Cassànndrè Sager
Assign 1~ The Writing Guru
Engl 110
September 27, 2006
rough draft
Dear Distressed Reader,
Ah, the academic essay! Why, it’s a piece of cake once you know what it is! You should realize, of course, that cake is not necessarily easy for everyone to make. Despite any struggles, if the right ingredients are in there, then it comes out good and worth it! An academic essay consists of four basic ingredients: motive and idea, thesis and development, tension of argument, and structure of argument. If you include these ingredients, then your essay will come out great!
An academic essay must have a motive- a reason for writing the paper. Sometimes the motive is to get a grade- these essays tend to be boring, in my opinion. The less boring essays have motives like wanting to enlighten or inform people. (What I am writing now could be considered an essay with the motive of informing you and getting paid my hefty fee.) Accompanying the motive is the idea- the opinion of the paper. (The idea of what I am writing to you is my opinion of what an academic essay is.) When researching a topic for your academic essay, ask yourself questions about the topic. Once you have a question that has real potential for an interesting and well-rounded essay, then work towards finding the answer to that question and then adapt your information for essay writing. The motive and idea are the flour in an academic essay- without these, an academic essay just won’t work!
There is more to cake than just flour, of course. Your essay needs a thesis- the chocolate in a chocolate cake! The whole point of an essay is “nut-shelled” in your thesis. (My thesis in this response is what the basic ingredients of an academic essay are.) A thesis is the most vital part of an academic essay. What is the point of making a chocolate cake if you don’t put in any chocolate? The same idea holds true for theses and essays. Your academic essay should be about supplementing, or supporting, your thesis. A classic (and somewhat elementary) thesis comes in the form of an “If-then-because” statement. “If I take food away from a cat then it will starve because it has no nourishment.” After stating your thesis you spend the rest of your essay (except the conclusion, of course) developing arguments and points about your thesis. This is like putting chocolate pudding or ice-cream in your cake; building on the main idea of your essay/cake and making it better.
My recipe book tells me that I need sugar and salt. An academic essay must “taste” good. The way you argue your thesis (your “tension of argument”) convinces people either that it is a reasonable thesis or that it is utterly absurd. Butter, sugar, and salt all make a chocolate cake reasonable to eat because they are what make the chocolate and the cake itself taste good. There is a single large difference between yourself- the writer- and the reader of your essay. You know more about your thesis than your reader does. Your reader does not know why your thesis is correct (in your opinion), but you do. The cook that cooked that chocolate cake knows it tastes good, but the customer probably doesn’t. You argue your point in your essay so that your readers can understand why you believe your thesis is correct. A cake cook should anticipate some cynical customers that say “your cake has too much fat in it! It’s not worth it!”, and he (or she) should have prepared beforehand some sort of reasonable response to convince those cynics to still buy the cake. Rely on the fact that your readers are reasonable people, like yourself. Reason with them, explain, teach, and argue your point. We all know that a little sugar
and salt can make something taste great.
Despite all of the good ingredients in your cake, people aren’t going to buy it if you don’t make it look like a cake. Similarly, the structure of your argument is very important. An essay with an ambiguous argument structure is distracting from your main point. Cooks occasionally place their cakes on an attractive little cake platter and in a case with an attractive background. You must also “set the stage” for your thesis by giving people context. For example, you would use the information I have given you in writing an academic essay. That is the context in which you would actually care about this information. A scientist writing an essay about how serotonin is found in both the brain and the intestines might give the context of how such information is important because it helps to understand the link between anxiety and stomach pain. Use logic in the structure of your argument. Our cook would not put his cake in a case that contained rats because he knows that anyone in their right mind would not buy a cake that has been in containment with rats. There are two methods of structuring an academic essay. You can structure it as a deductive argument, giving your conclusion and then using facts to support that conclusion. Or you can structure it as an inductive essay- giving your facts and then your conclusion. Whatever you do, make your cake attractive and don’t let the structure of it distract people from eating it!
I hope this information has been helpful! Remember- motive and idea, thesis and development, tension of argument, and structure of argument. These ingredients can lead you to making an academic essay as fantastic as our dear cook’s cake.
Sincerely,
The Writing Guru
Source~
“Overview of the Academic Essay”. Harvard. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/Overvu.html
No comments:
Post a Comment