Breakthrough Writer

1C Lesson for “Virtual Love” by Meghan Daum on page 137

Part One. Lexicon

 

1. monotony; see paragraph 1
2. ennui; often the result of monotony
3. oxymoron of her “love affair”; distant yet close; see paragraph 12 on page 139
4. narcissistic fantasy; see paragraph 14 and see page 143 paragraph 32; delusions of grandeur and self-centeredness; the need to worship and be worshipped; this is not love
5. To be someone’s cynosure; paragraph 14 and 15 and 16.
6. Love Hangover Principle; the faster you rise to ecstasy and bliss and passion, the more sure you are to crash into despair, depression, and emptiness.
7. Lonely Principle; the more lonely you are, the more intensely you fall in love; see paragraph 17
8. Panacea Principle; the more empty and lost you are, the more likely you are to look to love as a cure-all for all your problems
9. Projection Principle; the more desperate you are, the more likely you are to project your ideal onto your lover so what you fall in love with is a projection of your imagination, not the real human being. The inevitable result is disappointment and disgust.
10. Disparity between chimera and cipher
11. Irony; reversal of expectations; see page 143, paragraph 30; she plays is straight, but she’s still deluded
12. “Raw truth”; in spite of her desire to be an independent, self-reliant, touch urban woman with ambitions for her career, she sees she has deep needs to be loved. 

 

Part Two. Writing an Effective Thesis

 

Qualities of Successful Thesis:

1.     One sentence that establishes a demonstrable argument or purpose.

2.     
Demonstrable means two things: writer has authentic emotional connection to material so he or she doesn’t run out of gas at the midway point. Secondly, it means writer can support the thesis with mapping statements.  Sample: The popularity of SUVs reveals a malignancy about American consumerism. First, SUV makers market their vehicles toward people who wish to dominate and bully on the road; second, SUV drivers feel entitled to cheap gas to quench their driving habits, at the expense of American dependency on oil from hostile countries; third, SUV drivers often recklessly multi-task as they live inside their little cockpit fantasy. Lipstick, DVD, Carl’s Jr. gluttony, cell phone, etc.

3.     A good thesis is often followed by a clarifying sentence: Owning an SUV is morally irresponsible. This grotesque lapse of morality is evidenced by _______________, ______________________, _______________________, and _______________________________.

4.      A good thesis defies the obvious and possesses the So-What Factor: Sample: Tom Cruise and Terrell Owens are jerks. A better thesis: Society requires grotesque celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Terrell Owens, to be our punching bags. First, these vile celebrities refute the unhealthy notion that riches result in goodness; second, our communal hatred for them gives us a sense of shared values; third, our loathing for these miscreants gives us catharsis and we vent our class envy and middle class frustrations. 


5.     A good thesis answers a compelling question. Why does no one care about Barry Bonds, even as he closes in on Hank Aaron’s record? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, how did the US government leave so many people to die in a country that is the richest and freest in the world? Why do women continue to outnumber men in college enrollment? Another compelling question: Why do Americans spend more and more money on diets and workout programs and personal trainers as they continue to getter fatter and fatter and fatter and fatter?: Americans grow obscenely fatter in the face of their diet obsessions because none of their “programs” address the root of their fatness. To the contrary, their dieting exacerbates their real problem, which is that they are blind, incorrigible consumers. The diet is just another consumer commodity that promises a “magic bullet.” The diet is, like their overeating, a form of obsessive neurosis and orality. Finally, the diet becomes a form of shared communal experience that gives them a feeble sense of belonging and assuages their loneliness. Their laziness compels them to seek magic bullets rather than change behavior and get educated. Their diet obsession intensifies their food obsession. Their diet becomes a feeble way to stave off their loneliness.

 

Part Three: What not to do when writing a thesis:

Don’ts

1.     Don’t write an easy thesis that is so self-evident or obvious that to support it is a complete waste of time that will bore your reader to tears, anguish, and resentment over your bovine effort. 


2.        Don’t write a thesis that leads to a sermon in which you bloviate a bunch of homilies, bromides, and truisms to your rankled reader.

3.     Don’t write a thesis that is so broad and general that the only way to support it is with a 500-page book.


4.       Don’t write a thesis that you don’t understand or believe in because your lack of conviction will give your paper a limp, soggy quality that will depress both you and your reader.


5.      Don’t write a thesis that is cold, cerebral, and intellectually detached for this approach will result in a frosty academic treatise with no vitality or fire to inflame your readers’ interest. 


6.     Don’t write a thesis that is ridiculous for ridiculous’ sake because, lacking in any vital ideas, you’re desperate to pique and provoke your reader with lame gimmicks.


7.      Don’t write a thesis that “sounds good” but in truth bores the hell out of you so that when you sit down to write your essay you cry and curse your decision to enroll in a composition class.


8.     Don’t write a thesis for which there is no accessible research material so that you’re left making up fictitious articles for your Works Cited page.

9.      Don’t write the same thesis that your friend wrote because “he got an A” when in fact you have no emotional connection to this carbon copy essay.


10.   Don’t write a thesis that simply echoes the same points of the essay you’re writing about, which results in a summary of the essay, not an analysis. 

 

Part Four. Writing Assignment Options 165 and 166; Numbers 2, 5, and 6 are relevant to today’s assigned reading. My mapping components are applicable to all 3 options. 

 

Option #2: Weak thesis: The cyberrevolution is positive. Too broad.

 

Option #2 Better thesis: While the cyberrevolution gives us access to more potential love partners and makes communication more convenient, a cyber romance is not a real romance but a doomed fantasy. This false love is evidenced by the corruption of real love evidenced by ______________________, ________________________, ______________________, and _____________________________.

 

 

1. the false bliss of a relationship mostly based on written language; written language creates a love persona that is not the real you and your cyber partner does the same. It’s romantic but you can’t live up to your written persona.
2. the false love based on self-serving convenience; you can turn this kind of love on and off as you see fit;
3. the opportunity for obsession unchecked by face-to-face contact.
4. Distance between lovers creates loneliness and longing, which creates wish-fulfillment that can never be realized.

 

I notice my mapping components for to all 3 relevant options.

Number 6: The cyber romance born from technology is a pathetic fantasy that for a short while veils us from the awful truth of modern life: That living in our fast-paced world is incompatible with real love. This sad truth is evident when we consider that the pressures of work make us turn toward a debased form of love—the cyber romance, which can be characterized by ____________________, ______________________, ____________________, and __________________________.

 

 

 

 

1A Study Guide for “Love and War in Cyberspace” by Katy Vine 380

Part One. Lexicon. 

1. savvy, the ability to navigate in social circles with poise, confidence, and tact
2. socially inept, the opposite of savvy (see paragraph 1); see 383, bottom paragraph
3. promise of modernity, see paragraph 3: Technology will fulfill all your emotional and materialistic needs, yet it’s a lie: you’re bored, your life is in a vacuum and you seek even greater technology to quiet your restless soul.
4. Slippery slope: one misguided step towards happiness leads to several misguided steps until one descends into madness: this is the essay in a nutshell.
5. T-3 Pipe: fiber-optic data line that can handle the telecommunication needs of a small country. “Come for the bandwidth, Stay for the Community” 381 bottom
6. Monolithic group: 383, second to last paragraph and 386 bottom and 387 top
7. Four Basic emotional needs: sense of belonging, sense of personal distinction and identity, a job that interest you and utilizes your deepest talents, to love and to be loved; see page 383 top: Walden promises a sense of belonging and identity and even love and many people work in the computer industry so that Walden is everything to them. See bottom of 390 in which Bosch buys a house, but moves back to Walden; see how close-knit the group is on page 391, tackling burglars, for example.
8. Protocols; rules needed for social interaction to preserve respect and order. Without protocols there is chaos and disrespect. These adult children have no social etiquette, see page 385 and 386, the violent language.
9. Anomie; breakdown of social norms and values resulting in chaos; see 392-394; it becomes necessary for property owner Birney to issue new rules at bottom of 394.
10. Hedonism; the desperate attempt to overcome one’s sense of loneliness and emptiness through pleasure-seeking; it always results in an emotional hangover and a feeling of emptiness that’s greater than before.
11. Virtual World (from Wikipedia): A Virtual World is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. These avatars are usually depicted as textual, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional graphical representations, although other forms are possible[1] (auditory[2] and touch sensations for example). Some, but not all, virtual worlds allow for multiple users.

 

Part Two. A Failed Experiment in Unlimited Freedom. We learn that real freedom requires conditions. Therefore unlimited freedom, the kind we see at Walden, is a false freedom. 

Unlimited Freedom at Walden Is a False Freedom 

1. E-mail communication is not free. There must be face-to-face accountability; if you can’t say what you have to say to another human’s face, you are a coward and a fraud. Too many people hiding behind their computers speaking reckless thoughts from their mind.
2. E-mail communication is dangerous because you’re hiding under the delusional safety of your computer. In fact, your raw unedited thoughts are dangerous and inappropriate. Your thoughts should be measured, contemplated, and edited. That’s what makes you a mature, thinking person. The stream of consciousness that spews forth in an e-mail is the rant and tantrum of a spoiled child.Squandering all your free time on an addiction is not freedom; it’s enslavement and the Multi-User Dungeon gamers are slaves to their addiction. See 380
3. Technology without wisdom will kill you. These renters have the broadest band-width in the world, but they can’t handle it. The computer modem attaches to their brain and their minds become warped; they go insane. See page 383Walden gives the loners and computer geeks a sense of belonging, which you need to be free, but this is false belonging. This is symbiosis; an unhealthy mutual dependence that results in retarding your emotional growth. See 381
4. A cohesive healthy community must have protocols of etiquette to create a sense of safety, respect, and dignity. But there are no boundaries at Walden. See the “bombastic” and violent language on page 386.A healthy community has diversity of people with diversity of ideas to challenge one’s way of seeing the world. But the people at Walden are a monolithic tribe. They’re all the same and as a result they’re maladapted to the real world, which is diverse. The world isn’t a bunch of computer geeks and hiding in a cell with other computer geeks isn’t the answer. See page 383
5. See page 390 in which we learn that hedonism leads to despair. That kind of extreme behavior is always followed by a crash. Your whole life can’t be a party. You’ll burn-out. You’ll find yourself lost. People who party all the time age faster than the rest of us. They look old. Hedonism wears you out. It’s not freedom. It’s a desperate attempt to escape your sense of loneliness and isolation and it never works. Read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.here are no moral absolutes and no sense that this is right and this is wrong; as a result, Walden is a place of chaos and confusion.A Virtual World is a place where you don’t find freedom. You lose yourself to insanity.  

 

Part Three. The 8 Characteristics of Virtual World 

1. The VW allows you to escape your daily frustrations.
2. The VW allows you to escape from the intense pain of having no intimacy in your life, both romantic and social.
3. The VW becomes a way of procrastinating your responsibilities.
4. The VW can incite chemical reactions in your brain that become addictive.
5. The VW presents you with manageable challenges, giving you a sense of control and achievement when you would otherwise feel overwhelmed by a lack of control and a sense of personal failure.
6. It’s easier to go back and delete your mistakes in a VW and star all over again than it is in real life.
7. The VW allows you to erase or hide your real self, the one you either despise or feel is inadequate or both, and it allows you to recreate yourself with bells and whistles so that you have more confidence.
8. The VW provides you with a sense of belonging in the “online community” when in the real world you’re overcome by a sense of constant loneliness and isolation. 

Part Four Defining the foundation of your essay—your thesis 

1.  One sentence that declares or asserts a position that can be demonstrated with examples.

2.    The examples can be expressed in mapping statements or mapping components.

3.    Avoids being self-evident or obvious but creates new insights.

4.    A good thesis is visceral, from the gut, meaning you have an immediate emotional connection to it. The intellect comes later. 

Examples: 

Fact, not thesis: Eighty % of Americans polled believe that America is on the “wrong track.”

 

Thesis: Americans’ pessimistic attitude regarding the direction of our country can be attributed to _________________, _____________________, _____________________, and _________________________.

 

The cost of the war in Iraq in both blood and treasure.

The national debt.

Increased gas costs and price of crude oil.

Biggest jobless rate jump in month in 20 years. (5 to 5.5 %)

 

McMahon’s thesis for “Love and War in Cyberspace”

Walden is a failed experiment in the promise of unlimited freedom through technology. This woeful failure can be attributed to ________________, ___________________, and ____________________, and results in ___________________, ___________________, and __________________________________.

 

Katy Vine’s essay shows us the dangers of living in a Virtual World, which include __________________, ___________________, _________________, and _________________________.

 

“Love and War in Cyberspace” 380. 5-page outline: In the first 2 pages, analyze the causes of social dysfunction described in the essay. Then in about 3 pages, use research to show how the apartment complex is a microcosm for an emerging social dysfunction in our Age of Information. As such the thesis would like this: The apartment complex is a microcosm for an emerging social dysfunction emerging in our Information Age, which consists of __________________, ___________________, ___________________, and _______________________. You would flesh out the mapping components for the essay's last 3 pages.

1C: A New Writing Option for Essay #1: The Chimera

Comparing Meghan Daum's essay "Virtual Love" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," define the Love Chimera, a cipher who elicits fantasies of euphoria and ecstasy but who in the end is just a cipher. 

You can use Fitzgerald's story, Daum's essay, and my lecture material for your 3 research sources.