discussion 4 post, Alice in wonderland

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Week 4 Homework (done at your own pace) (1) Start Alice in Wonderland. (2) Read the middle section (“History of Hell”) in Partially Excited States. (3) From “files” area on Canvas, look again at these handouts: What is a Thesis? What is Audience? What is a Paragraph? Discussion 4 topic In reading Alice in Wonderland and Partially Excited States, you have probably started to notice words new to you. Keep track of those and look them up, then share with us half a dozen new words you learned from doing the assigned reading. D4 is due no later than 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, 13 September 2017 What Is a Thesis? All graded essays in this course must have a thesis: a main point that you present and defend. It needs to be something debatable—something you can prove and that is worth thinking about. This is not the same as a thesis statement, which is a sentence (sometimes two) that compresses your thesis into an explicit statement, often placed at the end of your introductory paragraph. Many essays have a thesis statement; many do not. Reasons to hold back include having something so startling or objectionable that you could lose your readers before you even start; in that case, it makes sense to bury the thesis sentence in the middle of the paper or even to skip it entirely. You need a thesis; you may or may not need a thesis statement. What is not a thesis? Here are examples: • • • • Child abuse is wrong. On average, men earn more than women. Race is a problem in America today. Reintroducing wolves to California will be controversial. None of these could be reasonably debated; all are statements of fact. They cannot be a thesis. Meanwhile, even a claim that can be debated may just be a weak thesis. The grading rubric expects writers to defend interesting, challenging, insightful ideas. Merely proving the obvious is not enough. What is a weak thesis? Here are examples of very dull, obvious claims: • • • • Football is the most American of all the sports. When we travel to Mars, the biggest challenge is not radiation exposure, but psychology. The “war on drugs” failed because we did not address the issues of supply and demand. The American Civil War was less about slavery than about industrialization vs. farming. How can you write a better thesis, one that could help get you an “A”? To do good work means you take the audience someplace new: you help us see the problem a new way. Let us say you are writing a paper about the most important American invention of the past 100 years. You look around your desk and think, “Oh I know, I will write about my new iPhone.” That would be at best a “C-” thesis. Why? Out of a class of 30 students, probably 15 are writing about their smart phones, so that makes it expected and hence average, and by definition, average work gets a letter grade of C. But a bigger problem is that it assumes that smart phones are good. Just because something is popular, that does not make it good. Cigarettes used to be popular (even doctors smoked); that does not make cigarettes good.   2   Problems with cell phones include their cost—one is locked into payment plans for years and years, then you need to buy a case, insurance, increased data allotments—plus we need to think about the number of car accidents caused while texting, the rise in cyber-bullying, lessened attention spans, or a culture where nobody can calculate a restaurant tip without their phone’s help. The iPhone makes social media postings easy (perhaps too easy), increasing America’s nauseating trend of empty content and rampant narcissism. A smart phone is not inherently good or important. So let’s say you take it a step further. Rather than look at the iPhone as fun to use, maybe step back and look at what makes it American. • • • It was designed by an expat Brit, Jony Ive. (What is “American” about that? We are a nation of immigrants; that a foreign-born person is our best designer is delicious irony.) Apple is very profitable because it uses exploited labor and tax evasion. (By off-shoring manufacturing, Apple dodges taxes and increases profits: again, very American practices. Most of our “American” companies do it.) The iPhone makes shopping easy; sure, you can use it for bird-watching or to report a car accident, but most people use smart phones to post to social media, do online shopping, find out movie times (which is more shopping, in essence). Capitalism is based not on social justice or outdoor activities, but on going to the mall. These phones facilitate that addiction. But what if your American inventions paper looked at things differently, not in terms of an object (the cotton gin or the tommy gun) but looked at ideas? For example, Jazz music and the western (as a movie genre), those are two very American contributions to world culture. Henry Ford invented the modern assembly line—not just factories, but an idea about factories. Blues gave us rock and roll. Again, those are rather obvious choices. You can prove any of them but there’s no reasonable opposition. You set a low bar with those choices: they are too easy. They are not going to bring your paper to an A, not even if you prove that the first Star Wars was basically a western set in space, or that the World War II drama Casablanca is more a western than it is an example of film noir. What’s the best American invention? What about this thesis: Drywall. That’s the most important American product of the past 100 years. Cheap to make, easy to ship, filled with the most basic of ingredients (gypsum), these standardized plasterboard sheets make possible almost every modern building, from houses to hotels to hospitals. Yet they also create a living-wage occupation (a top-end drywaller makes more than a teacher) and they even added a new word to the English language (“sheetrock”). If you wanted to ask which would make daily life worse, not having an iPhone or not having drywall, the answer is drywall. Only problem with that as a thesis? Drywall was invented in England, not America, and it’s more than 100 years old. But that at least allows you to break into new territory, so you can think about objects like latex condoms (1920s until today), the pencil (Shakespeare never had one), leaf blowers, where hip hop came from, or In-n-Out Burger, or the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Your job? Make us smarter. What is a Paragraph? College essays need sustained paragraphs, and odds are, you’re probably not doing enough in yours. Here is the template for an ideal paragraph (with notes on exceptions to follow below). You need to • • • • • • • • • • provide a transition from whatever you were doing previously introduce a main point or topic let us know what you’ll be doing overall begin to support your paragraph’s main point introduce each quotation as you use it cite support with in-text, MLA-style documentation provide more than one piece of evidence allow counter views to challenge your evidence refute the counter views bring the paragraph to a logical close and make a transition to the next idea All of this takes ten or fifteen sentences; just two or three won’t be enough. Look at your finished, hard-copy essay: if there are four or more paragraphs per page, you’re probably not developing and supporting your work very thoroughly. On a regular page, there won’t be room for four paragraphs. Exceptions? Sometimes you want something shorter in order to provide a pivot between one idea and the next; you can have something as brief as a one-word paragraph if it’s the right thing to do. (You might end a long paragraph with the rhetorical question, “And of these choices, which is the correct answer?” And then do a paragraph break, and answer that with a stand-alone sentence that says, “None of them.” And then we go to the next paragraph and in that one, there you show how all the received knowledge about why the war on drugs misperceives the problem and that the actual way to see it is blah blah.) Don’t let your work sound formulaic or mechanical: humans crave variety. a note on format Paragraphs flow continuously, using the same double-spacing as the main text. Do not insert additional space between them. You may need to go into the paragraph dialog box of Word and check the option, “Do not insert extra space.” (If you can, default it so it’s checked permanently.) Paragraphs should always start with an indent: tab over half an inch from the regular margin. If in doubt, check the models Hood has provided. What is Audience? “Audience” asks, Who do you imagine you’re talking to inside your paper? Many students do poorly because they write papers aimed at an audience of simpletons. That was fine in high school, but not here. Please write for smart, busy people—and please assume the best about us, not the worst. One way to learn audience is to watch TED talks on YouTube. See for example the list of the 25 most popular TED talks of all time: https://www.ted.com/playlists/171/the_most_popular_talks_of_all Another way to learn audience is to look at these smart magazines, available at Barnes & Noble: The New Yorker The Nation Vanity Fair Rolling Stone Harper’s Time Examples of poor choices of audience: xx Starting a sentence with “In my opinion....” Why it’s wrong: (a) Of course it’s your opinion; your name is on the paper, isn’t it? (b) Nobody gives a fig about your opinion. An opinion is not a thesis. (c) As a rhetorical marker, it signals a refusal to take responsibility. It tries to say, “Oh, don’t get mad at me, it’s just my opinion.” You must own, defend, prove any of your claims and assertions. Asking us not to be critical of your stance is not fair: either you have evidence or you don’t. xx Starting with a definition. “What is democracy? According to dictionary.com, it is....” Why it’s wrong: (a) Any adult can reasonably be expected to know this word. If you stop the show to define it, you are implying we don’t know it already. That’s insulting. (b) Even if we didn’t know it, going to the most obvious, child-like source insults us. At least go to a more subtle, insightful, or creative source than something we all own or can access from our phones in, like, two seconds. Between his house and his campus office, Hood owns ten dictionaries. He doesn’t need you to define basic things for him. (c) You’re wasting our time by retracing steps you may have needed to go through in getting ready to start the paper. Your own process and research is not our problem: after you have a good definition worked up (by contrasting and collating ten sources), then start the paper. Just because you may have needed to look it up doesn’t mean that we need to watch you look it up. Look it up on your own time, and come back to us when you’re ready to start.   2   How to fix this would be to take it to a higher level. This is correct: Although most Americans have a fairly agreed-upon sense of the word “democracy,” the Founding Fathers in framing the constitution worked from a radically different set of assumptions. According to Professor Krud, when Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams talked about “democracy,” they meant something more like “sit down and shut up, because father knows best” (45). Why this matters is that . . . Lying to the audience is also a problem. Hood received this statement in a paper once. xx Ever been to the mall? It’s a great place to go shopping. Why it’s wrong: (a) Of course the reader has been to the mall. We’re not space aliens. What a massively insulting thing to ask. Hood did not grow up on Neptune. (b) This sentence lies. The Antelope Valley Mall is a NOT a good place to go shopping. Do you think people from Santa Monica going to Third Street Promenade or hipsters going to vintage clothing stores on Melrose are wringing their hands in anguish, bereft because they have to shop in L.A. and can’t afford the gas to come to Palmdale and shop at the AV Mall? Certainly not. A good place to go shopping is London or Paris or New York. Write for grown-ups who inhabit the real world. Don’t write nonsense. (c) Who even cares about shopping? ¶ how to learn a better sense of audience ¶ As writing models, USA Today and the Antelope Valley Press aim too low, and Wikipedia is just a long report. (Nobody reads Wikipedia for fun.) Instead, to learn voice, do a search for “the most popular TED talks of all time.” These informal lectures model the voice to use when talking to us. Yet another way to learn audience is to go to a museum and take a docent tour. Go to the Getty and take the architecture tour or go to LACMA (L.A. County Museum of Art) and look at a painting on one of their free tours. Go to the Petersen Museum and take a tour of the fancy cars (including the DeLorean from Back to the Future.) How the docent explains things to the human beings there in the room—with a voice that is polite, friendly, engaging, yet very informative—that is how you should write to us, your fellow humans and your expectant readers.
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Explanation & Answer

this is the answer to the questions that needed answered but unfortunately the second part will need to be completed by you as neither set of reading materials were provided. if you send me the Partially Excited States by Charles Hood i can complete the second part.

1. What is a thesis: A thesis is the point of your paper, most often attributed with a
students final research paper.
2. What is the audience: The audience is a set of people that is geared toward the topic of
the essay.
3. What is a paragraph: A paragraph is a set of 5 or more sent...


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