Tips for Making Your Writing More Vital

Tips in Giving Your Essays More Vitality: Disagree with the author even if you agree. In other words take the contrarian view. For example:

 

Sample thesis in response to Gary Wills’ well written essay “The Dramaturgy of Death”

 

While I concede that Wills’ argument that the death penalty is sodden with irrational impulses and that capital punishment can never achieve justice or “closure,” Wills’ screed collapses under the weight of his own naiveté and knee-jerk pacifism. For in fact, when warranted, capital punishment can impede the living murderer from wreaking more violence, havoc and insult.

 

Mapping statements:

 

1. A living murderer can hone his crime skills in prison and escape.
2. A living murderer can make contacts to threaten and kill witnesses and the victim’s family.
3. A living murderer can write revisionist books, some of them best-sellers, that make him look like a “victim of circumstance.”
4. A living murderer can finagle the legal system and waste its limited resources.
5. A living murderer unjustly drains limited resources from the medical and legal system.
6. Subsidizing a murderer’s existence, giving him entitlements he doesn’t deserve, is an      insult and an outrage to the victim’s family.
7. Over time, the murderer will often affect the pose of a God-fearing man who has taken an interest in the Bible, divinity, and piety in order to incur sympathy of supporters who will protest his “unjust persecution.”