1 Roble 1 Barney Roble Ms. DeMeener English Honors 25 April 2008 The Noble Character of Alexander The literature about Alexander the Great is extensive. Writers ancient and modern have probed the available facts of his life in search of the factors that enabled Alexander to accomplish seemingly impossible feats of military genius. One potential cause of his extraordinary success might be the nobility and magnanimity of his character. Stories abound about Alexander’s respect for local cultures and for the bravery of his enemies. He often absorbed defeated leaders ng them to high and responsible Roble 4 Works Cited Cartledge, Paul. Alexander the Great. New York: Overlook, 2004. Cummings, Lewis V. Alexander the Great. New York: Grove, 1968. Fox, Robin Lane. Alexander the Great. New York: Penguin, 2004. Advanced Academic Writing An Illustrated Program Volume Three Student Manual with a CD of Actual Research Paper Comments Michael Clay Thompson Royal Fireworks Press Unionville, New York
Transcript
1
Roble 1
Barney Roble
Ms. DeMeener
English Honors
25 April 2008
The Noble Character of A
lexander
The literature about Ale
xander the Great is exte
nsive.
Writers ancient and mode
rn have probed the avail
able facts
of his life in search of
the factors that enable
d Alexander
to accomplish seemingly
impossible feats of mili
tary genius.
One potential cause of h
is extraordinary success
might be the
nobility and magnanimity
of his character. Sto
ries abound
about Alexander’s respec
t for local cultures and
for the
bravery of his enemies.
He often absorbed defea
ted leaders
into his own army, appoi
nting them to high and r
esponsible
rank. When, after defea
ting Darius, he gave cha
se and finally
found the dead king alon
e and unattended, Alexan
der covered
Darius with his own cloa
k:
He gazed for a moment at
the poor corpse that
alone was the spoil of t
he long race, then took
off
his cloak and wrapped it
around the body of his
predecessor . . . (Cumm
ings 258)
Alexander’s respect for
Darius
Roble 4Works CitedCartledge, Paul. Alexander the Great. New York: Overlook, 2004. Cummings, Lewis V. Alexander the Great. New York: Grove, 1968.
Fox, Robin Lane. Alexander the Great. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Green, Peter. Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
Moore 6Works CitedLondon, Jack. The Call of the Wild. Chicago: Mellon, 2003.---. White Fang. New York: Paladin, 2005. Samayam, Sue S. Jack London’s Novels of the Wild New York: Harping, 2004.Durness, Will. “The Gradual Metamorphosis to Savagery as seen
in The Lord of the Rings and The Call of the Wild.” The Chicago Review of Literature. 23 (2004): 124-137.
4
Moore 1
Joseph Moore
Mr. Eeus
English IH
9 October 2010
JACK LONDEN
Jack Londen was born on
January 12, 1876. He wr
ote many
novels, including The Ca
ll of the Wild, White Fa
ng, and The Sea
Wolf. London was one of
the first American novel
ists to make a
living writing novels.
Londen didn’t have an ea
sy life. He
was often broke and he s
ometimes worked on the d
ock’s and ships
as a seaman.
Buck is a dog in Jack Lo
nden’s novel The Call of
the
Wild. At the beginning
of the novel Buck live w
ith a family
in California, but Buck
is taken to Alaska where
he encounters
many exciting adventures
and has encounters with
wolves. At
the end of the story Buc
k meets John Thornton, a
very good
master, but John Thornto
n dies. One writer said
:
Jack London wrote some o
f the best novels in
American literature. He
explored the edge betwe
en
civilization and savager
y and showed characters
--some of them animals--
crossing from one side t
o
another. (Samayam, 274)
Alaska is the largest st
ate in the United States
of America.
It is located between Ca
nada and the Artic Ocean
. You can see
Russia from the houses i
n Alaska, across the Ber
ing Strait.
The United States bought
Alaska from Russia. Th
e price was
seven million dollars.
This papershows what notto do. There is no thesis, no continuity.
r-s
contraction
sp
sp
sp
no transition
no transitionwho?
quote
irrelevant
to paragraph
no transition
thesis?
half inch
What does this have to do
with the paragraph above
or with the thesis?
thesis?
thesis?
ital
sp
Works Citednot alphabetized.
sp
5
Introduction
The weary English teacher, Mr. Eeus, had been sitting before his computer for five hours, carefully grading the stack of papers he had received on Friday. He was determined to return them on Monday. Most of the papers had been good, had been what he had assigned: five-page MLA papers with long and short quotations supporting an intellectual thesis. The hands of the clock on the wall kept circling, and soon he would have to stop for the night. He would grade a few more. Even though he was getting tired, he would think positively; he had trained himself to look forward to every paper, no matter how many papers there were. He picked up the next paper from the stack. Ah, the paper was by Joseph Moore. Joseph was a good student who participated in class discussions and always did his work on time. Mr. Eeus began to examine Joseph’s paper. Even at first glance, he saw problems. The title of the paper, JACK LONDEN, was all capitalized, it misspelled London Londen, and it did not express the thesis of the paper. The teacher saw that he would have to find out, the hard way, what the paper was about. He noticed with disappointment that the margin of the paper was wrong; there was an inch between the header, Moore 1, and the top of the page, instead of the half inch that was required. Each of these details was a small matter, but taken together, they made three errors before the paper even began. He began to read Joseph’s paper which apparently had something to do with Jack London. Perhaps Joseph would explain the thesis of the paper in the introduction. Unfortunately, Joseph did not. The first paragraph did not introduce the thesis at all; it was only a list of biographical facts, beginning with London’s birth—exactly what the teacher had told the class not to do. The first paragraph seemed to have no topic; it certainly had no topic sentence. Would Joseph ever get to his thesis? Did Joseph even have a thesis? To make matters worse, Joseph had used a contraction, didn’t, even though the class had been instructed not to use contractions, and the last sentence of the paragraph was a run-on sentence (after all that work on clause punctuation). Mr. Eeus looked again at the paper, holding out hope for the second paragraph. Thesis...thesis... What? The second paragraph was simply a crude summary of London’s novel The Call of the Wild. It too had no topic sentence, and it had no bridge of any kind to the first paragraph. There was still no sign of a thesis. This was confusing, and the teacher’s brain began to hurt as he searched for the point of the paper. He wanted Joseph to do well, but this paper seemed unplanned, random, pointless, and careless. He was having to stop reading and correct elementary errors in every paragraph. It was exhausting.
Notice thestrong effect
of errors on the reader. Theydamage theexperience.
6
From this painful glimpse into one moment in the life of a teacher, we see one of the central principles of advanced academic writing: you are not writing to yourself. Academic writing is for someone else, and to be advanced, you have to view what you write from a reader’s perspective. The decisions you make, the process you use, and the care you take with details all have an effect on your reader. Sometimes your reader will be a teacher who knows you well; other times your reader will be a professor who knows you by name only, or it may be someone you have never met. Whoever it is, he or she will read the paper without you. You will not be there to explain what you meant.
This concern for the reader does not come easily. It comes with writing experience, with discovering the hard way that tiny mistakes in wording cause major disruptions in reading. Intense awareness of the reader is one of the most advanced elements in writing. This awareness extends to every detail: you want the reader to have a clear mind, to be utterly undistracted by mistakes of format, grammar, spelling, punctuation, wording, wordiness, organization—you want the reader to be captured by your idea.
That brings us to the point of this book. Now that we have our foundations in place from the first two volumes, what are the final elements that make a paper advanced?
Advanced Concerns. Volume Three of Advanced Academic Writing explores the most advanced concerns of writing academic papers. I use the noun concerns to describe this exploration because all of this work must be, for you, a personal concern. If you regard the principles of academic writing as a list of someone else’s rules that you are forced to obey, then you will never reach the highest levels of academic writing. If, on the other hand, you have internalized academic writing as an almost magical method that lets you express truths you care about, then you have the depth it takes to master these advanced details. In other words you cannot become great if you think these details only matter to someone else; you only become great if they are important to you.
In this third volume in the Advanced Academic Writing series, I do not repeat the introductory discussions of the first two books. I assume that you have previously used one or both of the first two volumes. If you have not, then you must review the first two volumes; it will bring you into alignment with the more advanced elements of Volume Three. Here is a review of the elements first of Volume One and then of Volume Two:
7
Volume One: The first book discussed the commitment you must make to academic writing. It introduced standard proofreader’s marks and reviewed the elements of a classic essay structure. It then presented the details of a correct MLA (Modern Language Association) paper, including margins, pagination, treatment of quotations, and Works Cited. It also reviewed the rules of academic punctuation, grammar, and usage. It presented forty real research paper comments that I wrote on student papers in the past. It introduced the method of grading, four-level assessment. Finally, Volume One presented four MLA writing assignments, to be three pages in length plus Works Cited: First Paper: Single Source Interpretation of Fiction Second Paper: Multiple Works Cited Third Paper: A Revolutionary Character Fourth Paper: An Abstract Concept Volume Two: The second book made stronger intellectual demands. It reviewed the fundamentals from Volume One but increased them; it doubled the proofreader’s marks and the real research paper comments, and it added detailed comments to the punctuation, grammar, and usage elements that had been introduced in Volume One. Then it explored the logic of advanced writing, including the logic of the essay, the logic of the syllogism, and famous logical fallacies. Finally, it assigned four more MLA papers, this time to be four pages plus Works Cited: First Paper: A Paper about Poetry or Shakespeare Second Paper: Comparison or Contrast of Ideas Third Paper: Evaluating Ideas Fourth Paper: Creating an Academic Idea
Volume Three: In this third book we will write four, slightly longer, more scholarly papers, concentrating on advanced refinements of presentation and style. The elementary details of grammar, punctuation, and usage are no longer our emphasis; you now know that you cannot succeed if those beginner’s basics are not right. Unlike the first two volumes, this book will put those resources at the end of the book, in an appendix. It is now time to concentrate on the elements that most affect your reader. These are elements we have mentioned before, but now we want to deepen our comprehension. We will begin with the important concept of unity. I will describe the problems from the reader’s point of view, and your task will be to deepen both your comprehension and your personal concern about the effects that writing problems have on your reader.
8
94
Susan,
Thank you for this outst
anding paper on the work
of Gelsey
Kirkland, the American p
rima ballerina. I knew
a little about
her, of course; I knew s
he danced the role of Cl
ara with
Mikhail Baryshnikov in T
he Nutcracker in 1984, b
ut I did not
realize the struggle she
suffered with eating dis
orders, and
I had never thought abou
t the extreme physical a
nd athletic
challenges of dancing at
that level. Your paper
is beautifully
organized around your th
eme of brilliance maskin
g struggle in
art, and I particularly
like your conclusion, wh
ich really
ties all of the parts of
the body together. In
all it is an
impressive paper, and I
am looking forward to yo
ur next paper
eagerly. There are alwa
ys a few problems to eli
minate, so let
us look at those and a f
ew other comments I will
make below.
Your MLA details are exc
ellent.
I appreciate the excelle
nt job you have done of
following the
MLA format. Your title
page, your documentary t
echnique, your
margins and spacing, and
your Works Cited listin
gs all show
advanced attention to de
tail. This gives me, as
a reader, more
time to spend thinking a
bout your ideas.
Study the difference betw
een semicolons and colon
s.
Use a semicolon in a I;I
compound sentence if th
ere is no
This letter isprinted out andstapled to the top
of the student paper.
coordinating conjunction to separate the two independent clauses; a mere comma in this situation would be a comma splice. Use a colon instead of a semicolon if the second clause is offered as an illustration or example of what you said in the first clause: this clause is such an example. You should also study the way semicolons can be used in lists, and the way colons can be used to introduce lists.
The reason is not because; the reason is that. When you are explaining what the reason is for something, use the word that instead of the word because. The reason Poseidon disliked the Trojans was that (not because) Zeus favored them. This is a standard of usage because when you say the reason is because, you are repeating yourself; you already said it was a reason, so you do not need the word because; just say, “The reason we eliminate adjectives is that they clog sentences.” An alternative is to eliminate the word reason instead and say, “We eliminate adjectives because they clog sentences.” Use reason or that but not both.
8
The letterexplains manyof the errors in
the paper. Othersmay be simply
marked.
9
UNITY
One languagein one structure.
The better you get at writing, the more important
the idea of unitywill be to you.
10 Mossinari 1
Ellah Mossinari
Mrs. Overton
English 3H
17 October 2010
Erewhon: The Iconoclasm
of Samual Butler
This paper is an analysi
s of the eccentric, even
iconoclastic, ideas of S
amuel Butler, as found i
n his 1872
utopian novel Erewhon.
I will show that Butler’
s ideas
were remarkably divergen
t from the typical ideas
of British
Victorian society, as ex
plained in this quotatio
n by Johnson
Boswell:
In Samuel Butler’s odd u
topian novel Erewhon, we
find a
world abounding in stran
ge behavior. Only gradu
ally do
we begin to realize that
Erewhon is not really N
owhere,
as Butler leads us to be
lieve; it is England. E
rewhon
is a fierce satire on the
social life of Britain,
and
Butler raises his satire
to iconoclastic heights
by
ridiculing England’s rev
ered customs. (Boswell
94)
This quotation by Boswel
l supports the thesis of
this paper,
which is that Butler’s i
deas in Erewhon are unco
nventional--
even extremely unconvent
ional--which might expla
in why he had
the novel published anon
ymously.
In my essay I will show
that Erewhon is iconocla
stic
in three different ways.
In the first section of
my essay I
will discuss ways in whi
ch Butler used Erewhon t
o attack the
hypocrisy of the British
class system. In the s
econd section I
will show how Butler rid
iculed the English syste
m of criminal
punishment. Finally, in
the third section of my
essay, I will
This papershows what notto do. It talks
about itself morethan aboutthe topic.
Mossinari 1Ellah MossinariMrs. OvertonEnglish 3H
17 October 2010
Erewhon: The Iconoclasm of Samual Butler In 1872 the eccentric British novelist Samuel Butler anonymously wrote his iconoclastic utopian novel Erewhon, a word representing nowhere. In reality Erewhon was not nowhere, at all, but a satirical condemnation of British society. Butler published the novel anonymously for his own protection, fearing the adverse reaction he would receive from the ferocity of his satire. Johnson Boswell says that: In Samuel Butler’s odd utopian novel Erewhon, we find a world abounding in strange behavior. Only gradually do we begin to realize that Erewhon is not really Nowhere, as Butler leads us to believe; it is England. Erewhon is a fierce satire on the social life of Britain, and Butler raises his satire to iconoclastic heights by ridiculing England’s revered customs. (Boswell 94) Behind the veil of anonymity, Butler sought to attack
