Still working…

I’ve given the story I plan to submit to this contest a once over, and will be revising it again this week (it needs details like a bland dish needs salt).  I’ve got to be careful, though, because I’ve got an 8,000 word limit.  I should be done with it by the end of the weekend.  If it doesn’t make the grade, I’ll likely revise it again, with an eye toward putting it up for sale as a Kindle stand-alone.

“Bar Tabs” is almost done.  I’ll be giving it one more once-over when I finish my current project.  Then, as soon as I get the cover art, I’ll be posting it up as a $0.99 Kindle story (and offering it for free frequently).

I have the children’s story, Lizzy’s Tail, totally finished, and halfway through the publication process.  That is, again, stalled out by the cover art not being quite ready.

I’m working on Fire and Forge, but things are coming along…strangely.  The story chapters are a bit darker than I intended them to be.  I think real life is intruding on my imaginary world, and making it difficult to get things to come out like I want them to.  Here’s hoping things work out better in other chapters.

Last but not least, Pendragon Resurgent is still selling…but slowly.  I’ve sold a total of 21 copies over the month or so it’s been out.  Ten last month, and eleven so far this month, with one taken out through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

 

Elements of persuasion

Despite decades of trying to replace the classic ideas put forth by Aristotle in the book compiled from his lectures and writings, Rhetoric, not one modern theoretician has managed.  His basic ideas of how persuasive argument is built has not changed, mostly because they are basic: the proper use of ethos, pathos, and logos create effective and persuasive argument.

Ethos

Ethos is the root word of ethics, but in this case it refers to the credibility of the author.  Is your author an expert in the field he or she is discussing?  Yes?  Then he or she likely knows what they’re talking about.  However.  If they can’t express it well–staying focused on their main topic, keeping their writing organized logically, and thoroughly developing it with good choices of evidence and elaborating on exactly how that evidence proves their claims, you’re less likely to pay attention to what they’re saying, and less likely to believe them because of how they’re saying it.

And if their grammar and/or punctuation is poor, you’re even less likely to believe they know what they’re talking about.

In other words, how they present their argument is almost more important to their credibility than their expertise.  How else do you explain people listening to Hollywood actors or professional athletes about health issues that they know less about than your average layman?

Now.  Apply that to you, and your writing.  Think of this: say you’re moved to write a letter to the editor.  Say there was an article published in your local paper that you know is wrong, because you’re an unsung expert in the field they’re flubbing.  Want to know the best way to build your credibility and get your letter published?

Use your grammar check.  Every grammar checker will catch obvious problems (misspelled words, missing punctuation) that would get your letter filed in the circular filing cabinet right next to the editor’s desk.

Pathos

Pathos is the root word of sympathy, and of empathy.  Where writing persuasively is concerned, pathos is appealing to the audience’s emotions.  Politicians and tort lawyers love this because it is so very easy to use–and to abuse.  John Edwards (former senator and current scumbag) used this hugely in class action lawsuits against obstetricians: he pretended to channel stillborn babies who were supposedly killed by doctors’ carelessness, asserted he spoke for children who were oxygen deprived at birth (again, supposedly because of doctors’ carelessness) and left retarded or with severe cerebral palsy.

It worked.  Obstetricians now have to pay astronomical sums for insurance against malpractice because of that particular individual’s efforts in using pathos.  Why do you think having a baby costs so much?  They pass the costs on to the patients.

Pathos is effective.  It’s easy to use.  The best and easiest way to use it is to find individual stories–anecdotes–and use them as evidence to support your claim.

Logos

Logos is the root word of logic, and is the most difficult tool to use well.  Aristotle used it to mean “what is rationally possible”–for instance, in most domestic violence cases, it rarely comes out that half the time, the woman is the instigator.  It just doesn’t make rational sense to anyone (except another violent woman) that it could be possible for a five and a half foot tall, hundred and twenty pound woman would attack a six foot tall, hundred and eighty pound man.  It just doesn’t make sense, because a rational person knows that that kind of a size difference leads to a bad result…except for when it’s being used in a divorce.

Logos is also the use of hard evidence–facts, statistics, experiments, studies, and anonymous polling results–to support your argument.  Convincing the average American of the validity of a position through the use of hard evidence is much, much harder than using their emotions to manipulate them.  There is a small minority who actually look for the logical underpinnings of an argument–and that minority is shrinking all the time–however, you cannot convince that minority of your position without it.

And last, but not least, with that minority–your solid use of logos supports and builds your ethos.  Your credibility depends upon the evidence you choose, how you present it, and the audience you present it to.

The best arguments have a solid grounding in all three elements.

Audience

We’ve talked about purpose, focus, organization, and development.  All of these issues are very important for being able to achieve what you want to with your writing.

There’s more to it than those elements, though.  You need to keep your audience in mind.

Who are you writing for?  Are you planning on persuading, or just entertaining them?  What do they need?  What do you need to do to convince them that your argument is right, if you’re being persuasive?

Say you’re trying to be persuasive.  Say you have a proposal for something, and it’s something you really want done.  First question: who can get done what you want done?

For example, say you’re a college student, and you want to get the chairs in a particular classroom replaced.  They’re ugly, uncomfortable, and completely unsafe–the rivets are loose, several bits are broken, and most of the desks feel like they could simply fall apart when the students sit down in them.

Who is your audience?  Who can change that?  The university president?  He’d take your proposal…and put it directly in the round filing cabinet next to his desk, otherwise known as the trash can.  So, who should you direct your proposal to?

What department takes care of the grounds?  With Missouri Southern, it’s the physical plant.  So.  That’s where you direct your proposal.  To whom do you direct it?  The director is probably going to react the same as the president.  The secretary can’t do anything to replace the chairs.  Neither will the paint supervisor, the guy in charge of planning the flower beds, or the guy in charge of the fire suppression systems.  Hmm…the carpentry supervisor looks promising.  So does the facilities planner.  It will sort of depend on what you want done to replace the desks.

Say you want to replace the desks with three or four long, narrow tables.  The carpentry supervisor may be who you need to direct your idea to.  How do you convince him?  What does he need to be convinced?

He needs to see that this is something that would be good for the university, because that’s what’s good for his job, and what’s best for him keeping his job, and maybe earning a bonus–or a raise.  So, how do you convince him of this?

The same way you convince any other employee of the university: point out how the desks reflect on the university.  How the ugly desks make the university look like it doesn’t care about its students or its image, how uncomfortable desks might drive enrollment elsewhere, and how a collapsing desk may lead to a student being badly hurt on university grounds by university equipment.  Then, point out the benefits of building tables and acquiring chairs.  Point out that it’s cheaper that replacing the desks with new desks, that repair for the desks isn’t really possible with their construction, and that the new, updated facilities will increase enrollment.

Do it that way, and you’re convincing your audience that what you want is in their best interests.

If you focus on what you want, and why you want it?  Yeah, they’re not gonna care.  Your standard university employee doesn’t give half a damn about the students or their comfort.  Your standard university employee only cares about their job, and about the money whatever you want will cost–or save, by avoiding possible lawsuits–the university.

Focus your arguments on what your audience wants.  What your audience cares about.  Because your audience won’t care about you (unless your audience is your parents or grandparents).

And don’t forget to maintain your focus and organization, or to adequately develop your justification of why your proposal is in your audience’s best interests.

Development

One of the main complaints I hear from my students is “I can’t write three to five pages!”

Well, no.  Not the way most of them write.  Most of what I see coming into my class is no more fleshed out than an outline, not really an essay.  So, what’s the secret?  The secret is in thorough development.

Development is actually really simple.  It’s a paragraph level writing tool, unlike focus and organization, which are more overall tools.  Good development is made up of claims, evidence, and elaboration.

Your claim is your paragraph’s topic sentence.  For that, you need to go back to your thesis statement–your overall clam with reasons.  Those reasons form the topic sentences for the main body paragraphs.  You may have a subclaim or two to flesh out, but your main topic sentence is one of the reasons listed in your thesis statement.  Start your paragraph with a sentence or two making your claims.  Then, you move on to your evidence.

So, what kind of evidence do you need?  That depends.  There’s hard evidence, and soft evidence.  Hard evidence consists of facts, figures, and statistics.  Basically, you find a lot of this either by having a lot of technical knowledge on the topic you’re writing about, or you do research to find it (more on finding reliable sources in a future post).  Soft evidence is anecdotes–stories from your experience, or from other people’s.  Hypothetical examples also fit in soft evidence.  Most of the time, you’ll need both kinds of evidence to truly convince your readers.  You’ll need about three to six sentences of hard or soft evidence per paragraph (and it’s best to combine both).  Then, you elaborate on your evidence.

What do I mean by elaborate on the evidence?  Well, how often do you say something to someone else that you think proves a point, only to have them come to a completely different conclusion?  You can easily avoid that in writing by explaining, in eight to ten sentences interspersed between your evidence, exactly how your bits of evidence illustrate the initial claim you made in your paragraph’s topic sentence.  Walk your readers through the logic chain that you see connecting your evidence to your claims.

So, altogether, each paragraph will have between one and three sentences of claim, three to six sentences of evidence, and six to ten sentences of elaboration on your evidence.  Do you see a pattern?  You need approximately twice as much evidence as claim, and about twice as much elaboration as evidence.  Each paragraph needs between ten and twenty sentences.

That means a single paragraph will be at least half to three quarters of a page long, double-spaced.  And with full development on three main points, you’ve got a much stronger paper that meets the minimum requirement easily, if you’re writing for a class, and clearly makes your point even if you’re not.

 

More on organization…

When I write a paper, or a story, or a novel, the very first thing I decide on is the order everything is going to go in.  And the very first step I take in completing a paper, or a story, or a novel is to create a basic outline.  First A, then B, then C.

Outlining your work before you start it has a few, major advantages.  First, you are better able to stay focused.  Second, your outline keeps your points organized.  Last, but not least, it speeds the writing process.  If you use an outline, you have your topic sentences and some of the rest already done.  All you have to do is fill in the detail.

Right now, I’m working on revising a textbook I wrote for my Composition I class.  The original textbook was  written for an online class where I’d have minimal interactions with students (mostly because I only know when they need something if they actually ask…which the majority don’t do).  I thought about it, and realized that some of the main complaints I had when I’d used a Blackboard enhanced course to contain worksheets and stuff was that my students didn’t know where to find stuff, didn’t know how to use Blackboard, and didn’t want to bother with trying to learn how to use it without help.  So, my first chapter in my textbook was how to use the features in Blackboard that they’d need.

Second, I wanted to discuss the type of writing we’d be doing–expository–and why we’d be starting with that, and how to do it.  I outlined it…then used the outline as bolded headers for them to use to find things quickly.

After that came the assignment chapters.  I usually started out with questions: Why are we writing this paper?  What goes into it?  How is it organized?  I used those as my outline, and my section headers.  Then, I wrote answering the questions.

Yes, I can reuse a lot of the stuff from my previous draft; however, a lot of it will need to be scrapped, and one of the assignments just isn’t going to work in a classroom setting.  Because of that, I’m going to have to substitute a different assignment–which means outlining and writing at least one new chapter.

To recap: outline your work before you start.  It makes everything easier and smoother.

How to write: Organization

Organization is important.  Very important.  It’s closely related to focus, since your thesis statement also helps create and maintain your organization, and clues your readers into what you’re doing with your paper by giving them a road map to your points.

It also helps your focus: by staying organized, it’s easier to stay focused.

I usually focus hard on teaching organization and focus.  Each is fairly simple to understand, and there are only a few things to remember about each.  Organization carries two major pitfalls: keep similar points together, and keep your body paragraphs’ main points in the same order you have them in your thesis statement.

One of my standard assignments for my Freshman Composition I courses is an analysis paper.  They have to analyze whether something is a good or bad example of something else.  Because the example paper they have analyzes whether someone is making a good argument by using the criteria of good use of ethos (appealing to the audience through the author’s credibility), pathos (appeal through audience emotions), and logos (appeal through the use of facts, figures, and logic), many of my students do the same.  The article I discuss is a little complicated–the writer is very credible in the subject he’s writing about, and makes excellent use of the appeal to the audience’s emotions, but does a lousy job with using enough facts and figures to back up his argument.  So, that’s how my thesis statement reads:

William Raspberry uses ethos and pathos quite well in his essay “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”; however, his use of logos leaves a lot to be desired.

Unfortunately, many of them looked at the order of the rhetorical parts (ethos, pathos, logos), and didn’t see that I’d kept like with like: what Raspberry did well vs. what he didn’t.  That led to some problems.  Some of the students wrote about other arguments–and some of those other arguments didn’t do well, or did poorly with pathos.  And their thesis statements and body paragraphs had it splitting the paragraphs analyzing what the writer did right with the single paragraph of what the writer did wrong.  Which, in turn, is jarring, and leaves the reader with the impression that the essay was badly written.  Keep like with like.

The other problem is that many of the rest didn’t use their thesis statement as their framework for writing: they had their points in one order in the thesis statement, but had the body paragraphs in a different order.  I actually had one student go fully backwards–their first body paragraph’s main point was the last point listed in their thesis statement.

To recap, the two main things to keep in mind with organization are these: keep similar points together (did well in X and Y, but badly in Z), and make sure your paper’s body paragraphs follow the order outlined in your thesis statement.

If you stay focused, and follow the proper organization, you’re halfway there with what you need to know to write well.  Sadly, it takes most of a semester for me to convince most of the students I get coming through my classes that yes, it really is that simple.

Focus

So, you’ve chosen your purpose: to inform.  And your topic: say you want to write about your dog.  Now, you need to decide what to focus on.  Do you want to inform people of the benefits of having the same kind of dog you do?  Great!  Let’s talk about that.

Your dog is a great dog–I’m absolutely certain of that.  I mean, my dog is a great dog.  She’s calm, even-tempered, not mean in the slightest.  She’s territorial, but can tell friend from stranger (and doesn’t go batshit insane when it’s a friend).  She’s a great little dog–a Scottish Terrier.

But…she’s stubborn.  She’s not easy to train because, while she does want to do things that make her family happy, she also wants to do things she wants to do.  She yanks on the leash, and if her front feet are on the ground, she can jerk hard enough to pop my wrist, elbow, and shoulder, and yank me off balance.

So…focus.  My purpose is to inform readers of what a great dog a Scottish Terrier is.  My focus should be on her good points: that she’s got a great temperment, is very smart, isn’t huge or hyper, and takes minimal grooming.  Yes, I probably should mention her bad points, but shouldn’t dwell on them.  They should kind of be glossed over.  Otherwise…I could end up complaining about the dog’s bad behavior, and turning my audience off of getting a Scotty dog.

How do you stay on focus?  Easy: have a good, strong thesis statement that includes your reasons.  Those listed reasons can easily be turned into topic sentences for your main body paragraphs.  My paper about my Scotty would have a thesis statement that read like this:

A Scottish Terrier is a great dog for a family because they’re even tempered, not too big or hyper if you have a small space, and don’t take much grooming.

My reasons would be used later as topic sentences for body paragraphs, helping me avoid the whole focus pitfall of telling my audience what a great choice a Scotty is, but spending the whole paper complaining about how stubborn she is, and what a pain she can be to take care of–even though that’s not what I think at all.

To recap: focus is important.  If you lose sight of what you want to write about, not only will your audience have no clue what you’re trying to say, but also might be convinced of the opposite of what you intended.  Your thesis statement is an important part of helping you maintain the focus you wanted.

How to write: purpose

I’ve been teaching composition for ten years as of this August.  I’ve taught expository writing and persuasive writing equally often during that time, and it occurs to me that most of my students come to me knowing nothing about writing except that it’s hard.

Except…it’s not hard.  Writing is actually really easy, if you know how to do it.  In times past, that was taught in elementary school.  I guess it’s not taught even in high school any longer.

So, I figured I’d write a series of posts about what’s important in writing anything from a letter to the editor to an article to an editorial to a blog post meant to do nothing but entertain.

First, before you put pen to paper (or pull up a document of whatever type in your word processor program), you need to decide why you’re writing.  Do you want to teach someone how to do something?  Make somebody laugh?  Persuade your local congresscritter to vote against something?

The reason you’re writing is your purpose.  It’s incredibly important–as important as the words on the page, because it dictates literally everything else: your focus on your topic, your organization, how thoroughly developed your writing needs to be (or how concise), your tone and style, and how much attention you have to pay to your grammar and editing.

So…what do you want to write?  Think about that.  Write it down.