Here are some of my responses to your diagnostic exercises. This was a very short writing assignment, so I was primarily looking for how you restated and responded to Young’s argument (which, in a meta twist, is itself a response to Fish’s argument). The things I’m listing below are fairly common issues in early drafts in a first-year writing classroom, so don’t feel like you’re alone if you find your response contains most of these items. For ease of revision, I will always divide feedback into 2 categories:
Higher-Order Concerns (HOCs): This is the most important material in your essay, the “big picture,” macro-level stuff: e.g., the claim; specific connections to exhibits or experiences you might be examining; development of your explanation of the claim and your analysis of each piece of lexis; etc.
Lower-Order Concerns (LOCs): This is the less important (not unimportant!) stuff in your essay, like grammar and mechanics: e.g., spelling, fragments, run-ons, punctuation, sentence rhythm variation, word choice.
HOCs:
They Say/I Say: When summarizing an author’s argument be sure to identify their words and thinking (they say) and then your paraphrasing, interpretation, and application of that idea (I say). This means always begin with what the author says, before diving into your own response. Imagine a reader who hasn’t read the essay you’re responding to—without your summary of the author’s argument, they’ll be lost.
Keep Your Analysis Local/Specific. When an author is making a specific claim, you have to attend to those specifics. Young, for instance, is reacting to criticisms about particular kinds of writing—academic or professional, as taught in educational institutions. You can’t really apply an argument about academic writing to the writing of poetry or a tweet without first accounting for the differences across those genres.
Rhetorical Awareness/Analysis. Rhetorical elements to watch out for include style/voice, intended audience, publication context (which might indicate intended audience), and circulation/impact/engagement. For instance, few of you actually mentioned the fact that Young almost exclusively wrote in AAVE, with occasional code-switching to engage other authors. Writing in this style itself helps make his argument, because it demonstrates that his essay is comprehensible regardless of the dialect he’s using; thus, the style itself becomes part of the argument.
Specificity and Precision. Be as specific as possible when restating another’s ideas and when articulating your own. For example, whose culture? Whose language? If visual examples help, just the other day a writer-academic on Twitter demonstrated a lot of this by annotating the Harper’s open letter making the rounds on social media today to show all its flaws and fallacies:
It’s important to ask these same sorts of questions of your own writing as you draft and revise.
Lower-Order concerns (LOCs):
- Refer to authors by their last names only (e.g., Young, Ahmed, Lorde).
- It’s okay to use the first-person!
- If used sparingly, using “And” or “But” to begin a sentence is fine (so long as the sentence isn’t a fragment).
- Don’t over do it with rhetorical questions. When you include a question, whether or not you intend it as rhetorical, the reader will expect that you answer, so you might just end up making more work for yourself.
- Use active voice and shorter sentences!
- Adjectives/adverbs will not make your case for you. For instance, saying an author is “famous” doesn’t say anything about why their argument works; saying a claim is “obvious” doesn’t really make it apparent.
One thing I’d like to stress: learn to work smarter, not harder. When research isn’t required, avoid outside sources. When you’re trying to explain your own thinking, keep it to your own thinking. Choose language that does all the work for you—e.g., appropriate transition words and phrases, strong verbs, precise and accurate descriptors. Writing is a game of manipulation and strategy, so let’s work on internalizing some of its “winning” practices.
