Alternative ways to organize your essay, part 2
And we're back.
Now, let's move on to persuasive or argumentative writing.
Number 12, building blocks, is your basic form.
The 5-paragraph essay is one variation on this form.
Here, you make a claim, also known as a thesis or assertion-- maybe that
our city must invest in light-rail mass-transit now.
Next, give a little context.
Explain to your reader why this is an urgent issue we'd better get on top of,
because if we don't, there will be some dire consequences.
After that, you build your argument like building blocks, one on top of the other.
Follow this with a description of what someone who disagrees with you
would say, and then respectfully demolish
that person's argument with your own rock solid reasoning.
Then, just to keep it interesting, you could finish with a prediction of two futures:
one in which wise leaders have followed your advice and everything is grand,
and another one in which your advice was disregarded and everything is in the toilet.
13 is Exemplification,
which is just a ten-dollar word meaning "showing or illustrating with examples.""
In They Say, I Say fashion, you could write, "Some people believe blah blah blah,
but I argue yadda yadda instead." Let's say your "Yadda yadda" is that
global climate change is a danger to all living things on earth, including us.
To back up that claim, you give maybe two major supporting examples,
the ones that will really make an impression.
In another paragraph, you could quickly summarize in what is essentially a list
a few other terrible consequences of climate change.
You could follow that with a prediction of a hypothetical world in which
global climate change is successfully addressed and what that might look like.
And just like you'd do with all of these examples, you'd follow that
with a strong conclusion.
The call-to-action conclusion is a good way to go for this one.
Number 14 is an analysis of multiple items.
Let's say you were asked to analyze three major characters in a play, say,
Death of a Salesman.
First, you could make a general statement about the play's characters,
maybe how they're all very different, or how they're all part of a certain social culture,
products of their time and place.
You'd then write about each character one by one, and at each step,
you'd compare the character you're currently writing about
with the ones you previously wrote about.
You'd explain what kind of people they are and why they do what they do.
Finally, you'd argue that the playwright deliberately constructed these
characters to function in a certain way in the story
to create a certain effect of some kind, whatever that might be.
OK, number 15.
Candidate comparison.
Like number 7 and a little like 14, this kind of essay compares two things, but
in this one, you compare two political candidates and argue at the end that
one of them is superior to the other one.
Pretty straightforward.
I see two obvious approaches, but there could be a dozen other ways to go at this.
In model 15a, you look at three separate issues one at a time, comparing
the positions of candidates Azure and Brown on each issue.
So the first two paragraphs are about taxes, the second pair is about
civil rights, and the last two are about immigration.
In 15b, you turn that around and talk about one candidate and his positions on
all three issues, then the second candidate and her positions on
same three issues, comparing the two candidate's positions as you go.
Both of those models end with an analysis of the two candidates' ideas and then
advocating for one over the other.
I imagine that analysis section would take multiple paragraphs to be thorough.
16, Unfolding Theme, is a little different.
You know how when you're reading a long-form narrative like a novel,
the theme changes at different stages of the book?
This approach allows you to describe that.
You begin with a statement of theme, and if you aren't sure what a theme is,
take a look at my video called "How to Find a Theme."
Then, in each paragraph you write about a section of the plot
and what theme is suggested at each stage, finishing with your thoughts about
what the overall theme is.
You'd probably want to go chronologically.
17 is Contrasting Relationships.
Here, I imagined writing about a novel like The Color Purple.
In this model, you don't begin with a statement of theme as you
traditionally would.
If you were writing about Celie in the Color Purple, you might want to start by
summarizing what someone else in class said about some important plot point
and then pointing out that events are important
because of who they happen to and how they affect the relationships
between them.
Next, talk about the differences in Celie's relationships with the adult men,
"Mister" and his father,
and the female characters Shug, Sofia, and Nettie, and finally with the children,
like Harpo, gradually developing a picture of the theme as you go.
Finally, you can bring it all together at the end, explaining what those
relationships mean, how they suggest a theme.
I'll call 18 a point-by-point rebuttal of a series of counterarguments.
My model for this is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous and eloquent
"Letter from Birmingham Jail." A group of clergymen had published
a letter objecting to his protests in Birmingham, Alabama.
In response, Dr. King opens his letter with a greeting and a statement of
his intentions. Next, he respectfully addresses
the objections of those clergymen one by one.
The restatement of the counterarguments aren't very long.
His devastating rebuttals are well supported and fully developed
with examples and reasoning.
After repeating this process a few times, Dr. King moves into explaining his position
fully, again supporting all his assertions with evidence and explanations.
He addresses one more counterargument, then closes by reaching out to his reader,
not as an enemy but as a potential ally,
looking for common ground on an elevated moral plane.
If you haven't read it, you really should.
It's amazing.
Next, narrative forms.
19 is Relating an Event.
I'm imagining a chronology like the unfolding events of September 11, 2001.
You might begin with a short overview of what happened that day.
That's context, so your reader is reminded of what you're talking about.
The next paragraph could be about the different groups of people
involved in the event, like the terrorists,
the American intelligence community, and the first responders.
You would probably want to write about each event in the order
in which it happened.
Just imagine that that 3rd box there represents four separate boxes,
one for each event.
Don't go into microscopic detail unless you want to write a book.
Choose key moments, key events, the last of which is the aftermath
of the attacks and how they affected and continue to affect
people and systems, like laws and security procedures.
You could follow that with an analysis of why it happened
and missed opportunities to have avoided it.
Finally, in a call-to-action sort of conclusion, you could
talk about what should happen now
to balance safety with freedom to go about our daily lives.
Just a reminder, all of these models should begin with some kind of hook
and end with a conclusion.
Number 20 is what I call Hindsight.
For this one, I thought about an incredible memoir I read by Scott Russell Sanders
about his father's alcoholism.
You might start with an early memory of something.
You don't have anything to compare it to, so it doesn't mean anything to you.
But then it happens again, and although you don't talk about it, you notice it.
So in each paragraph or section, you write about what you thought at that time.
It happens again and you start to really understand what's going on.
You write about that.
It happens yet again, recently, and you come to a more mature
understanding of this thing, whatever it is,
because you're older now and more experienced with this thing.
In Sanders' essay, he then wrote about how that knowledge altered the way
he saw himself and why he is the way he is.
And finally, you could talk about how you want to live your life, how you want to
go forward, given this new understanding.
The next narrative form, 21, is the memoir thread.
In this one, you'd talk about some topic that has been relevant to your entire life
so far, something that impacts you now and when you were little.
Let's say you wanted to write about lies you've been told and how those lies
have affected you.
You introduce that topic in an early paragraph after, I imagine,
a really compelling personal experience hook.
Then you talk about three important times in your life when you were lied to,
and what each of those instances meant to you.
Maybe not all of them were negative.
Maybe some came from a place of love or compassion.
Then after writing about the three lies, you could analyze what each of them
revealed to you about people or the world we live in.
You interpret those experiences so your reader can draw from them
a new lens for looking at the nature of honesty and dishonesty.
The next five, I'll go through quickly because they aren't mine.
They were observed and pointed out by an extraordinary teacher named
Cornelius Minor, who is affliliated with Columbia Teachers College.
He has a popular Twitter feed too.
Mr. Minor looked at specific writers and took note of organizational structures
that he'd seen in their writing.
I won't try to explain them as well as he does.
Number 22.
In Malcolm Gladwell's writing, I think Mr. Minor said Gladwell tells
a string of anecdotes and only gets to the theme,
the principle they all have in common, at the very end.
My notes on the Gladwell model are a little vague.
But I know he said Gladwell doesn't get to the point until the end.
He said some of Gladwell's readers found this frustrating, while others think
Gladwell is brilliant.
23.
Alice Walker begins with a big claim or claims about life,
so she starts with a wide-angle lens.
To support that claim, she summarizes a story, or the story she's writing about,
finds evidence in there of how the story
supports her claims, then closes by restating the claim.
24.
Minor noticed that Oprah Winfrey also opens with a claim,
an assertion of some kind.
Then she explains why that thing is good or important.
She then writes about some things that aren't so good, a concession.
Finally, she explains why the good outweighs the bad.
25.
Manohla Dargis is a film critic for the New York Times,
so this is a good template to follow for writing a review.
It doesn't have to be a movie review; it can be a book or something else.
She opens the review with a summary, a description of the movie's plot,
being careful not to spoil the ending.
Then she describes the "top two things you need to know" about the movie.
Finally, she ends with what Minor calls an action clause, which I guess is her
telling the reader to go see or not to go see the movie.
But it's basically a conclusion, giving her bottom-line judgement about the movie
as a whole.
Last, 26.
Gordon Ramsay is a famous chef you may have seen on TV.
Minor says that when Ramsay is writing about a book, he opens by grabbing
your attention by telling you the most shocking thing from the book.
Then he explains why that shocking thing is important, he gives an example
from the book, another example from life, and closes with an explanation of
why people should believe these ideas.
So don't be nervous or uncertain leaving the safety of the 5-paragraph essay.
In fact, you should get up and dance, because you've just been given the
freedom to, within reasonable boundaries,
say what you want in whatever form best suits your content.
This is what freedom feels like.
These models are just an appetizer like a sampler plate at a restaurant.
You've probably already gotten ideas about how to improve on these.
That's great.
Here's a time index for the 26 models.
There are an infinite number of ways to express something worth expressing,
and each of them can be organized differently
from another essay, article, blog, report, review or whatever,
on the same topic.
My hope is that this video gives you some idea of the different kinds of things
you can say in your writing-- not just supporting evidence, but context,
counterarguments, analysis, predictions, speculation,
summaries of contrasting viewpoints, detailed descriptions of all the little
parts of a thing, as well as a huge, abstract generalization about something else,
or a string of connectedness of your topic to another thing and to another,
and another, and so on.
It's like you're putting together a menu.
You don't necessarily have to serve exactly one meat, one starch, and one vegetable
like in a school cafeteria.
You can combine whatever works well on the plate, as long as the final result
is beneficial and satisfying to your reader.
But don't get overwhelmed by the multiplicity of choices.
Think about your topic first.
Think.
Your writing is just a record of your thought process.
If you are trying not to actually think, and you know who you are, your task
just got times harder.
So, in the words of the great Winnie the Pooh: think, think, think.
And when you've thought yourself to an interesting destination, ask yourself,
what were the stopping points on your train of thought?
That's how you should organize your writing.
And don't forget, you can always hang onto the basic principle that all good writing--
no matter if it's a dramatic monologue, a manga, or thank you note--
still has a beginning that introduces your ideas,
a middle where you develop those ideas, and an end that has
that thump of finality and conveys to your readers why they should care.
OK, good luck with your thinking.
And then with your writing.
OK, go get 'em.