Developing PEEL Paragraphs (PEEL equals Point, Evidence or Example, Elaboration or Explanation, and Links)
When writing a research paper, it’s very important in the evidence or example section to use a quote from the text.
Paragraph Example (I've underlined the links or transitions)
The essay "Green Guilt" makes a powerful argument that we must accept the afflictions of guilt and sin, whether that guilt be caused by religious or secular forces, in order that we survive and thrive in a cooperative society. As we read in Asma’s essay, “All this internalized self-loathing is the cost we pay for being civilized. In a very well organized society that protects the interests of many, we have to refrain from our natural instincts.” Indeed, our natural instincts, if left unchecked, would create a barbaric world where no kind of viable or even pleasing society could flourish. A second curse of selfish desires unbridled by a sense of guilt and sin would be the moral dissolution that would ensue as hordes of people would become numb to pleasures resulting in frustration and increased violence. We see evidence of such mayhem and grand displays of nihilism in hedonistic societies right before they crumble such as the Fall of Rome. Finally, let us not neglect to point out that a sense of sin can prompt us to be more disciplined so that we maximize the success of our personal goals rather than squandering our life on the foolish errands prompted by our unharnessed desires. To conclude, Asma convincingly shows us that it is in our best interests to repress our base passions by swallowing the Sin Pill in order to fulfill our potential as individuals and as a society.
Sentence Fragments
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
Fragment
Going to college is difficult on your time. Not to mention all the money it costs.
Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
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.
Study Questions for “You’re Ugly, Too” by Lorrie Moore
One. What is Zoe’s crisis of connection?
Zoe is an urbane, well educated woman living in a bovine, backwards Midwestern town where the men are looking for the Heidi Archetype, a simple woman who smiles and serves and allows herself to be her husband’s accessory.
She is very lonely. Lonely people tend to live in their head. Living in the head is very dangerous. It lends toward solipsism, a form of being disconnected from reality as one withdraws more and more into one's self.
Solipsism makes us go crazy.
Not only is Zoe crazy, but so are the men she meets.
They're crazy because they want a fictitious woman known as "Heidi."
Heidi is a docile homemaker who serves her man 24/7.
While the subservient Heidi Archetype really does exist, she is becoming more and more rare, and she tends to live inside men's imaginations more than in the real world. Therefore, we can conclude that men on a Heidi Quest are crazy.
Zoe is repelled by Heidi-seeking men. Her being repelled all the time as made her create a defensive wall based on sarcasm.
Zoe’s sarcastic defenses protect her from Heidi-seeking male troglodytes to a point, but over time these troglodytes become corrosive so that the very thing (caustic sarcasm) that protects and medicates her from her alienation and isolation becomes worse than the original poison. In other words, she has maladapted to her own defense mechanism becoming a prisoner of it in ways she cannot totally see.
Maladaptation happens when our defense mechanisms, which used to benefit us, begin to work against us.
For example, our defenses, whether they be sarcasm, deadpan irony, pessimism, cynicism, or lowered expectations in the age of Facebook, often reach the law of diminishing returns in which they create more problems than they solve. For example, you may have a suffocating boyfriend or girlfriend, and you deal with this person by "disappearing," both in real life and social media.
Your disappearing act helps you deal with the stress of having a suffocating partner; however, over time you begin to disappear from yourself. You don't even know who you are anymore. You've maladapted to a problem and have made the problem worse.
Two. We read that Zoe Hendricks is “almost pretty.” How does this pertain to one of the story’s themes?
We find that most of us are at a point in our lives where we are ALMOST SOMETHING: almost pretty, almost handsome, almost buffed, almost skinny, almost appealing, almost successful, almost rich, almost secure, almost popular, almost famous, almost happy, etc. You're almost a YouTube star. You're almost a straight-A student. You almost really like your boyfriend or girlfriend and trying to convince yourself that the relationship is "really amazing." You're almost--you fill in the blank.
As soon as you achieve your goal and find "completeness," you'll find something else to "almost be."
What happens, too often, is in our quest to get beat the sense of ALMOST we commit self-destruct through OVERKILL, relying on extreme measures to up the ante.
We’ve seen people who keep getting plastic surgery, one after an another, because they feel they’re ALMOST good looking and they end up looking like, to use an image from Tina Fey, a hand puppet with smudged lipstick or a clown fish or some other grotesquerie.
As humans, we tend to feel like we’ve constantly fallen short of whatever popular culture expects from us. Combine this with the glorification of perfect bodies, beauty, wealth, power, and celebrity in the media and we are vulnerable, fragile, and broken creatures susceptible to feeling like we’re ALMOST GOOD ENOUGH and thus have fallen short.
We read of Zoe: “She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn, no doubt, for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out the sides of her head like antennae.”
When we compensate for our perceived shortcomings, we often become frightening and grotesque with our oversized earrings, wristwatches, car rims, steroid-infused muscles, etc. Or we overdo our bachelor pad with the snap-command fireplace and clap-command descending king-size waterbed.
We lose to a contest in life and we adapt to our loss.
When I was four years old, I lost out to a girl because my raisins weren't as good as another kid's Captain Kangaroo Cookies. I learned that getting the girl is a competition, and if I were to be successful I would have to adapt, but my adaptation went too far.
I'd pump up in the parking lot before asking out a waitress.
Or on a first date I took off my shirt to play the piano while standing up. Standing up and playing while revealing my torso was overkill. It's a form of maladaptation.
Three. How does Zoe’s life contrast with her younger sister Evan?
Evan and her live-in boyfriend suffer first-world problems like sharing a luxury pool in a Manhattan sky-rise condo instead of owning their own pool. They feel like they're "roughing it" by lowering themselves into the communal pool.
They are a settled couple. The boyfriend watches football. They don’t cook. They seem to have invested little in the relationship and put a minimum effort in their lives. They are both maladapted to complacent mediocrity and as a result they live a life of brain-dead zombies.
As a couple that settles for a sort of mediocre, mindless existence, they live in contented self-complacency with low expectations, just like Facebook "friends" have low expectations from one another. The bonds in such relationships are flimsy and superficial. Zoe is smart enough to understand that succumbing to such an existence is a form of death.
In contrast, Zoe, who languishes in the Midwest and thinks she’s superior to the bovine peasants that surround her, lives in a state of intellectual pride alternated by the despair of her loneliness and learned helplessness.
Dionysus and Apollo in the Story
The contrast of Zoe’s Midwestern home and her sister’s Manhattan one further underscores another story contrast, the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian forces.
Apollo represents order reason and control. Dionysus represents frenzy and excess.
I’ve read that any short story can be reduced to the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. That’s probably true.
In the story, we see Zoe goes through Apollonian cycles, living a life of dry routine and control, punctuated by Dionysian ones, characterized by reckless self-abandon, when she visits her sister in Manhattan.
The climactic Halloween party is the Dionysian meltdown where her mask comes off, she sees her chin whisker as a sign of being a witch and a Misfit, and she can’t even pull out the whisker, a symbol of her futility and ineptitude.
Four. What 3 Life Traps do we see in the story?
Trap of Intellectual Pride:
Zoe’s belief that she is better than others, that she is a genius surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces, reinforces her isolation and bitterness.
When I was in my twenties, I thought I was better than most others. I thought I was smarter, funnier, hipper and these grandiose thoughts served to obscure my essential fear of my own humanity, which didn't become more evident until I became older.
Zoe is similar. Her pride is an escape from her fear of her own human foibles.
Trap of Complacency and Self-Satisfied Mediocrity:
We see Evan, Zoe’s sister, content to settle in a mediocre relationship. As we read, “He and Evan lived in it like two kids in a dorm, beer cans and clothes strewn around.” Their romance is gone. They’re nesting like two sloths in front of the TV.
At one point Evan says, “He’s wearing psychic cold cream and curlers, if you know what I mean.” Their settling together is a form of stagnation and death.
We also see Zoe’s students who are privileged and well-fed “large quantities of meat and eggs” whose brains are empty of knowledge, ideas, and critical thinking skills. They, too, represent self-satisfied mediocrity.
Her students’ sense of privilege and entitlement makes them empty-headed, bovine narcissists who are barely tolerable. They suffer from a “healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographical,” Zoe thinks sarcastically. Her loathing of her students reinforces her isolation in her community, and this isolation must make her anxious and depressed. Her disconnection compels her to create a proud persona, which only reinforces her disconnection from others.
To add to her contempt for the students, they feel their opinions are equal to hers or anyone else’s when in fact they don’t understand that informed opinions, which they don’t have, are superior. For her students, all opinions are “just opinions” and therefore are all alike.
Trap of Despair:
Zoe’s pride, which makes her think she’s too smart for other people, also feeds her despair and helplessness. Despair is the just the flip coin of narcissistic pride. To coddle one's despair is to affirm that one's despair is noteworthy and special, so that this wallowing in despair becomes a narcissistic exercise. "No one feels pain like I do."
Zoe’s failures with men prove lugubrious (beyond pathetic) and reinforce her cynicism and despair about connecting with a man. She can’t settle like her sister does, so she feels doomed to the private hell of her loneliness. She feels trapped, alone, anxious, and helpless.
Five. What is the Heidi Archetype?
Zoe believes that all men deep down want a Heidi, a subservient hourglass shaped simpleton who obsequiously serves her husband with a perky, ingratiating smile.
Zoe’s caustic, corrosive humor makes her the antithesis of the Heidi. She seems to relish in cruel humor and in fact the story title, “You’re Ugly, Too,” points to a cruel joke that defines the default humor setting inside Zoe’s psyche.
Six. What do Zoe’s mirror images say about the loss of herself?
Images in the mirror are a story motif or pattern. They serve as an opportunity for Zoe to see her personality’s dissolution and disintegration.
As her pride, sarcasm, and cynicism grow, a valuable part of her vanishes and she becomes a grotesque version of her real self. She can barely recognize herself. In one scene she has a chin hair that she can’t remove without drawing blood.
In another moment of despair she sees herself as “a woman alone at the movies with everything in a Baggie” evidencing how close she feels to becoming a bag lady. These morbid thoughts underscore her identity as an outcast and a pariah.
She misplaces her concern for self through hypochondria, the worry that she has cancer. Most likely, her stomach problems or dyspepsia are psychosomatic, the result of her anxiety, isolation, and worry.
In yet another grotesque image, Earl is dressed up as a naked woman and his disgusting image is a metaphor for Zoe’s feelings of unattractiveness and having replaced her original self with some fiendish looking Frankenstein.
Perhaps, then, Earl is Zoe’s doppelganger (double).
A Good Thesis
A good thesis is a complete sentence that defines your argument.
A good thesis addresses your opponents’ views in a concession clause.
A good thesis often has mapping components or mapping statements that outline your body paragraphs.
A good thesis avoids the obvious and instead struggles to grapple with difficult and complex ideas.
A good thesis embraces complexity and sophistication but is expressed with clarity.
For literary analysis, a thesis could be the following:
argumentative
cause and effect analysis
extended definition
Essay Option #4 for "You're Ugly ,Too" by Lorrie Moore using argumentation
In the context of the story, support, refute, or complicate the argument that for a single woman like Zoe there is a point in which the personality, adapting to being alone with its lack of demands for sacrifice, defies romance and intimacy. In other words, when it comes to relationships, a woman can adapt to her single state and this adaptation, or maladaptation, makes her reach The Point of No Return in which she becomes "undateable." Do you know any such women who compare to Zoe? What process have they gone through that makes it almost impossible for them to connect romantically?
Points to Consider
One. Zoe adapts to loneliness and the lifestyle of no compromise.
Two. Her standards for the type of man who can disrupt her lifestyle continue to elevate till she reaches The Point of No Return.
Three. Her adaptation to loneliness and male troglodytes hungry for the Heidi Myth causes her to develop a prickly facade of irony and cynicism that makes her off-putting and grotesque so that he repels not only the troglodytes but the qualified, good men as well.
Four. Educated men who would otherwise be part of her dating pool find themselves searching for the Heidi Archetype, the bovine, servile ignoramus, rather than an educated, autonomous woman.
Five. Lonely professional women such as Zoe find they are stagnant in a perpetual condition of intellectual pride alternated by bitter despair and this alternating cycle becomes a prison from which they can see no escape, thus defining their abject learned helplessness.
Sample Argumentative Thesis
While Zoe has allowed her cynicism to get the best of her, her loneliness and failure to connect meaningfully with a man is largely the fault of modern American society evidenced by male sexism against professional women, perpetual male adolescence, and the undying Heidi Archetype.
Refutation of the Above Thesis
Blaming Zoe’s woes on sexist men is a pathetic argument that diverts attention from the severity of Zoe’s diseased mind, that attempts to abnegate Zoe’s responsibility for improving her life, and that relies on crude male stereotypes to make its claim.
Variation of the First Thesis
Educated, professional women like Zoe are better served suffering loneliness than settling with the modern American man when we consider the modern male’s sexism against independent women, his perpetual adolescence, and his deep love of the Heidi Archetype.
Sample Cause and Effect Analysis Thesis
Professional women who remain unwed through their thirties are close to reaching the Point of No Return in which they will most likely remain single for the rest of their lives. The cause of their perennial single status is the inevitable bitterness and caustic irony that changes their core personality, the dependence on their uncompromised routine, and the cultivation of highly idiosyncratic behavior that defies any kind of harmonious living arrangement with another human.
Sample Extended Definition Thesis
The Heidi Archetype, referred to in Lorrie Moore’s masterful short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” is a male fantasy characterized by a women who engages in self-abnegation or self-erasure, who slavishly accommodates her spouse, and whose life work is to allay any matrimonial conflicts as the Heidi sees this latter task as her Life Mission.
Be Sure to Use Present Verb Tense When You Write Literary Analysis Essays
With literary analysis, we use the present verb tense.
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.
Hanging out on Facebook is like eating Twinkies.
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:
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?
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