Origin unknown (at least, unfound through a cursory Google search).
Update, Oct. 18: I’m giving you the corrections/exemplars guide for the Prose ETA questions. The normal assignment protocol — complete the work, check your answers, revise — may not be the most effective approach, and the stated purpose of this week’s lessons is to put you in charge of learning. You’ll find the “answer” key attached to your Google Classroom assignment, and I’ll stack printed copies on the bookshelf by our textbook.
Emulation through Analysis
The following is a version of this document. It has been reformatted for the website.
Overview of the Concept
In 1946, George Orwell noted that
an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Later, he summarizes this idea: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Our work isn’t so negative, though. We are focused on a feedback loop that builds strength in thinking through strength in writing. We listen to Orwell but invoke Neil Postman:
Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.
In here, we also pay attention to Paul Graham and his theory that essay-writing in school focuses on literary analysis through “a series of historical accidents,” with the end result that most school essays are “now three steps removed from real work.” Even non-literary assignments lose authenticity in the pursuit of academic emulation.
The path forward has you read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate her, not to produce the sort of analysis that a cursory search of Google would reveal. It’s the difference between applied and theoretical science.
So we arrive at emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work, which is designed to teach you how to answer analytical questions while you answer them. You should define new terms, look up new concepts, and enlist peers to help you. Getting the right answer is a goal; understanding how to use the strategy or technique is the goal. And the substructure is comprised, as always, of the universal skills of grade abatement, especially the three that most often lead to external artifacts:
Because you must know how to create in order to create. A makerspace requires granular expertise before experimentation and iteration will yield results. Otherwise, it’s just a sandbox.
Meanwhile, keep another idea from Orwell in mind:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
The following ten questions deconstruct elements of an essay by Francine Prose. Copies are available in the classroom. Focus your response process on speed, clarity, and insight. Ask questions about the ETA process or these questions in particular in the comments.
ETA Practice: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read”
- Discuss three appeals to ethos in this essay. What different roles, or personae, does Prose use to establish her ethos?
- Prose’s opening paragraph includes such words as appalled, dismal, and dreariness – all with negative connotations. Why does she start out with such strong language? Does she risk putting off readers who do not share her views? Why or why not? What other examples of strongly emotional language do you find in the essay?
- Prose makes several key assumptions about the role and impact of reading literary works in high school. What are they?
- What appeals does she make to logos?
- Prose cites many different novels and plays. Does she assume her audience is familiar with some of them? All of them? Explain why it matters whether the audience knows the works.
- According to Prose, “To hold up [I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings] as a paradigm of memoir, of thought – of literature – is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students” (para. 13). Do you agree with this analogy? Explain your answer. What other examples of figurative language can you find in this essay?
- Toward the end of the essay (paras. 35, 39, and 43), Prose uses a series of rhetorical questions. What is her purpose in piling one rhetorical question on top of the other?
- Would Prose have strengthened her argument by including interviews with a few high school students or teachers? Why or why not?
- According to Prose, why are American high school students learning to loathe literature? Try to find at least four or five reasons.
- Does she propose a solution or recommendations to change this situation? If she does not offer a solution, is her argument weakened? Explain your answer.
The next two sections offer you more context for this assignment. Read both carefully.
Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism
These questions are an unusual test, in that they don’t test knowledge you’ve learned. They teach that knowledge through process of answering each question. You’re going to have to look up terms, define concepts, and collaborate. To be most effective, though, you should start with an inventory of the resources available to you in and out of the classroom.
Google, as ever, is your friend. And like some friends, Google doesn’t always know what it doesn’t know — it just acts like it has an answer. Certainly you could learn a lot by searching Google and Wikipedia. I will suggest, however, that there are two compelling reasons to use a textbook, instead:
- The information has been vetted by an expert.
- The information is organized and indexed.
There is an erstwhile textbook for this class. We have 32 copies of it sitting on the bookshelf in the corner of the room. It’s called The Language of Composition, and one of my favorite facts about it is that it was written in part by a former Brewster teacher, Larry Scanlon.
The opening chapters of the textbook walk you through the three appeals that are mentioned several times in these ETA questions. Whether you are versed in these Aristotelian appeals or not, the textbook is an excellent review. You’ll also glean a dozen more helpful strategies and techniques through those first few chapters.
You have probably guessed by now that this next week is as much about proving that you can utilize the resources of a space like ours to learn as it is about deconstructing and emulating Prose. Before we can start writing earnestly and frequently, you need a foundation. For some of you, it will be review; for others, it will be a crash course. Remember that I am here to help.
Postscript: Occam’s Razor
Good. You’ve gotten through this post, and with some luck, you feel a little more clarity than you did 30 minutes ago. You have one more test this week:
Eleven perspectives on Sisyphean High
Read that. I will read it, too, in order to update any sections that need updating. Then we’ll come together in mutual understanding — or we won’t, and I will know who hasn’t read by the way your ignorance undermines your choices and interactions over the next week.
Understand that the greatest strength of this course is its 100% transparency: If you want to know what to do and how it all works, you only need to read. When I direct you toward something specific to read, that should be an immediate priority. We learn by doing in here, but the explanatory and instructional posts are a prerequisite; trying to create something meaningful without that background would be like trying to use power tools without any safety precautions. You’re going to lose a limb.
On the subject of losing limbs: If I’m not convinced by the end of the first-quarter that you belong in this AP class, then you don’t belong in this AP class. Does that mean you’ll be kicked out? No, of course not. But you should emerge from a close reading of that “Occam’s Razor” essay with an understanding of what it does mean.