One. The Four Questions I Ask When I Grade Your Essay 1. How clear is your purpose (thesis) and how effectively do you keep focused on your purpose throughout the essay? 2. How well do you develop your ideas with concrete detailed paragraphs? 3. How well do you bring the "Excitement Factor" into your essay by finding an approach that stirs your emotional fire, passion, and conviction? 4. How effectively do you execute the mechanics so that in terms of grammar, precise word choice, and formatting you deliver a polished, professional manuscript? Two. The Five Writing Traps to Avoid 1. Turning in late papers—I set my sights on the new cycle of essays so that when a late paper, from the old cycle, comes my way I look at that paper with disdain. In fact, my heart is “dead” to the late paper and I will mark that late paper with a C or D grade no matter what the paper’s virtues. My hostility to the late paper is exacerbated when students give me their grossly tardy expositions during the last two weeks of the semester, a time in which I am already inundated with stacks of on-time papers, thereby making me especially vitriolic toward late essays, which I see as an affront to my dignity and self-respect and which therefore compel me to mark those essays with a D or F grade. I harbor enormous suspicions towards alleged “medical and family emergencies” which “necessitate” turning in a late essay. While I concede that compelling circumstances do exist and while I address those alleged compelling circumstances on an individual basis and with sympathy, I have found over the last twenty years of teaching that well over 99% of the students who claim special circumstances are a constant source of chafing agitation and demonstrate a highly annoying predictable pattern of lame excuses, “bad luck,” and emotional neediness which, for their sake, I do not indulge lest I should be guilty of encouraging their dysfunctional behavior. In conclusion, do not, I repeat, do not turn in late essays. Three. Qualities of a Successful Thesis, the Foundation of Your Essay 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. Sample Thesis with Mapping Statements Phil Connor’s time warp in Groundhog Day is an excellent illustration of Wallace’s warning about the dangerous consequences of us settling into our morally bankrupt “default setting.” First, Connor is a man who has become a slave to his “template” of self-centeredness, unable to connect with the outside world, a form of insanity. Second, he is absent of any beliefs other than conviction of his own vanity making him blind to his own repulsiveness. Third, his misanthropic bitterness creates a self-fulfilling prophesy that brings out the worst in others and therefore reinforces his cynicism. Fourth, he cannot escape his private hell until, in Wallace’s words, he develops a “critical awareness” of his misguided “certainties” and realizes he is “totally wrong and deluded.” Four. An effective way to write a thesis is to give it concession, refutation, and mapping components (underlined below). Example: While ABC's Gray's Anatomy is often cleverly written and deals with timely topics that are dramatized in a complex, compelling manner, the show too often is sodden with cutesy dialogue, predictably needy characters who are less endearing than they are chafing, and highly annoying, "sensitive" scenes that deteriorate into over-stylized MTV-style music videos accompanied by precious and cloying indy-pop folk rock. The above example has concession by conceding that the show is often "clever," "timely," and "complex"; at the same time, in the thesis' independent clause the writer refutes the show by accusing it of being "cutesy," "chafing," and "annoying." Finally, the thesis has mapping components that outline the body paragraphs and thus give the writer a road map or organizing structure for the essay.
2. Writing essays that are full of the obvious and self-evident—an essay full of obvious truths and clichés has no reason to exist, no matter how well organized and well written. Writing about the evil of greed and materialism or the way in which we are withdrawing into our technology or how we have forgotten to love and respect one another are all true and noble sentiments but they have no business in your papers since, presumably, we already have those beliefs so that these papers are superfluous. To capitulate to obvious truths about the human condition is to sermonize or to lecture down to your reader. Also, if the material is obvious, you will be bored with your own essay and your reader will even be more bored. Therefore, strive to challenge your intellect and argue for a position that requires vigorous defense and sophisticated analysis.
3. Writing essays from your head but not your gut—intellectual explorations can only take you so far. A memorable essay must be fueled by both your mind and a fire in your belly. If you can’t muster a fire of passion for your topic, then your essay will be flaccid, perfunctory, and lackluster, sins which your reader will never forgive. You cannot fake passion. Either you have it or you don’t. It is your responsibility to find a way to bring authentic passion to your essay.
4. Writing half-baked essays—a half-baked essay is a rough draft, a seed of a good idea. It may contain a recognizable structure, topic sentences, a clear focus, and an exciting approach but it falls on its face because the essay lacks details, color, and concreteness. A telltale sign of a half-baked essay is short paragraphs. Fully developed paragraphs, 100-150 words, are a sign of a fully baked exposition, which I can spot immediately just by glancing at your paragraphs. A lack of details, haphazard sentences, redundant syntax, lack of word variety—all these things evince a half-baked essay written in the rush of a moment or with one hand on the keyboard and other holding a cell phone. I have sadly received many half-baked essays because students carried on with cell-phone conversations while writing their essays.
5. Relying on your computer or a tutor for spelling, grammar, and other facets of your exposition—realize that your computer is a nincompoop that is incapable of discerning the difference between possessive case and a contraction (whose/who’s or your/you’re or its/it’s) and many other spelling scenarios. Its grammar check is a complete stinker. Its ability to detect other syntax errors is at best weak. Do not rely on it. Do not rely on your tutor for grammar either. Over the last twenty years I have received thousands of “tutor-approved” essays rife with comma splices, run-ons, fragments, noun-pronoun errors, dangling modifiers, faulty subordination, elephantine syntax, and other egregious errors that have prompted full investigations into the credentials of these so-called “tutors.” I have also over the last twenty years graded horrific, cliché-laden essays that the students defended by saying, “But my tutor liked it,” or “It was my tutor’s idea.” I don’t care what your tutor thought or said about your essay. Your tutor means absolutely nothing to me. Therefore rely on no one but yourself. This is a life lesson in being street smart, the most valuable kind of intelligence. Remember that Rule Number One in being street smart is trusting no one. Rule Number Two is don’t make your pride, performance, and excellence dependent on others. Your excellence and success is your responsibility and no one else’s.
Five. Jeff Henderson grows up and gets infected with the virus of concupiscence.
Six. Concupiscence and Its Causes
- Concupiscence is the search for happiness based on gratifying pleasure and ego without a moral compass. The result is moral dissolution, a fancy term for the loss of morality and sanity. Tennessee Williams became famous after writing the play A Streetcar Named Desire and lived in a fancy hotel where he had room service and escorts visit him every day. One evening he poured gravy over his banana split and realized he had become insane. He left the hotel, went to Mexico and resumed with his writing career.
- Concupiscence is the pursuit of happiness without a moral compass; in other words, you have no vision of anything beyond gratifying your base appetites and therefore have a misguided definition of happiness.
- When you have no vision beyond your base appetites, you are what we call “Bread and Circus,” which means all you desire is food and entertainment.
- Concupiscence compels you to feed your irrational appetites, which wage war against your powers of reason. For example, one of my students knows a guy who lives in expensive Brentwood and drives a BMW but he has to eat his sister’s government cheese and other handouts because he has no money for food. That’s not a reasonable situation.
- Concupiscence grows inside us when we have role models without a moral compass. In Jeff Henderson’s case, he sees all the major “players,” like T-Row, glory in the life of concupiscence.
- Concupiscence grows inside us from the anger that is born from having a sense of deprivation: “I’m gonna get mine.”
- The writer Jonathan Franzen gives concupiscence another name, Ache: Being overwhelmed by desires that always outrun our capacity to fulfill them.
- Another cause behind concupiscence is vanity, also called the libido ostentandi: The need to show off. A rich woman in Argentina wears a body length mink coat at an outdoor bazaar where the temperature is 105 degrees. She wants everyone to know she is of a higher stature. She passes out and dies of heat stroke. Another example: A student wrote an essay about his friend who, buying a BMW 5 series, had to work 2 jobs and drop out of El Camino College. The misguided young man’s didn’t know how depressed he was when he realized all his friends, the people who would be impressed with his BMW, could not see it since they were attending college. One day this BMW owner made a special trip to the college and yelled to his buddies to come look at his car but they had to go to his class and my student’s final vision of his friend was screaming from his BMW on the Crenshaw parking lot for someone to check out his car. No one cared.
Seven. Concupiscence and Its Effects
- If concupiscence goes its full course, we arrive at a condition of moral dissolution like Tennessee Williams mentioned above. Here’s another example: A man cheats on his girlfriend or wife once and feels the searing pain from his conscience. He cheats on her 1,000 times and feels nothing because his conscience has decomposed into what we call moral dissolution. In other words, he’s lost his soul.
- Another word for moral dissolution is debauchery, which means the moral pillars that hold up your morality have fallen and your morality has fallen with them.
- Ennui; you’ve filled your senses with so much pleasure that you can no longer feel anything. You have become incurably numb to life and now must suffer the desperation of needing to feel anything, no matter what the cost.
- Nihilism; the death of meaning. There is no right or wrong. Life has no meaning. The world is merely a playground for your desires. The world is a giant margarita glass and you suck on the straw, slurp every last drop and then die.
Eight. In addition to concupiscence, Jeff Henderson becomes a victim of his own success. One of the memoir’s major themes is that misguided success can be a great misfortune leading to insanity.
- One of the major themes in Cooked is that in life when we think we’re rising, we’re actually falling.
- The problem with success is that most of us have a misguided definition of it. If success is based on concupiscence, then the “success” we achieve will drive us insane.
- Another problem with success is that it creates the illusion of invincibility. The more successful Henderson’s drug operation becomes, for example, the more safe he feels. He believes he is “untouchable.”
- When we feel invincible we go into denial. For example, Henderson minimizes, to his detriment, his drug dealer associations, some of whom will be kidnapped and killed. He also underestimates the stupidity and back-stabbing nature of another one, which will result in his demise. Finally, Henderson is in denial about the feds’ suspicions regarding Henderson’s covert drug operations. The feds arrest him without even catching Henderson with any drugs at all because they have a long list of records, phone conversations, ancillary transactions, witness testimony, etc.
- Another form of denial is moral denial. Henderson rationalizes that he is a drug dealer but he does so “strictly as a businessman.” He’s not about violence, taking drugs, or hanging out with gang bangers. But the fact of the matter is his operations are harmful, a painful fact he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison.
- When our success generates easy money, we go insane because suddenly we lose our sense of value and hard work and our sense of goals. We live in Another Universe, one that most people don’t live in. The films City of God and Goodfellas illustrate this point.
- When money is easy for us and we see the rest of the world “getting punked,” being forced to do real work to make their money, we start to feel so superior to the rest of humanity that we think we’re gods. We think this to our own detriment.
Nine. Writing an Essay Based on Today’s Themes
Option #1:
Develop a thesis in which you compare the insanity born from concupiscence and misguided success as you see it in Cooked with the film City of God or Goodfellas.
Cooked and City of God (or Goodfellas) take us on the journey of misguided success, which always results in insanity. As the book and film show, this mental derangement is born from _____________________, ___________________, ____________________, and _________________________________.
Option #2: Write an essay that analyzes Jeff Henderson’s Road to Redemption Jeff Henderson’s road to redemption includes _____________________, _____________________________, __________________________, and _________________________________. One. The Descent or the Fall: Concupiscence (addiction to power and money), nihilism (a moral abyss in which there is only one value: getting over) , denial, rationalization. Two. Perdition: Realizing you’re not invincible; taking responsibility for your actions, doing time or suffering, starting from Ground Zero. Three. The Rebuilding Process: Finding a passion. Developing your craft through hard work, fortitude, commitment, focus. Four. Being responsible to others rather than your own concupiscence: Caring about your family. Sample Structure: In a page, write about someone you know who experienced the Fall, Perdition, and the Rebuilding Process, which in sum resulted in their redemption. Then use a bridge: Similarly, Jeff Henderson finds redemption after being an apex drug dealer. His redemption results from _____________________, ___________________, __________________________, and ___________________________. Your supporting paragraphs will correspond the mapping components (indicated by the blanks above).
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