evaluate an appeal to ethos, you examine how successfully a speaker or writer establishes

able to recognize how writers and speakers depend upon ethos, logos, and pathos in their efforts to communicate.

summarize what “they say” as soon as you can in your text, and remind readers of it at strategic points as your text unfolds.

it’s true that not all texts follow this practice, we think it’s important for all writers to master it before they depart from it. 

eed to start with “what others are saying,” as the title of this chapter recommends, and then introduce your own ideas as a response.

Delaying this explanation for more than one or two paragraphs in a very short essay or blog entry, three or four pages in a longer work, or more than ten or so pages in a book reverses the natural order in which readers process material—and in which writers think and develop ideas.

This story also illustrates an important lesson about the order in which things are said: to keep an audience engaged, a writer needs to explain what he or she is responding to—either before offering that response or, at least, very early in the discussion.

would have understood the speaker’s point better if he’d sketched in some of the larger conversation his own claims were

writer needs to indicate clearly not only what his or her thesis is, but also what larger conversation that thesis is responding to.

story illustrates an important lesson: that to give writing the most important thing of all—namely, a point

Dr. X’s ideas and convinced many sociologists that Dr. X’s work was unsound.

Since the speaker gave no hint of an answer to any of these questions,

referring extensively and in great detail to various books and articles

Right. And a journalism major, who takes courses on beat reporting and feature writing, thinks about what will make a good story. A geology major does field work, looks at maps, learns about geological history, and sees rocks everywhere.

The Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) database is a good one. Are you logged in to the library? Can you try that one?

Before we move on, there’s an important aspect of walking with sources that you need to be aware of. In college writing, if you use a source in a paper,

Don’t forget to ask for help when you’re looking around for sources. Reference librarians make very good guides; it’s their job to keep up on where various kinds of knowledge are located and help people find that knowledge.

is that they won’t necessarily lead you to the sources considered most valuable for college writing.

But there are some ways you can narrow your search to get fewer, more focused results

That’d save me a trip.

What if you were writing an article on student clubs for the school newspaper? Where would you go for information?

Yes, the Internet has cut down on the amount of physical walking you need to do to find sources

Increase Font Size Toggle Menu HomeReadSign in Search in book: Search Contents Introduction I. Unit 1: Where I come from? 1. Poetry Selection: Our Names, Our Places, Our Families2. I Remember: Variations3. From: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life4. "My Bachelorette Application" by Samantha Irby5. Writing Advice: WP16.  II. Unit 2: Who am I? 7. "Know Yourself" from Book of Life8. Writing Advice: WP29. Interview Essays: Professional Examples III. Unit 3: Where am I going? 10. Defining Decade: Introduction and "Work"11. Defining Decade: "Love"12. Defining Decade: "The Brain and the Body"13. Writing Spaces: Advice on Finding and Using Sources IV. Unit 4: What do I care about? 14. "They Say" from They Say/I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkstein V. Unit 5: What ideas appeal to me? 15. "Evaluating Appeals to Ethos, Logos and Pathos" from English 116. Readings for WP5 Appendix Ascender Anthology 13 Protected: Writing Spaces: Advice on Finding and Using Sources “Walk, Talk, Cook, Eat: A Guide to Using Sources” by Cynthia R. Haller Marvin, a college student at Any University, sits down at his computer.* He logs in to the “Online Professor,” an interactive advice site for students. After setting up a chat, he begins tapping the keys. Marvin: Hi. I’m a student in the physician assistant program. The major paper for my health and environment class is due in five weeks, and I need some advice. The professor says the paper has to be 6–8 pages, and I have to cite and document my sources. O-Prof: Congratulations on getting started early! Tell me a bit about your assignment. What’s the purpose? Who’s it intended for? Marvin: Well, the professor said it should talk about a health problem caused by water pollution and suggest ways to solve it. We’ve read some articles, plus my professor gave us statistics on groundwater contamination in different areas. O-Prof: What’s been most interesting so far? Marvin: I’m amazed at how much water pollution there is. It seems like it would be healthier to drink bottled water, but the plastic bottles hurt the environment. O-Prof: Who else might be interested in this? Marvin: Lots of people are worried about bad water. I might even get questions about it from my clients once I finish my program. O-Prof: OK. So what information do you need to make a good recommendation? Marvin thinks for a moment. Marvin: I don’t know much about the health problems caused by contaminated drinking water.

What’s been most interesting so far? Marvin: I’m amazed at how much water pollution there is. It seems like it would be healthier to drink bottled water, but the plastic bottles hurt the environment. O-Prof: Who else might be interested in this?

plus my professor gave us statistics on groundwater contamination in different areas.

The major paper for my health and environment class is due in five weeks, and I need some advice

It seems too conventional, or at least politically incorrect, to be strategic about such things.

Popular magazines portray a twentysomething culture dominated by singles who are almost obsessed with avoiding commitment.

Some are serial monogamists while others pair with as many people as they can. Pundits and parents worry that marriage is dead, dating is in demise, and hooking up is the new relational medium.

Brooks aptly observed that we have to go downmarket, to talk shows or reality shows, to hear marriage discussed at all.

. This time gives many people a chance to live it up before they settle down, and to have fun with friends and lovers while the options are open.

happiness has more to do with whom you marry than with what college you attend

writer’s block. He felt he wasn’t supposed to say what he really wanted to say, which was something about how happiness has more to do with whom you marry than with what college you attend.

Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse.

is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

Now twentysomethings have been set up to be another bubble ready to burst. Inside my office, I have seen the bus

much of which has trivialized what is actually the most defining decade of our adult lives.

in the span of one generation, came an enormous cultural shift. User-friendly birth control flooded the market and women flooded the workplace. By the new millennium, only about half of twentysomethings were married by age thirty and even fewer had children, making the twenties a time of newfound freedom

Divorce and the Pill were just becoming mainstream

The men and women who did work could expect to stay in the same field for life.

“Love and work, work and love… that’s all there is,” and these things take shape later than they used to.

She said she finally felt like she was living her life “in real time.”

Most of the jobs (and the men) didn’t seem interesting. The ones that did she was starting to doubt she could get.

Kate looked around and felt behind

“the unexamined life is not worth living,”

It seemed unfair to talk about her weekends when it was her weekdays that made her so unhappy

Kate and I debated about what therapy—and her twenties—was supposed to be about.

twentysomethings spend too many years living without perspective

she hoped to figure out what she wanted to do by age thirty. “Thirty is the new twenty,”

She thought she was supposed to be having the time of her life but mostly she felt stressed and anxious. “My twenties are paralyzing,”

Her mother and father married just out of college because they wanted to go to Europe together and, in the early 1970s, this was not condoned by either of their families. They honeymooned in Italy and came back pregnant.

, Kate was often late to our appointments.

made her feel like a passenger in her own life.

with external stimulation of the appropriate kind, the capacity will pretty suddenly develop and mature. Before that and later than that, it’s either harder or impossible.

It’s hard to imagine navigating our world today without her stories

Also, not all the good writers get attention and win awards

While she now makes a living with her pen, it was not always so easy for her or her Latino/Chicano contemporaries

He has it locked up with a key in a safe somewhere.

used to sell that book for a dollar a copy out my backpack while I was still studying for my MFA,” she recalls. “I never thought I’d make money writing.” She says she doesn’t own a copy of the book

used to sell that book for a dollar a copy out my backpack while I was still studying for my MFA,

born in Chicago in 1954 to Mexican immigrants

who said at 77 that if he could have five more years, only then could he call himself an artist.

dipping into other forms of artistic expression. Her latest work, “Puro Amor,” is a small book of her illustrations.

It’s not that I am consciously doing this art — it’s organic and I am just learning

is collaborating with the composer Derek Bermel for an opera based on “The House on Mango Street.”

I am not where I want to be,” she said. “I have seen what I would like to do, and I have a long way to go.”

I have a long way to go.”

not only a gifted writer but an absolutely essential one.

feel it’s our responsibility to support young Latino and Latina writers who are probably being discouraged

I wrote it to stop the swelling in my heart from the stories that I was hearing and witnessing.”

she writes out of a sense of urgency because

all the work we do is in service to those we love and it’s always going to bring us better rewards and fortune.

They’ve been looking for loans, and the interest in Mexico is 39 percent. I can’t describe how happy it makes me to be able to do this for them.”

You’ll find yourself devising abbreviations for often-used words and also omitting the small connective syntax. As soon as the interview is over, fill in all the missing words you can remember.

This fear is almost wholly unfounded. The so-called man in the street is delighted that somebody wants to interview him.

and forget the questions you intended to ask

you can only go by intuition

keep your notebook out of sight until you need it. There’s nothing less likely to relax a person than the arrival of a stranger with a stenographer’s pad.

The rest is instinct

Choose, in short, someone who touches some corner of the reader’s life

they probably don’t have much to say that the rest of us want to hear.

The interview itself is one of the most popular nonfiction forms

it made you want to turn over the page to see what happens next.

characterization was not very authentic or convincing.

‘Your worries are over,’ I told her, ‘if you sell that chest.’ She said, ‘But that’s quite impossible— where will I store my blankets?’”

see if her furniture would fetch that much.

” The whole building turned out to be just such a mixture of scholars

. Find these people to tell your story and it won’t be drab.

Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers

we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us.

no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

use work to gain a sense of control over life

A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad.

not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require

provoke or assuage them

Choosing the wrong partner: We try to get together with people who don’t really suit us,

leaves you open to accident and mistaken ambitions. 

offers us a route to greater happiness and fulfilment.

focus on the areas of self-knowledge that matter most in life

literally the meaning of life.

I doubt that you would read a close friend’s early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker

awareness is learning to keep yourself company

The next day, I’d sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out everything I possibly could, find a new lead somewhere on the second page, figure out a kicky place to end it, and then write a second draft

Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get.

But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived

truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar.

I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper.

I would eventually let myself trust the process

No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him.

the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts

But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated.

he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us.”

Our sense by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this “composting.”

it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective. All we can say is, “I’m madly in love,” over and over again. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body.

This is me she is carrying. I am a baby. She does not know I will turn out bad.

My mother will get very mad. Her face will turn red and she will throw one shoe.

My father will say nothing. After a while everyone will forget it. Years and years will pass. My mother will stop mentioning it.

The woman, the one my father knows, is not here.

Mama was never good at pictures.

Can you see? I have candy in my mouth.

I am from those moments– snapped before I budded — leaf-fall from the family tree.

Under my bed was a dress box spilling old pictures,

I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.

the mountain I see when I wake up is imprinted

I am from that suspicious minority that doesn’t have roots like trees.

I am from the things I hang on my wall and the bed I get out of in the morning.

and it turns up everywhere including job applications.

I want to know when you get to be from a place, Five years, ten, twenty?

I could shed my name in the middle of life, the ordinary thing, and it would flee along with childhood and dead grandmothers

I have guarded my name as people in other times kept their own clipped hair, believing the soul could be scattered if they were careless.

“Let it breathe,” says this woman who knows my hand and tongue knot

Straight as a nun I sit.

My fingers foolish before paper and pen