms. His word sustains His creation in His love. His word informs the human community with its sustaining virtues—justice, mercy, goodness, and love—and His word conveys to individuals the judgment, forgiveness, and salvation that open them to their full identities as children of God. Christian faith identifies this Creative Word of God with Jesus, God Incarnate, “in the flesh,” whose earthly life fully images the creative and sustaining love of God.

Humans, made in the image of God, also use words that shape the human environment. They do not create out of nothing, as God does, but they act as “sub-creators” to order the flow of phenomena their senses respond to, using a language system (e.g., English, Spanish, Mandarin) to understand and give words to reality. A simple way to understand this shaping power of words on one level is to think of how words affect personal relationships. By a word you can bless, create trust, show friendship or love; and by a word you can curse, destroying relationships by a lie, a betrayal, or an insult. Parents’ words are especially powerful in shaping their children’s personalities: affirming words to build confidence and trust or negative words to destroy these, breeding doubt and confusion. The capacity to grow in faith and love depends greatly upon the nurturing words parents give to their children.

Storytellers, poets, dramatists, writers of essays, and singers of songs have given shape to our human community throughout history. The bards of the ancient world celebrated their heroes, telling adventures that would later be written down as The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, and other epic poems that have been preserved for modern readers. By their celebration of the qualities that constituted the hero in their society, they shaped the listeners’ imaginations to love those virtues such as courage, friendship, loyalty, hospitality, strength, and skill. The world of the story perpetuated and helped solidify the moral values of the community. The storyteller delighted his listeners with his stories, even as he instructed, reminding them of the way good and evil manifest themselves in the human world.

Reading as a Communicative Act

Writers write to communicate. They want to express some idea, theory, hope, story, reminder, experience, or emotion to another human being. They may want to persuade or inspire, to explain or describe, to amuse or inform. The explicit purposes for writing vary greatly, but at its base, writing is an act of human communication. Students sometimes lose sight of this when they become frustrated with material they are trying to read. “It doesn’t make sense,” they may say, forgetting that if the article or story was published, it did make sense to someone—a publisher or editor at least. English teachers may have contributed to students’ frustration by overemphasizing symbolic meanings, suggesting that what the poem “really” means is not evident in any literal interpretation. Students may come to the conclusion that serious literature is a kind of puzzle wherein the meaning is “hidden” by an author and only English teachers (or literary critics) have the special reading skills to solve the mystery a poem or a story presents. But this is a false notion. The overwhelming majority of writing is intended to be clear; otherwise, the writing itself subverts its own essential purpose of communicating.

To be sure, avant garde writers, like abstract painters and experimental composers, continue to stretch the limits of their genre’s conventions. When we encounter experimental art of this type, we often lack knowledge, familiarity, and comfort with it. We may recoil from a painting by Mark Rothko, for example, saying “a child could do that.” What that response reveals is an unwillingness to stop before the painting, to look closely at it; to see its subtle hue, tone, line, and balance; to realize the long apprenticeship the painter served to allow him to create this spare contemplation of color and primal shape. If our eyes are educated to see only the qualities of “realistic” painting, the very different experiences of much modern art are closed to us, and we treat these expressions like many things that we do not understand—with casual dismissal or hostility.

Similarly, poetry, fiction, and drama may evoke negative responses if we do not feel we can understand them. Sometimes the works may be experimental, works that overturn or distort the genre conventions we are accustomed to and comfortable with. Plot, character, narrative flow and the other elements of fiction may be “played with” by an experimental author, leaving us feeling we do not know the rules of the game this particular writer is using. Likewise, works from a past historical period may be frustrating to us. In Shakespeare’s dramas, for example, historical or mythical characters familiar to an audience of his own day may be almost totally unknown to readers in today’s classrooms. Reading introductions, looking at footnotes, awaiting a teacher’s comment, may all be needed for students’ entrances into the experience of the play, but they do distance the readers from the immediacy and intensity of the literary experience. And writings from other cultures pose their own problems to readers. Only by patience and openness can readers enter these foreign cultures, with their different religions, institutions, and aesthetics. A Japanese Kabuki actor may spend a lifetime studying his art and its meaning, a meaning that reaches contemporary Japan from an ancient tradition, but one still living. But how can a Western student, limited to reading one or two such plays, have any understanding of Kabuki?

Recognizing the problems facing us as we seek to understand the arts, we must realize that even with the arts most foreign or obscure to us, we can gain an increasing measure of appreciation. With this hope, students are encouraged to keep on reading, and teachers are encouraged to keep on teaching. Both students and teachers are seeking to make the experience of the art—whether it be music, painting, mathematics, or literature—as clear, intense, moving, enlightening, as it can be.

If the artists’ intentions are to communicate, and if they have honed their skills from a lifetime of practice, then students must likewise use their skills to receive the communication, really seeing, hearing, imagining, and understanding. Then the fundamental purpose of the art—communication—will be achieved successfully. But humility is always required when we feel we have succeeded with an interpretation of any of the arts. “Receiving the communication,” when it involves art as eloquent and complex as that of Shakespeare, Bach, or Giotto, for example, becomes a dynamic process that we participate in throughout our lives.

Aristotle’s description of poetic or literary art as a mimesis or “image” of life has proved enduring through the ages, and this notion of art as image of human reality can encourage us as we face the barriers of time, distance, and other elements of unfamiliarity in the reading experience. Despite the cultural influences that shape characters’ motivation, the characters are humans like us. They may be mysterious to us at first because of their differences from us; the works they appear in may operate by aesthetic conventions strange to us, but they nonetheless share with us the same dimensions of the human journey from birth to death. Common motifs occur in the literature and art of every culture, motifs that witness to a common humanity. Falling in love, being initiated into maturity or into a community, finding one’s place in society, working out the tensions between the claims of the individual and the claims of community, becoming a part of a family, seeking the origins and meaning of existence, realizing one’s mortality—these are all common subjects of ancient mythology, and these motifs constitute the subject matter of later fiction, drama, and poetry.

The meaning communicated to those encouraging any work of art is grounded in the literal level and in the particularity of art. If we listen to a string quartet, we must attend to that which is immediate: the pitch and duration of musical sounds, the constituting of a melody in time, and a harmony of simultaneous notes. Then, as we listen, we begin to respond with emotions, feelings of peace or excitement, of sadness or joy. The music, while it does not communicate in the same way that expository prose does, or even as poetry does, evokes our senses, moods, and imagination beyond the mere juxtaposition of sustained pitches of sound. We generally don’t ask of music, “What does it mean?” We are content to hear it, and we naturally allow ourselves to respond to the deeper resonances the ordered notes bring to our minds.

Levels of Meaning in a Text

In reading, as in looking at the visual arts, we are often too quick to seek a meaning, a theme, a lesson, a symbolic dimension. Understanding a text usually requires some patient questioning, observing, and reflecting. The medieval Christian Biblical interpreters had a four-fold method of reading scriptures that required thoughtful meditation: (1) the literal meaning, (2) the allegorical meaning (usually pointing toward Christ), (3) the tropological meaning—how it speaks to our moral or spiritual lives, (4) the anagogical meaning—how it suggests ultimate or heavenly meanings. Reading for these meanings, all thought to inhere in the literal level of the text, were clarified and approved by early Christian theologian St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) as a way of discouraging the practice of ignoring the literal level in order to promote excessively elaborate symbolic readings.

How would we follow these medieval Christian interpreters in reading a text then? Take, for example, the story of the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt. It is first of all a literal story about an enslaved people who flee Egypt only to wander in a desert wilderness for many years before finally arriving at a country they can claim as home. Meditating on the literal level of the story, a Jewish reader may see a pattern of God’s love for Israel, His call to them to be a distinct nation, His patient leading, His historical dialogue, and His rewarding them with a homeland. This story, told throughout Jewish and Christian history, is, indeed, significant first as a story of the forming of the Jewish people as a distinct people, but it has had meaning to many groups of people through history. Christian readers, aware of the “four-fold” method or not, tend to read the story through their faith in Jesus as Messiah. The literal story may remind them, allegorically, of the forty-day temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, where He, like the children of Israel, learned to live by the word of God, the promise of God. A Christian minister preparing a sermon may find in this story a moral meaning by which he encourages his parishioners, exhorting them to keep faithful through their own difficult “wilderness” times. And a Christian theologian may find in the Exodus story an anagogic meaning—a pattern for the Christian view of history, the story of a pilgrim people who seek a heavenly city and a triumphal culmination of human history in which mankind unites with God. These meanings, which seem to rise naturally as the Christian imagination focuses on the literal story, reflect the four-fold levels sought by the medieval Biblical scholars—the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the heavenly. The richness of this literal story—with all the loss, fear, hope, grumbling, hunger, discouragement, temptation, thirst and heat, scorching sun and sand—allows the later meanings to exist. This is why the literal text of a story is necessary, in all its details and textures, for its theme to exist. Authors warn us against reducing a story to a brief, abstract theme. They realize that the whole story is needed to fully state the theme. As Flannery O’Connor said in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”

Modern readers have other options for meaning. To a reader familiar with psychoanalytic methods, a story may reveal much about its characters, or its author, or even the reader. To a historian, a story may reveal social and economic forces that form the background, the context, or the motivations within the fiction. Readers influenced by feminist criticism examine the power of gender-dominated social institutions, of family dynamics, of the roles assigned to women in the society of the story. Each reader comes to a piece of writing, be it story, poem, drama, or essay, with an individual viewpoint resulting from background, from cultural assumptions, from values and beliefs, and from personal experience. A parent reading Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, may feel the separation of the old King from his daughter Cordelia and his betrayal by his other two daughters with more intensity than a high school reader might; and an adolescent reader might respond more easily to the love Romeo feels upon his first meeting Juliet than would an older reader who may have been in love many times—or who may never have been in love.

Does this suggest that all meaning of literature is purely subjective? Not at all. It does suggest that meaning arises from the interaction of the reader and the text. It notes that all reading is done from an individual perspective, provoking some unique images, and yielding meanings, perceptions, and understandings that are to some degree personal and variable. But the literary work still has its literal level that forms the base of all other interpretations, and this literal level of meaning ensures that the work can communicate. The readers, who have read and understood a work, over time or through spatial distances, constitute what the literary critic Stanley Fish calls the “interpretative community.” This community of readers may represent a small scholarly group if the text is of interest mainly to a group of specialists or scholars, or it may represent a large group within popular culture. The “interpretative community” may be the scientists or medical doctors who form the audience of an article published in a professional scientific or medical journal. It may be the countless numbers of playgoers, critics, writers, students, movie directors, and movie viewers who have loved Shakespeare through the ages. The “interpretative community” through the centuries of our experience of Shakespeare’s art has revealed not a static, totally stable “objective” meaning, but a living, evolving understanding. Interpretations in classrooms and cinematic decisions by movie directors shift from time to time, revealing new dimensions to the basic stories told in Shakespeare’s masterful plays, and the literal level of these stories continues to be the dynamic center from which these various interpretations emanate.

If writers’ words could be construed to mean anything at all, with no constraints on interpretation, authors could never be certain of communicating with clarity and simplicity. Authors do intend certain meanings in their works, just as they have certain readers in mind as an audience. Their intentions, as closely as they can be known by studying their work in the light of their biographies and their cultural contexts, need to be respected. In this way, authorial intention becomes a guide—but not a rigid limitation—to their works’ meanings. “Stopping by Woods,” the famous poem by Robert Frost, may mean many things as a group of readers encounter it. The woods may be mountain pines and aspens to some, old oaks and beeches to another; the horses may be white in the imagination of some, chestnut in the minds of others. To some the poem may suggest a temptation to forget the duties of a responsible life – to simply rest; others may read the poem more darkly, as a temptation to the total passivity of death, suggested by the dark, leafless forest. But all these meanings and images spring from a clear understanding of the literal action in the poem. A man in a sleigh or wagon drawn by horses stops momentarily to look into the roadside woodlands; he meditates briefly, finding the woods to be “lovely, dark, and deep.” Then, remembering his journey, he decides to ride on. A simple story, a simple human act, but as Frost has expressed it, it reverberates with meaning as we read it with care.

Taking care with reading—treating each author with respect, each text with a kind of openness and humility—allows us to read with reverence and full attentiveness. Respect the literal level of a text as you would want your writing or your speaking to be respected; treat it with the same kind of reverence you give to any creature when you acknowledge the rich artistry of the Creator.

Active Reading

Becoming an active reader requires you to attend to the text with full awareness. Train yourself to distinguish between purpose, subject, topic, and thesis. Purpose has been discussed above as what an author wishes to accomplish by his writing. The broad area of an author’s interest is the subject, and the particular aspect of the subject he focuses on is the topic. Again you are sensitive to the elements of rhetorical situation. You note the writer’s voice, his persona’s manner and sound. You look for clues to his purpose. You ask questions as you read: “What is the author seeking to do with this text?” “Does the author want to inform me, persuade me, or entertain me?” Perhaps he or she wants to tell you how to do a task, understand a theory, or correct a problem. Perhaps the authors want to move your emotions, exhort you, anger you, make you cry or laugh.

Your understanding of the author’s purpose will probably coincide with your growing knowledge of his subject. What the writer is saying and why he or she is saying it becomes clearer as you read. Be sure to be open-minded, hearing what the writer is trying to say to you. A necessary skill of good reading is the ability to suspend judgment until all the information is received. Readers who make quick judgments of a writer’s beliefs or information can easily misread the text, mistaking its purpose and even its content.

Assignment

Mortimer Adler “How to Mark a Book”

Read Mortimer Adler’s essay “How to Mark a Book” and take note of what he recommends in order to get the most out of what you read. The advice given by Adler provides you a method of reading carefully and attentively, that is, a way to practice being an active reader. As you read, mark, and come to understand a text, two writing responses may be appropriate: paraphrasing and summarizing. Most of the notes you take in doing academic research will be written in the form of paraphrases or summaries. Copying the source text exactly is necessary only when you have clear reasons for quoting it, as when the information is very detailed, when the original is stated in an unusual or striking way, or when you feel that any paraphrase would inadequately represent the author’s tone or intention.

Questions to ask while engaging in active reading

1. What is the subject?

Does the subject bring up any personal associations? Is it a controversial one?

2. What is the thesis (the overall main point)?

How does the thesis interpret the subject? If asked, could you summarize the main idea?

3. Who is the intended audience?

What values and/or beliefs do they hold that the writer could appeal to?

4. What is the tone of the text?

What is your reaction to the text, emotional or rational (think of pathos)? Does this reaction change at all throughout the text?

5. What is the writer's purpose?

To explain? Inform? Anger? Persuade? Amuse? Motivate? Sadden? Ridicule? Attack? Defend? Is there more than one purpose? Does the purpose shift at all throughout the text?

6. What methods does the writer use to develop his/her ideas?

Narration? Description? Definition? Comparison? Analogy? Cause and Effect? Example? Why does the writer use these methods? Do these methods help in his/her development of ideas?

7. What pattern does the author use for the arrangement of ideas?

Particular to general, broad to specific, spatial, chronological, alternating, or block? Does the format enhance or detract from the content? Does it help the piece along or distract from it?

8. Does the writer use adequate transitions to make the text unified and coherent?

Do you think the transitions work well? In what ways do they work well?

9. Are there any patterns in the sentence structure that make the writer's purpose clear to you?

What are these patterns like if there are some? Does the writer use any fragments or run-on sentences?

10. Is there any dialog and/or quotations used in the text?

To what effect? For what purpose is this dialog or quotations used?

11. In what way does the writer use diction?

Is the language emotionally evocative? Does the language change throughout the piece? How does the language contribute to the writer's aim?

12. Is there anything unusual in the writer's use of punctuation?

What punctuation or other techniques of emphasis (italics, capitals, underlining, ellipses, and parentheses) does the writer use? Is punctuation over- or under-used? Which marks does the writer use where, and to what effect?

13. Are there any repetitions of important terms throughout the text?

Are these repetitions effective, or do they detract from the text?

14. Does the writer present any particularly vivid images that stand out?

What is the effect of these images on the writer's purpose?

15. Are there any tropes--similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, comparisons, contrasts, etc. that are employed by the writer?

When does he/she use them? For what reason(s)? Are those devices used to convey or enhance meaning?

16. Are there any other devices such as humor, wordplay, irony, sarcasm, understatement, or parody that are used in the text?

Is the effect comic relief? Pleasure? Hysteria? Ridicule?

17. Is there any information about the background of the writer?

Is the writer an acceptable authority on the subject? How do you know?

Active Writing

Academic Essays

Good writing depends largely on good reading. By wide reading you become aware of how to phrase your thoughts: the variety of sentence forms and lengths; idiomatic phrasing; the value of clarity, unity, and appropriate tone; and the various genres appropriate for your purpose and audience. Not all writing is the same--not even all academic writing. Writing can be used to analyze ideas or evaluate concepts--among other purposes--and in this course you will be learning how to write various types of exercises and essays: a paraphrase, summary, analysis, critique, and research paper, among other assignments. These major writing assignments in COMP 102 follow Bloom's Taxonomy, an educational tool to help identify students' learning skills. At the end of World War II, returning veterans took advantage of their benefits to attend college. Realizing the need to evaluate their skills in learning, a committee headed by Benjamin Bloom worked to create a hierarchy of these skills, called “intended learning outcomes,” in a way that could be distinguished and described. This hierarchy moves from the lowest level of basic comprehension and memorization to the higher skills. The writing assignments in this course are intended to move students from the lower levels of thinking to the higher levels—going from paraphrasing and summarizing and leading to essays that evaluate and essays that persuade or argue an issue.

When writing formal or academic essays, you will find options for your particular task by considering subjects, topics, theses, and your audience and purpose. You will determine the scope and depth of the research needed to support your views, and you will have in mind the interests and knowledge of your audience. Formal essays frequently have a thesis statement that focuses the essay’s development around a central assertion or claim. The writer’s thesis in an essay is a statement asserting an opinion on the subject being discussed. The thesis may be stated explicitly, usually at the beginning or in the conclusion of the essay. Some professional writers do not state a thesis explicitly, but allow their supporting evidence and conclusions to lead their readers to a sense of their underlying, but unspoken, thesis. An interesting thesis results when the thinking or research on a subject brings new insight or even an unusual or eccentric perspective on a common activity. What is distinctive about a thesis is that it focuses the writer’s and the reader’s attention; it asserts a viewpoint that is arguable, not self-evident (“George Washington was the first president of the United States” is not a good thesis; it states a fact that is commonly known, not arguable.) “Washington’s reputation for honesty set an example for following presidents, but it also brought about some unhistorical legends about his inability to tell a lie” demonstrates a better thesis because it must be supported by evidence and examples. A good thesis supports a claim that demands support from the data or evidence in the body of the essay. Concise and clearly stated, it provides the scope and boundaries of the essay’s treatment of the subject.

The five paragraph essay is a useful form to use for brief academic reports or analyses. In the first paragraph the author introduces the subject and states a thesis. If the paper is about a book or short story, a brief introduction with the book’s title, author, and purpose is appropriate here. A good thesis suggests the outline of the essay by specifying details that support the thesis assertion. The next three paragraphs of a typical five paragraph essay give the supporting details, explaining how each contributes to the main assertion. The conclusion should restate the thesis in new terms and bring the essay to a sense of closure.

A documented essay involves researching materials from a variety of sources, books, journal articles, internet listings, personal interviews, or other communications. On most subjects appropriate for such a documented essay, you will find the most trustworthy support from material you have accessed from your school’s databases. You will be attending two library workshops, called LIBBI, for this course during this semester, and in these workshops you will learn how to recognize and locate reliable information. Resources must be carefully checked for accuracy and credibility.

You will be summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting others’ findings in this kind of essay, working with the ideas and knowledge of authorities on the chosen subject in order to create a synthesis yielding your own thesis and conclusion. Consult your writing handbook to compose your essay, and follow a specific style format, as outlined in your handbook, such as that of Modern Language Association (MLA) or that of the American Psychological Association (APA), for your documentation (parenthetical citations, footnotes, works cited page).

Informal Essays

Writing an informal essay may give you more choices of genre and tone; your essay may be serious or humorous, ironic or satirical. You may write a memoir, a meditation, an opinion essay; you may write a poem or an article for a newspaper or journal. Your personal view, rather than a product of academic research, may be expressed. Often these essays develop more intuitively than logically, as the mind freely wanders around the subject, associating ideas in a personal way. Many of the essays contained in this material for COMP 102 are informal essays. As you read them, examine the various ways they communicate effectively to readers.

The Basic Purpose for Writing

The basic task of writing is to communicate—all forms of writing share this purpose. Writing gives expression to the diversity of human activity and emotions—from the high art of literature (epics, drama, stories, poetry) to the daily actions of writing dates and times in an appointment calendar. If you need milk and bread from the grocery store, you might write yourself a note to remind you to stop at the supermarket on your way home from work. If you are a college student writing a letter to your parents, you may want to convince them that you really do need $75 to make it to the end of the month. If you are seeking a job, you may have to write a letter of inquiry, explaining your interest in the position and your main qualifications and experience. You may feel so strongly about an issue that you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper or submit an essay on the subject for publication. When you enter your profession, you may want to inform or influence your colleagues by writing the results of your research or experimentation. You may be asked to write a grant proposal or initiate a policy change. As time goes on, you may want to write stories or poems or to share stories from your family’s history with the younger generation. In all these cases, the fundamental act your writing is intended to accomplish is to communicate your experience—your ideas, your feelings, your needs, or your research findings—to others. Writing clearly and effectively has a purpose; it can make things happen; it can give you power.