Identify The Situation. What Motivates The Writer To Write?

Read Jonathan Kozol's article, "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid" (Links to an external site.). Using the following questions from your text book as a guide, craft an analysis of Kozol's piece:
[From Chapter 2, p. 48 - Steps to Analyzing a Text Rhetorically]
1. Identify the situation. What motivates the writer to write? [How do you know? What evidence suggests this to be true?]
2. Identify the writer's purpose. What does the writer want readers to do or think about? [How do you know? What evidence suggests this to be true?]
3. Identify the writer's claims. What is the writer's main claim? What minor claims does he or she make?
4. Identify the writer's audience. What do you know about the writer's audience? What does the writer's language imply about the readers? What about the writer's references? The structure of the essay? Audience is often tied to the writer's purpose, as well. What clues can you find to help you identify his / her intended audience?
Additionally... [Adapted from Chapter 4, p. 95]
5. Is Kozol's claim one of fact, where he asserts a problem existed, exists or will exist? Is it one of value, with Kozol expressing an evaluation of a problem? Or is it one of policy, where he calls for change and directs a course of action? How do you know? What evidence do YOU have?
6. What types of evidence does HE use to support his claim? Are they recent, relevant, reliable, accurate? Explain.
Chapter 2
From Reading as a Writer to Writing as a Reader
Reading for class and then writing an essay might seem to be separate tasks, but reading is the first step in the writing process. In this chapter we present methods that will help you read more effectively and move from reading to writing your own college essays. These methods will lead you to understand a writer’s purpose in responding to a situation, the motivation for asserting a claim in an essay and entering a particular conversation with a particular audience.
each other. Good academic writers are also good critical readers: They leave their mark on what they read, identifying issues, making judgments about the truth of what writers tell them, and evaluating the adequacy of the evidence in support of an argument. This is where writing and inquiry begin: understanding our own position relative to the Scholarly conversations we want to enter. Moreover, critical readers try to understand the strategies that writers use to persuade readers to agree with them. At times, these are strategies that we can adapt in advancing our arguments.
READING AS AN ACT OF COMPOSING: ANNOTATING
Leaving your mark on the page — annotating — is your first act of composing. When you mark the pages of a text, you are reading critically, engaging with the ideas of others, questioning and testing those ideas, and inquiring into their significance. Critical reading is sometimes called active reading to distinguish it from memorization, when you just read for the main idea so that you can “spit it back out on a test.” When you read actively and critically, you bring your knowledge, experiences, and interests to a text, so that you can respond to the writer, continuing the conversation the writer has begun.
Experienced college readers don’t try to memorize a text or assume they must understand it completely before they respond to it. Instead they read strategically, looking for the writer’s claims, for the writer’s key ideas and terms, and for connections with key ideas and terms in other texts. They also read to discern what conversation the writer has entered, and how the writer’s argument is connected to those he or she makes reference to.
When you annotate a text, your notes in the margins might address the following questions:
What arguments is this author responding to?
Is the issue relevant or significant?
How do I know that what the author says is true?
Is the author’s evidence legitimate? Sufficient?
Can I think of an exception to the author’s argument?
What would the counterarguments be?
Good readers ask the same kinds of questions of every text they read, considering not just what a writer says (the content), but how he or she says it given the writer’s purpose and audience.
The marks you leave on a page might indicate your own ideas and questions, patterns you see emerging, links to other texts, even your gut response to the writer’s argument — agreement, dismay, enthusiasm, confusion. They reveal your own thought processes as you read and signal that you are entering the conversation. In effect, they are traces of your own responding voice.
Developing your own system of marking or annotating pages can help you feel confident when you sit down with a new reading for your classes. Based on our students’ experiences, we offer this practical tip: Although wide-tipped highlighters have their place in some classes, it is more useful to read with a pen or pencil in your hand, so that you can do more than draw a bar of color through words or sentences you find important. Experienced readers write their responses to a text in the margins, using personal codes (boxing key words, for example), writing out definitions of words they have looked up, drawing lines to connect ideas on facing pages, or writing notes to themselves (“Connect this to Edmundson on consumer culture”; “Hirsch would disagree big time — see his ideas on memorization in primary grades”; “You call THIS evidence?!”). These notes help you get started on your own writing assignments.
Annotating your readings benefits you twice. First, it is easier to participate in class discussions if you have already marked PASSages that are important, confusing, or linked to specific PASSages in other texts you have read. It’s a sure way to avoid that sinking feeling you get when you return to pages you read the night before but now can’t remember at all. Second, by marking key ideas in a text, noting your ideas about them, and making connections to key ideas in other texts, you have begun the process of writing an essay. When you start writing the first draft of your essay, you can quote the PASSages you have already marked and explain what you find significant about them based on the notes you have already made to yourself. You can make the connections to other texts in the paragraphs of your own essay that you have already begun to make on the pages of your textbook. If you mark your texts effectively, you’ll never be at a loss when you sit down to write the first draft of an essay.
Let’s take a look at how one of our students marked several paragraphs of Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993). In the excerpt below, the student underlines what she believes is important information and begins to create an outline of the authors’ main points.
Two paragraphs show underlines and annotations.
The first paragraph reads as follows:
“The spatial isolation of black Americans was achieved by a conjunction of racist attitudes, private behaviors, and institutional practices that disenfranchised blacks from urban housing markets and led to the creation of the ghetto. Discrimination in employment exacerbated black poverty and limited the economic potential for integration, and black residential mobility was systematically blocked by pervasive discrimination and white avoidance of neighborhoods containing blacks. The walls of the ghetto were buttressed after 1950 by government programs that promoted slum clearance and relocated displaced ghetto residents into multi-story, high-density housing projects.”
In this paragraph, the words “racist attitudes,” “private behaviors,” “institutional practices,” “ghetto,” “the walls of the ghetto were buttressed after 1950,” and “relocated displaced ghetto residents into multi-story, high-density housing projects” are underlined.
The annotation for the underlined words, “racist attitudes,” “private behaviors,” and “institutional practices” reads, “1. racist attitudes 2. private behaviors 3. & institutional practices lead to ghettos (authors’ claim?)”
An arrow emerging from the word “housing” reads, “Ghetto = “multistory, high-density housing projects.” Post-1950.”
The annotation for the sentence, “The walls of the ghetto were buttressed after 1950 by government programs that promoted slum clearance and relocated displaced ghetto residents into multi-story, high-density housing projects” reads, “remember this happening where I grew up, but I didn’t know the government was responsible. Is this what happened in There Are No Children Here?”
The second paragraph reads as follows:
In theory, this self-reinforcing cycle of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation was broken during the 1960s by a growing rejection of racist sentiments by whites and a series of court decisions and federal laws that banned discrimination in public life. (1) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in employment, (2) the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in housing, and (3) the Gautreaux and Shannon court decisions prohibited public authorities from placing housing projects exclusively in black neighborhoods. Despite these changes, however, the nation’s largest black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980. Indeed, many urban areas displayed a pattern of intense racial isolation that could only be described as hypersegregation.” In this paragraph, the words “(1) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in employment, (2) the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in housing, and (3) the Gautreaux and Shannon court decisions prohibited public authorities from placing housing projects,” “nation’s largest black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980,” and “hypersegregation” are underlined.
An annotation pointing to “nation’s largest black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980” reads, “Authors say situation of “spatial isolation” remains despite court decisions. Does it?”
A paragraph shows underlines and annotations.
The paragraph reads as follows: “Although the racial climate of the United States improved outwardly during the 1970s, racism still restricted the residential freedom of black Americans; it just did so in less blatant ways. In the aftermath of the civil rights revolution, few whites voiced openly racist sentiments; realtors no longer refused outright to rent or sell to blacks; and few local governments went on record to oppose public housing projects because they would contain blacks. This lack of overt racism, however, did not mean that prejudice and discrimination had ended.” In this paragraph the words “racism still restricted the residential freedom of black Americans” are underlined and an annotation pointing toward it reads, “Subtler racism, not on public record.” The annotation for this paragraph reads, “Lack of enforcement of Civil Rights Act? Fair Housing Act? Gautreaux and Shannon? Why? Why not?”
READING AS A WRITER: ANALYZING A TEXT RHETORIcallY
When you study how writers influence readers through language, you are analyzing the rhetoric (available means of persuasion) of what you read. When you identify a writer’s purpose for responding to a situation by composing an essay that puts forth claims meant to sway a particular audience, you are performing a rhetorical analysis. Such an analysis entails identifying the features of an argument to better understand how the argument works to persuade a reader:
how the writer sees the situation that calls for a response in writing
the writer’s purpose for writing
intended audience
kinds of claims
types of evidence
We discuss each of these elements as we analyze the following preface from E. D. Hirsch’s book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987). Formerly a professor of English, Hirsch has long been interested in educational reform. That interest developed from his (and others’) perception that today’s students do not know as much as students did in the past. Although Hirsch wrote the book decades ago, many observers still believe that the contemporary problems of illiteracy and poverty can be traced to a lack of cultural literacy.
Read the preface. You may want to mark it with your own questions and responses, and then consider them in light of our analysis (following the preface) of Hirsch’s rhetorical situation, purpose, claims, and audience.
E. D. HIRSCH JR.
Preface to Cultural Literacy
E. D. Hirsch Jr., a retired English professor, is the author of many acclaimed books, including The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996) and The Knowledge Deficit (2006). His book Cultural Literacy was a best seller in 1987 and had a profound effect on the focus of education in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Rousseau points out the facility with which children lend themselves to our false methods: . . .“The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.”
— JOHN DEWEY
There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sir, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn’t ’em both.
— SAMUEL JOHNSON
To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science. It is by no means confined to “culture” narrowly understood as an acquaintance with the arts. Nor is it confined to one social class. Quite the contrary. Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years.
Although the chief beneficiaries of the educational reforms advocated in this book will be disadvantaged children, these same reforms will also enhance the literacy of children from middle-class homes. The educational goal advocated is that of mature literacy for all our citizens.
The connection between mature literacy and cultural literacy may already be familiar to those who have closely followed recent discussions of education. Shortly after the publication of my essay “Cultural Literacy,” Dr. William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and subsequently secretary of education in President Ronald Reagan’s second administration, championed its ideas. This endorsement from an influential person of conservative views gave my ideas some currency, but such an endorsement was not likely to recommend the concept to liberal thinkers, and in fact the idea of cultural literacy has been attacked by some liberals on the assumption that I must be advocating a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read.
But those who examine the Appendix to this book will be able to judge for themselves how thoroughly mistaken such an assumption is. Very few specific titles appear on the list, and they usually appear as words, not works, because they represent writings that culturally literate people have read about but haven’t read. Das Kapital is a good example. Cultural literacy is represented not by a prescriptive list of books but rather by a descriptive list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans. My aim in this book is to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans.
The importance of such widely shared information can best be understood if I explain briefly how the idea of cultural literacy relates to currently prevailing theories of education. The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years stem ultimately from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that we should encourage the natural development of young children and not impose adult ideas upon them before they can truly understand them. Rousseau’s conception of education as a process of natural development was an abstract generalization meant to apply to all children in any time or place: to French children of the eighteenth century or to Japanese or American children of the twentieth century. He thought that a child’s intellectual and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of education. His content-neutral conception of educational development has long been triumphant in American
WRITING AS A READER: COMPOSING A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
One of our favorite exercises is to ask students to choose a single paragraph or a brief section from a text they have read and to write a rhetorical analysis. We first ask our students to identify the writer’s key claims and ideas to orient them to the main points they want to make in their analysis. We then ask our students to consider such features as the situation that calls for a response in writing and the writer’s purpose, intended audience, kinds of claims, and types of evidence. In their rhetorical analyses, we encourage our students to analyze the ways writers develop their ideas and the extent to which these strategies succeed. That is, we ask our students to consider how writers express their ideas, develop their points of view, respond to a given situation, and use evidence to persuade readers. Once you are able to identify how writers make arguments, look critically at what works and what doesn’t in making a persuasive argument; then you will be able to make use of their strategies in your own writing.
For example, one of our students wrote a rhetorical analysis of an excerpt from David Tyack’s book on education, Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society (2004). In his book, Tyack examines the extent to which the purpose of education in American schools has developed out of and reflected the political, economic, and moral concerns of the nation. His analysis begins with the emergence of public schools in the nineteenth century and demonstrates a sense of continuity in twenty-first-century education, particularly in light of contemporary debates around national standards, teacher evaluation, social justice, equity, civic engagement, and the common good. This continuity is best represented in the quest for a common denominator of political and moral truths, often evidenced in textbooks that point to the progress of history and American democracy, the focus on great men who understood the grandeur of America’s destiny, and the importance of individual character in building a strong nation founded on shared values. For Tyack, history textbooks have served as a significant source of civic education — that is, “what adults thought children should learn about the past” — and assimilation. However, the search for common values in official histories (what he calls “stone monuments”) has not been without dissent, given their focus on white, male, Protestant ideology. Tyack also writes about the ways in which educators have dealt with questions of social and educational diversity, particularly race, immigration and ethnicity, and gender; efforts to establish models of educational governance to meet the needs of a pluralistic society; and the implications of opening public education to a free market.
Note that in the following PASSage, Tyack assesses the state of American history textbooks by citing a number of writers, sometimes generally and at other times more specifically, to address ways to solve the problems he identifies (for example, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s proposal for a “pluralistic model of history”).
As you read the Tyack PASSage, take notes on the rhetorical situation, purpose, main claim, audience, and language. You may want to underline PASSages or circle words and phrases where the writer makes the following points explicit:
the situation that motivates his writing,
the purpose of his analysis and argument,
his main claim or thesis, and
who he believes his audience is.
DAVID TYACK
Whither History Textbooks?
David Tyack was the Vida Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University. In addition to writing Seeking Common Ground, he authored The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974) and coauthored Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (1997), Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954 (1991), Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (1992), and Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (1984).
A history textbook today is hardly the republican catechism that Noah Webster appended to his famous speller. It is more like pieces of a sprawling novel with diverse characters and fascinating subplots waiting for an author to weave them into a broader narrative. Now a noisy confusion reigns about what stories the textbooks should tell. Special-interest groups of the right and left pressure publishers to include or drop topics, especially in big states such as California or Texas. Worries abound about old truths betrayed and new truths ignored. Many groups want to vet or veto what children learn, and it is unclear what roles teachers, parents, ethnic groups, religious activists, historians, and others should play. Tempers rise. In New York debates over a multicultural curriculum, Catherine Cornbleth and Dexter Waugh observed, “both sides engaged in a rhetoric of crisis, doom, and salvation.”
In the United States, unlike most other nations, private agencies — publishing companies — create and sell textbooks. Thus commerce plays an important part in deciding which historical truths shall be official. To be sure, public agencies usually decide which textbooks to adopt (about half of the states delegate text adoption to local districts, and the rest use some form of state adoption). For all the conventionality of the product, the actual production and sale of textbooks is still a risky business. It’s very expensive to create and print textbooks, and the market (the various agencies that actually decide which to adopt) is somewhat unpredictable. In addition, at any time some citizens are likely to protest whatever messages the texts send. Textbook adoption can be a free-for-all.
Thus it is not surprising that textbooks still beget textbooks. To control risk, companies find it wise to copy successes. Old icons (Washington) remain, but publishers respond to new demands by multiplying new state-approved truths. It has been easier to add those ubiquitous sidebars to the master narrative than to rethink it, easier to incorporate new content into a safe and profitable formula than to create new accounts. American history textbooks are enormous — 888 pages, on average — in part because publishers seek to neutralize or anticipate criticisms by adding topics. The result is often not comprehensive coverage but a bloated book devoid of style or coherence.
The traditional American fear of centralized power, salient today in debates over national standards and tests, has resulted in a strange patchwork of agencies and associations — textbook companies, state and local governments, lobby groups of many persuasions, individuals who want to play Grand Inquisitor — to choose and monitor the public truths taught in the texts. One of the most rapid ways of changing what students learn in American schools is to transform the textbooks, but the present Rube Goldberg system WRITING A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
By now you should have a strong sense of what is involved in rhetorical analysis. You should be ready to take the next steps: performing a rhetorical analysis of your own and then sharing your analysis and the strategies you’ve learned with your classmates.
Read the next text, “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle, annotating it to help you identify her situation, purpose, thesis, and audience. As you read, also make a separate set of annotations — possibly with a different color pen or pencil, circled, or keyed with asterisks — in which you comment on or evaluate the effectiveness of her essay. What do you like or dislike about it? Why? Does Turkle persuade you to accept her point of view? What impressions do you have of her as a person? Would you like to be in a conversation with her?
SHERRY TURKLE
The Flight from Conversation
Sherry Turkle — the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — is a licensed clinical psychologist with a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University. Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, she is the author or editor of many books, including The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), Simulation and Its Discontents (2009), and Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011). “The Flight from Conversation” appeared in the April 12, 2012, issue of The New York Times Magazine.
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: It involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.
A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”
A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”
In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: We are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods, and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.
Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.
Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.
We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance, and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.
Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to of creating and selecting textbooks