Reminder #1:
Because we have deemed Joseph Epstein's essay to be too biased in many respects, we have made referencing his essay an option, not a requirement.
Reminder #2
If you call Lasdun's book a "novel," you can't get higher than a C minus grade because it is a short story collection.
Reminder #3:
If you put Lasdun's book title It's Beginning to Hurt in quotation marks, you can't get higher than a C minus because book titles require italics.
Reminder #4:
If you start your essay with the words, "In today's society," you can't get higher than a D plus grade because generic writing is unacceptable.
Reminder #5:
If you are discouraged from your writing, it's partly because it's your first draft and first drafts as a rule are going to be terrible.
Essay Options
Essay 1 for 150 points: 1,400 words typed and 3 sources: Hard copy and turnitin upload due no later than start of class on March 1:
Option One
Comparing at least 3 stories from Lasdun’s collection, develop an analytical thesis that shows how Joseph Epstein’s online essay “The Perpetual Adolescent” supports the assertion that Lasdun’s characters self-destruct under the weight of their adolescent fixation.
By perpetual adolescence, we meaning the following:
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning the wisdom of maturity
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Pursuing Dionysian impulses instead of Apollonian ones. Some say that all literature is about the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
Be sure your essay has a minimum of 3 sources.
Sample Outline
Introduction: I would define maturity in the context of Carl Jung's 4 Life Stages: athlete, warrior, statement, spirit. I would give an example of someone I know or a character in fiction who has achieved this kind of maturity. 250 words.
In my second introduction paragraph I would contrast my definition of maturity with a definition of perpetual adolescence defined by hedonism, nihilistic aimlessness, self-pity, and cycles of futility and learned helplessness. I would give a personal example of someone I know or a fictional character who is mired in this kind of immaturity. 250 words.
Thesis Paragraph: Abel from "The Natural Order," Martin from "The Half Sister," and Clare from "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" are victims of self-induced perpetual adolescence evidenced by ____________________, _______________, ____________________, ________________________, and _________________________. 100 words.
Paragraphs 3-7 would elaborate the mapping components provided in the thesis paragraph. Each paragraph would be 150 words for 750 words.
Examples of topics for mapping components
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning the wisdom of maturity
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Pursuing Dionysian impulses instead of Apollonian ones. Some say that all literature is about the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
My final paragraph, my conclusion, is a brief, dramatic restatement of my thesis.
Total words is approximately 1,400 words.
Option Two
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state? (cause and effect thesis)
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad as they become disconnected from others and living inside their head, the condition known as solipsism.
They become irrational so that they are incapable of maturity, which means having the faculties of love and reason.
They have no boundaries with others, so that they are “clingers,” as we discussed last class, people capable of symbiotic relationships, which render both people emotional cripples.
They become blind to their own self-destruction so that they have no self-awareness or metacognition.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a cheap dream. They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay has a minimum of 3 sources.
Sample Outline for Essay Prompt 2
Paragraph 1 (250 words): Define the demonic state, which is characterized by the following:
The person is unhinged.
The person is possessed by an obsession.
The person lives in his or her head too much resulting in solipsism.
The person is consumed by irrational passions such as spite, envy, self-pity, or concupiscence to give some examples.
Write a profile of a person you know who is in demonic state.
Paragraph 2 (250 words): Write a contrast paragraph of the antithesis or opposite of the demonic state, the condition of being self-possessed.
The condition of being self-possessed means the person has the following:
self-awareness or metacognition
long-term planning over short-term gratification
can see the forest instead of being too close to the trees
has keen memory of climbing out of past holes and knows that getting out of a crisis requires calm
Write a brief profile of a self-possessed person.
Paragraph 3 Thesis Paragraph (100 words).
Sample thesis: Many of the characters in Lasdun's fiction are shackled by their demonic state evidenced by ____________, ________________, ___________________, and ___________________.
Body Paragraphs 4-7 (250 each)
Topics for body paragraphs:
The person is unhinged.
The person is possessed by an obsession.
The person lives in his or her head too much resulting in solipsism.
The person is consumed by irrational passions such as spite, envy, self-pity, or concupiscence to give some examples.
Conclusion: Dramatic restatement of thesis
Option Three
Analyze two stories in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. Be sure your essay at least 3 sources. You may use the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" as a source and as a story comparison.
Sample Thesis Statements
Sample A
The characters in Lasdun's lugubrious short story collection fail to grow up, slogging through life in a condition of perpetual adolescence, evidenced by a lack of moral foundation, higher purpose, self-constraint, empathy, metacognition, and pragmatism.
Sample B
McMahon's moral admonishment of the characters in Lasdun's dark story collection is misguided at best and archly judgmental at worst when we consider the characters are not morally bankrupt, as my strident, bombastic Professor McMahon would have us believe; rather, they are fairly decent people who get bogged down into a state of intractable adolescence due to loneliness, mid-life crises, abusive marriages, and an absence of worthy mentor figures.
Sample C
I loathe and detest Lasdun's collection It's Beginning to Hurt because the characters are too stupid, too immoral, and too foolish to get emotionally involved in. Their bad endings are too predictable. The author's vision of the human condition is too narrow in its cynicism and needs to be balanced by redemptive tales. The causes for the characters' perpetual adolescence is too obvious to mention, so I'm not really motivated to write this essay. McMahon, I'd rather write about universal health care, the current political crisis, or drug-resistant bacterial infections. I can say, McMahon, that you have literally ruined my life more than any instructor in my history of going to college and that because of you I am now considering a career in dental hygiene.
Sample D
The characters in Lasdun's fiction meet a tragic end because of self-pity, which is a poison evidenced by ostracism, pity's bitter-sweet addiction, entitlement, learned helplessness, and desperate measures.
Review the 4 Steps of MLA In-Text Citations
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase. Use the templates:
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Verbs in Signal Phrases
According to . . . (very common)
Ha Jin writes . . . (very common)
Panbin laments . . .
Dan rages . . .
Dan seethes . . .
Signal Phrase Templates
In the words of researchers Redelmeier and Tibshirani, “…”
As Matt Sundeen has noted, “…”
Patti Pena, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone, points out that “…”
“…” writes Christine Haughney, “…”
“…” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs.
Radio hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counterargument: “…”
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
Sample A Introduction and Thesis
I used to gleefully ridicule the gluttons who would eat countless platters of inedible slop at HomeTown Buffet, gorging until their bellies were so full their brains were drained of all nutritious blood supply rendering these overeaters brainless zombies.
But my mockery of these incontinent eaters was stopped in its tracks in the summer of 2003. My wife Carrie and I were walking back from the brunch buffet at the Sheraton Inn in Kauai where I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes slathered with thick maple syrup, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar, pecan-raisin cinnamon rolls, all washed down with several tall pitchers of freshly-squeezed orange juice.
With a self-complacent belch, I staggered up from the buffet and stumbled outside orienting myself to the sunlight. As I slogged my 259-pounds outside the buffet room and past a hotel window, I saw the reflection of a portly, unsightly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This disheveled, unattractive man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of a fat, shameless, overfed American.
I walked closer toward the bloated image of shame and disgust and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but was in fact me. I was that bloated apparition, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned all of my life.
This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” a sudden realization of one’s self-delusions that often results in a radical life transformation.
Indeed, the characters in Lasdun's fiction suffer similar self-delusions, evidenced by their denial of their shortcomings; their overwhelming passions that render them out of control; their gulf between who they think they are and who they really are; and their intractable fixation on “perpetual adolescence.”
“The Incalculable Life Gesture” (50)
Theme
When We Are Wronged, We Must Respond with Proper Proportion Or Else Be Our Own Worst Enemy
Richard’s moral flaw: He can't let go of the fact that life is unfair--especially TO HIM. While he is "right" that his sister has been unfair to him, he is wrong in his overreaction to the unfairness. His overreaction creates a virulent form of resentment that is consuming him.
In other words, Richard's resentment is a spiritual disease that is eating him from the inside out. In this sense, he is very, very wrong.
In addition to resentment is Richard's self-righteous indignation rooted in part that life is supposed to be fair and just and that we shouldn’t let narcissistic parasites (such as Richard’s sister) have their way.
We learn in examining Richard's moral flaw--the self-destructive resentment he harbors against his sister who he rightly sees as a cipher--that the more we rationalize our flaws the more we become irrational; the more we are technically right about an issue, the more we can be morally and spiritually wrong and as such we live an irrational life and evidence the demonic mind, a person whose irrational impulses have taken over metacognition. The result: The person becomes a dumpster fire, a car crash.
Richard's demonic state is his obsession with blaming his sister for all his woes. She is partly to blame for his life's problems, but he is the greater force of self-destruction. His sister is a convenient scapegoat.
Another Theme of the Demonic Mind: We're Right But We're Even MORE Wrong
Categories of Being Right But Being More Wrong
One. We see the trees but not the forest: some law or doctrine that causes destruction even as we obey it. We have an "A" clean rating at our restaurant because our cooks all wait hairnets, but one cook has an Old Testament beard that droops into the soup pot and little crabs and other creatures.
We have amassed thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook and enjoy lots of stars and "likes," but we are socially and emotionally infantile fragile creatures dependent on the dopamine rush of another "like." We have lost the forest, the bigger picture of what has become of us.
We are "Master Yelp Reviewers," but we languish in our mother's basement in a robe while eating Hot Pockets. We have lost the forest, the picture picture of what has become of us.
We have the Trophy Girl Whom Every Man Wants, but our lives are miserable, we're jumping through hoops, and living in debt to appease the Trophy Girl's Insatiable Consumer Appetites. We are lost in the woods and cannot see the forest, the picture picture of what has become of us.
Two. We make a bad situation worse: We report a bully who's beating our child and the bully retaliates. We "get even" with a stupid driver only to get shot at. We cheat "because everyone else is cheating" and compromise our education, our values, and our identity.
Three. We hurt people's feelings by telling the truth. Not all situations merit the truth. White lies are permissible when we have to preserve feelings or the safety of people.
Four. We choose victory over humanity. Study group keeps dead weight and loses the contest. But they gave kindness to the "dead weight" student.
Five. We rationalize our selfish behavior by saying, "we're right." The guy on the bus who won't give up his seat to old lady because "I was first" is selfish.
Six. We lie to give hope and spare feelings.
Seven. We have bad intentions. A teacher says, "It's your obligation to come to class prepared" even as he humiliates a student.
Eight. Not knowing whole story. You get a waitress fired from her job because of her horrible service, but you don’t know she’s a single mother whose boss harassed her in the back office and her three children are sick and she can’t afford a babysitter.
Nine. Gloating. "I told you so." You may have been right about your friend not buying that condo in a so-and-so city as the property value declines, but you're acting like a jackass.
Ten. You bring up a truth but you don't have a purpose or an end game. A guy tells his girlfriend for example that she doesn't love him, that she uses him for all the presents he gives her and her response is, "Yes, so what do you plan to do about it?" The guy is speechless because he doesn’t have an end game.
Questions for “The Incalculable Life Gesture”
One. What’s the psychological profile of Ellen on page 50?
A leech, a cipher, an indulgent, narcissistic ne’er-do-well. She represents the Dionysian spirit, one of chaos, while Richard embodies the Apollonian spirit, one of order. But is Richard any better, wanting his share of a small house when his sister and child need shelter? I find myself siding with Richard. Am I as petty as he is?
Two. How is Ellen unfair to her brother Richard regarding the inheritance of the house and how does Richard respond to this injustice?
He’s in a dilemma: Be a victim or a bully. Like Joseph in "An Anxious Man," he appears to lack convictions or a core self as he worries hiring an attorney to kick his sister out of the house might compromise his appearance with others. See page 51. Further, Richard can't see himself as selfish or petty because he identifies himself, rightly or not, as an intellectual helper of others, a spiritual guide, yet if we're honest Richard seems rather lost in his life.
Further, we could argue that the swelling he has ignored is a metaphor for some spiritual disease that is eating him and this disease may be rooted in Richard's existential vacuum.
Three. How does Ellen pour salt into the wounds she has inflicted upon Richard? See 51.
She has contempt for her brother and doesn’t see her brother’s capitulation to handing over the property to her as a good deed; she’s entitled to it from her point of view. She is the hostile victim who has been wronged from her standpoint.
She is icy and envious that her brother can afford organic groceries while she slogs for food at Walmart.
Four. What bothers Richard about the possibility of death on page 54?
Death makes a mockery of his life but his real death is that he has no place, identity, or belonging in society. That is Richard’s “death.” His personal frustration compels him to find a scapegoat, his sister, for whom to blame all his problems.
Five. Why did Richard decide to become a teacher? See page 57.
He wanted to teach others but also himself, find a way to be his own healer, so to speak, but in the tradition of Lasdun’s fictional characters Richard proves to be little more than a feeble cipher. Rather than have a core identity, he seems vain and at the mercy of others' opinion of him to base his self-image. As we read on page 54, he was worried that a diagnosis of cancer would change his image to others: one a healthy robust man, he would not be seen as a sick, moribund loser.
Six. Is the malady a metaphor for unrealistic expectations regarding justice and charity? Explain.
No, the malady is the disease that is Richard’s unrealized existence, his absence of meaning and core identity. Frustrated, he uses his hatred for his sister as his escape; therefore, he “needs” to hate her.
Seven. How does Richard’s self-image as a life-priest alienate him from modern life? See 57 and 58.
We see Richard is so vain that he never committed to any real vocation or calling for all the choices he considered in the end lacked "radiance" worthy of his exceptional being. Perhaps he is simply vain and slothful and lacking the rigor to take on a true profession lives in the delusion that he is of a rarefied breed, an "educator."
Eight. What does the story’s acrimonious ending seem to be telling us about empathy?
That empathy does not exist in self-centered, narcissistic ciphers like Richard, those waifs who are too full of self-regard to notice the struggles of others. See page 62 in which Richard wants his sister to share his glee for not having cancer when in fact his sister doesn't have time: She has pressing errands to run.
Nine. What is Richard's delusion or moral flaw?
That he has the right to fume and stew over his sister's injustice when in fact his resentment is killing him more than the injustice itself. His resentment is a cancer that is growing like the tumor on his face.
The spirit of Richard curdles as he contemplates his sister's parasitic ways. Likewise, Abel curdles with envy as he watches his friend Stewart live the life of a lascivious Billy Goat.
Comparing Richard and Abel (good mapping points for essay)
One. Overreacting to a crisis: Envy, resentment, and self-contempt become the crisis for both Richard and Abel, but it is their overreaction to the crisis that puts them in their demonic state. We all have envy, resentment, and self-loathing when we see ourselves being weak, but not all of us overreact to our failings. It is the overreaction that sparks the demonic.
Two. Crisis of irrelevance: Have I squandered my existence? Why am I alive? Who cares about me? Did I go down a wrong path? Am I a joke? Have I lost all my dignity? Have I lost my youth, my moxie, my creative spark that I saw inside myself during my younger years?
Three. Need for a scapegoat. Is Person X or Group Y the culprit of my torment? Has my obedience to society's rigid script resulted in my betraying myself? Am I a victim of blind convention?
Four. Self-pity. I've followed the rules and look at me--nobody loves me. I'm not appreciated. I feel hollow. I am the empty shell of my former self. I wan more in life, but I'm too stupid to even know what to look for.
You can go down a rabbit hole of self-pity for which there is no return. I knew a rich doctor who never recovered after his wife left him for another doctor.
In "Peter Khan's Third Wife" Clare gradually descends deeper and deeper into madness with no self-awareness or Third Eye. She descends into madness. We can conclude that her story is not a love story; it's a story about madness.
What is a love story? A story about the Irrational Mind, Madness, and Insanity.
Rule Number for Writing a Love Story: It's Never About Love. It's About Eros.
It's a story, for sure, but it's never about love. Love is just the packaging and the illusion experienced by the character. We are so sick in our need to package ourselves, and others, as illusions of love that these illusions result in divorce lawsuits.
If not love, then was is a love story pointing to? There are psychological explanations for "falling in love."
1. Unrealistic expectations based on boredom, immaturity, and desperation.
2. Novelty, the craving for something new to eat before spitting it out and going on to some other new thing. This is the mindset of a child.
3. The chimera, a figment of our imagination in which we chase phantoms produced by our unconscious. These phantoms represent our hunger for an Absolute an Escape, a form of Transcendence.
4. We fall in love often to escape a sense of our mortality. Falling in love makes us feel that we've conquered death, that we've transcended death because we've found something eternal. All crappy love songs are about rising above the transitory, shallow world and connecting with something deeper and larger than ourselves and this connection makes us feel like we will never die. We can't emphasize this enough: The hunger for connection saves us but it can also kill us, depending on the manner of the connection. Remember: Connection is a way of overcoming death.
5. We cannot bear to live in boring temporal world; falling in love, we connect with a parallel world to the one we live in. This parallel world feels eternal and makes the temporal world we live in more bearable.
When you fall in love, life is no longer boring. Look what happens to jeans and chewing gum when you fall in love.
Rule Number Two for Writing a Love Story:
Love Always Ends in Madness, Misery, Or Death, Or All of the Above
Because the love story is rooted in the human condition of desperation and because a love story captures a state of ecstasy which by its very nature is short-lived, a love story always has a crash, in which the character falls to earth and either comes out wiser or more often than not is permanently psychologically damaged or even dies.
Rule Three for Writing a Love Story:
There must be intense feeling of love, a form of ecstasy, followed by the curdling of love, which is a fancy way of saying hate and this hate makes us question if we ever found love in the first place. The ecstasy of "love" creates unrealistic expectations (because this bliss cannot be sustained) and because the intensity of love (always touching) must fade and its fading results in resentment and awkwardness.
Rule Four for Writing a Love Story:
We become convinced of our "love experience" to the point of being possessed with moral rectitude and we have contempt for the rest of the world for its incapacity to understand our rarified emotion. Additionally, we become defensive and hostile to anyone who questions the authenticity and superiority of our "love experience." As a result, we pity and condenscend to the world for its inability to taste our paradise. As such we become, by virture of falling in love, borish, pompous, insufferable asses. Happily, or sadly, depending on how we look at it, our "love" vanishes and we are sent back to Planet Earth and join misery with the rest of the human race.
Rule Five for Writing a Love Story:
We always give everything of ourselves for this "love," sacrificing everything "to make it work," but in the end this "love" devours us while giving us nothing in return. As a result, we exit our "love experience" feeling used, abused, exploited and the aftertaste of such an experience is intense bitterness, perhaps even suicide. Often this motif is referred to as the "Vampire Theory of Love" in which one subject gets bigger and stronger while the other gets smaller and weaker.
Rule Six for Writing a Love Story:
Love in a story is never about connection with reality; it is always about retreating into the solipsistic fantasies of self; therefore, a love story is always about a form of insanity. See, for example, "Peter Khan's Third Wife."
Rule Seven for Writing a Love Story
Love in a story is always about the confusion of noble emotions for what "love" really is, capricious, fickle, impulsive behavior. A love story is not about the pursuit of love; it is about the dalliance, the caprice, the fling and aggrandizing something so base and selfish with words like "love."
Rule Eight for Writing a Love Story
Love in a story is often about the sublimation (re-direction) of erotic desire manifest in melancholia, depression, and other poignant emotions associated with the spiritual world. See "The Half Sister." Or see the famous James Joyce short story, "Araby." Unfulfilled erotic love finds expression in acute sadness and defeat.
Rule Nine for Writing a Love Story
The subject is never interested in love; the subject is both bored and frustrated with his low place in life so he "falls in love" to create drama, a distraction from his horrible life. As soon as he no longer feels frustrated, he abandons his love project even if it means breaking the other person's heart. Why? Because a love story at its heart is about selfishness. If love is born from selfishness, fear, and desperation, then it must end badly.
Rule Ten for Writing a Love Story
It must never be about the compatibility of the sexes. It must be about their essential incompatibility. As George Carlin said, "In relationships, women disover that men are stupid and men discover that women are crazy and the reason woman are crazy is because men are stupid."
“Peter Kahn’s Third Wife” 185
- What romantic yet sobering thought informs the story? That romantic love overtakes us, defies logic, survives great obstacles, grows from desperate circumstances, and in many ways is unforgiving and self-destructive.
- What ambiguity haunts us regarding Clare Keillor’s interactions with Peter Khan? Is the magic real, self-induced? Is Clare chasing a chimera? Is her life wasting away like the man Dexter in “Winter Dreams”? See 186 bottom.
- On the bottom of page 186, we see a drugged, opium-like state in which Clare is “glazed off from the everyday world.” It appears that her life is enduring the intervals between one glazed off moment and the next. Is this true of all of us? We wait for grand moments that never come. She models diamonds to be the image of perfection for others when her real life is a huge mess. There is our irony. She finds comfort in her job where she escapes into chimera world.
- With love, do we really deal with love or do we live inside our head, lost in a world of solipsism? Explain in the context of the story. Peter Khan seems oblivious to Clare, at least during his first two wives. Her "affair" is in her head.
- Could we argue that it should be obvious to Clare that Khan is not worthy of her obsessive love? Explain. Could Clare’s abusive husband impair her judgment? Explain.
- There are two worlds in this story: the glassed-in sphere on page 189 and the real world. What is the relationship between these two worlds and Clare?
- Why is Clare satisfied to live in a hateful relationship with Neil? See page 192. Perhaps her hate “readies” her for the “love” she must have with Peter Khan, an illusion.
- Does Clare really see Khan as a cipher on page 192?
- Why does Clare lie to Neil by telling him she had an affair with Khan?
- How does the story end?
Comma Splices
A comma splice is joining two sentences with a comma when you should separate them with a period or a semicolon.
Incorrect
People love Facebook, however, they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Corrected
People love Facebook. However, they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Corrected
Though people love Facebook, they fail to realize Facebook is sucking all their energy.
Incorrect
Patience is difficult to cultivate, it grows steadily only if we make it a priority.
Corrected
Patience is difficult to cultivate. It grows steadily only if we make it a priority.
Corrected
Because patience grows within us so slowly, patience is extremely difficult to cultivate.
You can use a comma between two complete sentences when you join them with a FANBOYS word or coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
Correct
People love Facebook, but they don't realize Facebook is sucking all of their energy.
Student Comma Splices Part One (the second sentence feels like a continuation of thought from the first sentence, which it is, but it still requires a period before it)
- My department decided to set up another office for me to do my work, I was no longer sitting out front like the permanent receptionist.
- The permanent receptionist never spoke to anyone in the offices, he just answered phones.
- He said, “You have a few choices, they need a coordinator at the new jobsite or working the business side as a coordinator.”
- I was lucky, many opportunities came to me and now I had the required experience to get the job I wanted.
- There was no stopping me, all my achievements were completed on my own.
- I was promoted quickly, I went from coordinator to senior executive within a few months.
- The drug dealing lifestyle was insatiable to Jeff Henderson, he believed he could elude the feds.
- Our methods paralleled, my method was legal, his was illegal.
- Jeff Henderson rose to the top of his game, he had established his fortune.
10. Jeff Henderson had no choice, it was either work or stay confined in his prison cell.
11. She was going to marry her high school sweetheart, what better way to spend the rest of your life in bliss?
12. He asked me to marry him, he was a Marine after all stationed in Japan.
13. Her life was finally beginning, she could leave Los Angeles.
14. This was her life, she did what she wanted.
15. Now she had nothing, she had given up her job to move overseas.
16. Life was too much of a challenge, she accepted that fact.
To Avoid Comma Splices, Know the Difference Between Coordinating Conjunctions (FANBOYS) and Conjunctive Adverbs
Examples
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week. Nonetheless, he remained skinny.
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week, but he remained skinny.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW. Instead, she bought the Acura.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW, yet she did buy the Acura.
Steve wasn't interested in college. Moreover, he didn't want to work full-time.
Steve wasn't interested in college, and he didn't want to work full-time.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me. However, I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do, however, want you to help me do my taxes.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid. Consequently, I think we should break up.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid, so I think we should break up.
Students hate reading. Therefore, they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Students hate reading, so they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Avoiding Comma Splices and Run-Ons
Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.
One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.
Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.
Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.
Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can often correct the problem.
Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.
Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.
Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.
Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.
Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.
Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.
Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.
Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.
Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.
Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?