76. UNIT NINE: Mixed Pattern Paper: Description, Narrative and Definition Paper

UNIT NINE*: Mixing Patterns: Description, Narration, Close Read, Compare and Contrast,

Persuasive Argumentation, and Definition Patterns of the student’s choice (minimum of three

required)

The Short Prose Reader Assignments: Read Richard Rodriguez’s “The Great Wall of America” (445-451) (Mixing Patterns) and Jared Diamond "Globalization Rocked the Ancient World" (245-254)

and the Model Student Papers below:

Short Papers: Mixed Pattern Paper (Math, Art, Science, Speech, English, or History topic) with Works Cited Page

FINAL EXAM ON WRITING GUIDE PRINCIPLES: 1-63, Process, Academic Integrity, Glossary (80% or better to pass course)

MIXED PATTERN PAPER ASSIGNMENT

Unit Nine*: Mixing Patterns: (minimum of three required of the student’s choice)

Description,

Narration,

Close Read,

Compare and Contrast,

Persuasive Argumentation,

Definition Patterns

The Short Prose Reader Assignments: Read Richard Rodriguez’s “The Great Wall of America” (Mixing Patterns), Jared Diamond “Globalization Rocked the Ancient World Tpp (pp 245-254) and the Model Student Paper on the Writing Course Site

Short Papers: Mixed Pattern Paper (Math, Art, Science, Speech, English, or History topic) with Works Cited Page

FINAL EXAM ON WRITING GUIDE PRINCIPLES: 1-63, Process, Academic Integrity, Glossary (80% or better to pass course)

Create Mixed Pattern Paragraph

Ultimately, the goal of learning the 10 C’s of analytical writing is to be able to move seamlessly between the C’s in different paragraphs and even within the same paragraph. A paper that simply employs “default analysis”--- the 3 essential C’s of analytical writing: context, condense, and connect--- in each analysis paragraph will be a predictable and pedestrian paper. However, a paper that creates mixed patterns in paragraphs and employs varied patterns in different paragraphs will prove to be a compelling read. You will recall that the 10 C’s of analytical writing are:

1 Context

2 Condense

3 Connect

4 Close Read

5 Compare and contrast

6 Create the counterargument

7 Concede

8 Converse

9 Co-commentary

10 Concept definitions

Writers will learn to ask themselves which C’s are needed for a given paper or paragraph. That is, does the point of the paper or paragraph require persuasive argumentation that necessitates the definition of a concept? Or does a passage require close reading by imagery and connotations and comparisons and contrasts to a similar passage?

With time and practice, beginning writers will be able to determine by a paper prompt whether or not the paper requires multiple persuasive argumentation paragraphs or whether a paper prompt demands multiple close reading paragraphs. Like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, the writer will choose to repeat and emphasize certain patterns because either the paper prompt demands them or the text’s passages demand them or both. Eventually, advanced writers will become so familiar with the “rhetorical moves of sentence starters” and writing patterns and when to employ them that doing so will become second nature.

Below is a sample “Mixed Pattern paragraph” with the patterns bolded and labeled. (Readers should know that the Innocent Perspective was defined in the previous paragraph):

After writing the Song of Innocence poem “The Echoing Green” in which children “laugh and play” in nature and are of the Innocent perspective, William Blake writes the Song of Experience poem "The Garden of Love" to convey the despair and anger associated with finding nature destroyed by man. Describing the loss of love of wild nature, the speaker recalls:

I laid me down upon a bank,

Where Love lay sleeping;

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

(lines 1-8)

In the opening lines of Blake’s "The Garden of Love," the speaker describes nature as tricked or “beguiled” into becoming “chaste” or restrained by man’s alteration of it. This destruction of wild nature is associated with depriving life's unrestrained joys by organized religion’s focus on purity and fear of sin. Close Reading Pattern: The melancholy tone of the opening lines is underscored by portraying “Love” as “weeping, weeping.” Weeping has the connotations of loss, despair, and mourning. The speaker is mourning the loss of life's “joys and desires” in wild nature that has now been altered by man to be less “wasteful.” The personification of “Love” in the line, “ Where Love lay sleeping” is significant because it conveys that the once wild love in wild nature is dormant, less powerful, and asleep. Concept Definition Pattern: This personification also presents how love is non-existent or extremely diluted in the Experienced perspective---a view that questions the malevolent intentions and action of man as imbalanced toward destruction. Close Reading Pattern: The alliterative “th” sound in lines “Then I went to the heath and the wild, /

To the thistles and thorns of the waste” emphasizes the keywords “thorns” and “thistles”. The auditory emphasis on “thorns” and “thistles” is important because these objects engender the speaker’s Experienced perspective, for the Experienced perceiver focuses on the negatives in the world and cannot see that these thorny stems will one day bloom into a beautiful flower. Thorns and thistles are usually on the stems of roses, but they are separated from the bloom of the rose flower by man lopping off the perceived excess of the rose. Concept Definition Pattern: Blake’s depiction of man’s destruction of wild nature as “wasteful” leaves the speaker to focus solely on the thorns and thistles, and this establishes the speaker’s Experienced perspective in "The Garden of Love."

-commentary: notice how the writer moves seamlessly between the close reading pattern and the concept definition pattern. And notice how these two patterns are interwoven more than once in this analysis. The Blake poem begs to be read closely by tone, connotations, personification, and alliteration. And, since the poem’s point is to convey the Experienced Perspective to the reader, the poem as a whole invites the writer to define the Experienced perspective---a key concept developed in class. This is the goal: interweave multiple patterns based upon your assessment of what patterns the text demands.

MIXING PATTERNS: Description, Narrative, and Definition Paper while non-fiction and analysis essay writing are different rhetorical modes, blending the two in one paper often produces a more compelling read.

Non-fiction writing can range from description of place to setting and action to character sketches to personal narratives to definition writing to name a few non-fiction modes.

In an analysis paper on a William Blake’s Song of Innocence and a Song of Experience, it would be valuable to seize the opportunity to weave personal narrative writing about your “innocent” perspective into more formal textual analysis of the Song of Innocence poem “A Blossom.” And you could weave in a personal experience in which you became cynical and irreverent in order to allow the reader to have some insight about your development of the Blakean “experienced” perspective. This weaving in of nonfiction writing allows your paper to have a more personal and engaging feel than straight textual analysis writing. Often writers will begin and end their analysis essay writing with narratives, character sketches, or descriptions of place. Some writers even move effortlessly in and out of definition writing and analysis writing or personal narrative writing and analysis writing from body paragraph to body paragraph and even within body paragraphs..

The example below employs both non-fiction narrative writing at the beginning and end of the paper “to frame” it and achieve essay coherence and definition writing and narrative writing next to analysis writing from body paragraph to body paragraph.

Blending non-fiction and analysis writing should be a goal of all developing writers.

MIXED PATTERN WRITING ASSIGNMENT:

Prompt #1: Choose a paper you have written for a course in the Upper School and add two more rhetorical patterns to it to create a three-pattern paper. For example, you can turn your narrative into a Definition-Textual Analysis- Narrative paper, as I did above with my paper on “Wilderness- A Way of Thinking.”

Or choose a textual analysis paper from English class and add Description of Place and Narration.

Or choose an Art Illustration in this course or in an Art course and add Definition and Persuasive Argumentation.

Or choose a Compare and Contrast History paper or the compare and contrast paper from this course and add Definition and Close reading Analysis.

You get the idea…

Sample Non-Fiction and Analysis Writing:

Non-fiction writing is in bold:

Wilderness: A Wild Way of Thinking

White Cloud Mountains of central Idaho: 11,000 towering, jagged peaks, smattering of dwarfed pines below us, and two emerald green lakes joined by a constant stream. The stream runs with a quick splatter over freestone rocks and splays into Sapphire Lake without a sound. It is July 7th and I am hiking with my dog Kenai-a collie shepherd mix. We don’t talk but we understand. This is the third day of my solo hike. The winds are scouring the knife-edge, mountain ridge lines above me, but in this concentric bowl of lakes, the air is calm and tinged with the tantalizing whiff of pine. Sapphire lake is a cool, dark green colored stone that catches sunlight to reveal the water’s subtly hewn shadows as the lake transitions from almost black to the shallow sand-pebbled pockets of light green. A gem. (Description of Place)

My energy to move with a slow cadence comes from the western slope cutthroat I have been catching and eating for lunch and dinner. I have not spoken in three days. The world of language, traffic and towns, let alone cities, seems foreign to me. I feel light, airy, as if I can float from lake to lake, from stream to stream and fish more as a spirit than as a body. I feel myself blend as a detail among the alpine landscape, more apart of a vast ecosystem than a visitor to “wilderness.” (Narrative writing)

Although it may be impossible to escape our anthropocentric view-human centered view- of the world completely, we should strive to expand the limits of human consciousness to include the perspective of a tree, a trout, a wolf, and the biosphere. This expanded perspective eliminates the narrow mindedness which pervades our current relationship with nature. In Gary Snyder’s collection of essays The Practice of the Wild, he argues that one of the central lessons of the wilderness experience is to learn how myopic humans’ perspectives of nature are. (Definition Writing)

Hoping to expand the reader's’ consciousness by exposing the limits of an anthropocentric or human-centered perspective, Snyder argues that the value of wilderness cannot be assessed in human terms. We need a new way of perceiving and expressing wilderness in order to grasp at its value. In his essay, “The Etiquette of Freedom,” Snyder writes, “Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?” (33). Keenly aware of the tendency to hold humans as the determiners of meaning and value in this essay, Snyder questions the justifiability of this tendency. He also explores the consequences of continuing to judge the natural world and its “creatures” from an anthropocentric perspective; he writes, “Of all moral failings and flaws of character, the worst is stinginess of thought, which includes meanness in all its forms. Rudeness in thought or deed toward others, toward nature, reduces the chances of conviviality an inter species communication, which are essential to physical and spiritual survival.” (41). Not only is an anthropocentric view limiting to assessing nature’s value, it is also detrimental to the physical and spiritual connection between humans and nature. This disconnection with nature will perpetuate the narrow mindedness in thought and deed that caused it to be. Therefore, we need to extend our perspective of nature to include a perspective other than our own for the physical and spiritual health of this world and our minds. (Definition and Textual Analysis Writing)

In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell has a fascinating chapter titled the “Aesthetics of Relinquishment” in which he defines two conventional means of attaining a “wider perspective of the universe” in environmental literature. The first method of relinquishment entails the release of material goods, the denial of human comforts, and the acceptance of nature as the only reality. (i.e. Ike’s relinquishment of the rifle, compass, and watch in William Faulkner’s “The Bear”) The second method of reconnecting the human to the natural entails “giving up the notion of individual autonomy from the environment.” (Buell 121). In other words, this second form of relinquishment requires the self to eradicate the dichotomy between the natural and the human, nature and culture, and the wild and the civilized. Snyder advocates this second form of self-relinquishment: the sublimation of self-interest, self-effacement, and transcendence across artificial binaries between nature and human, as a means to develop a more ecocentric relationship with nature. It is important to note that Buell is careful to make the distinction between self-relinquishment and the eradication of the self. He argues for “relinquishment, not eradication of the ego. The aesthetics of relinquishment imply a suspension of the ego to the point of feeling the environment to be at least as worthy of attention as oneself and as situated among many interacting presences.” (Buell 121). Here, Buell is defining the feeling one gets when immersed in wilderness for a prolonged period of time. Human concerns become less cumbersome and one perceives oneself as a part of the natural world that is constantly making adjustments to survive. (Definition and Textual Analysis Writing)

A shadow flits across the surface of Sapphire Lake in the White Cloud mountains. Lifting my head from the end of my fly line, I notice an osprey with talons dangling and claws arched forward. Wings pinned back in a violent “W,” the osprey smacks the surface of the lake with great accuracy and lifts a five inch trout into the air by piecing its belly with a foreclaw. I return to my fly line and strip in line with three quick, deliberate pulls and then rest. Three short pulls, then, rest. Three short pulls, then, my line shoots out in a quick spasm of energy, and I lift the rod up with the fly line pressed against the cork handle. The green back and intermittent black spots crests the surface; it flops on its side and the unmistakable red spot below its gill flashes. It is a western slope cutthroat. I feel the “acceptance of nature as the only reality.” (Narrative Writing)

Gary Snyder adds to Larry Buell’s distinction between the eradication of the self and the relinquishment of the self in the development of a more ecocentric perspective of the environment by distinguishing between selves. Snyder believes that experiences in nature teach us to be aware of the “wildness” in the world and within us; this denies the former conception of an autonomous, independent self superior to nature. The new self realizes it is “situated among many interacting presences” and conceives of its existence as a “whole” inseparable from the world, which owes its existence to these “interacting presences.” This effacement of the former self and construction of an ecocentric self “engenders compassion” for the “actually existing world.” As Snyder states, “To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be whole...by directly intuiting our condition in the actually existing world we realize that we have had nothing from the beginning...The experience of emptiness engenders compassion.” (134). The “practice of the wild” (i.e.experiences in nature) develops a more ecocentric perspective by relinquishing the belief in a self autonomous from the natural world and the creation of a self that realizes it is part of the whole world as much as the whole world is a part of the self. Snyder believes, “To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in.” (231). The interconnectedness of part and whole in this passage intimates the creation of the “whole” self as continuous with nature. This leads to the realization that harm to the other (nature) is really harm to the self. As Snyder notes, “The etiquette of the wild world requires not only generosity but a good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort, an appreciation of everyone’s fragility, and a certain modesty...These moves take practice, which calls for a certain amount of self-abnegation, and intuition, which takes emptying of yourself.” (94). The emptying and purging of the former self allows the new self to be “generous, tough, modest, appreciative” and aware of its interdependent relation to the world. What is transcended in this process of self-relinquishment is the dichotomy between the natural and the human. Returning to his study of the relationship between the words “wild” and “free,” Snyder argues that “the lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. (We learn) to take ourselves as no more or no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept each other as barefooted equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them.” (121). Experiences in nature lead to the understanding of the pervasiveness of the wild, which lead to a compassion for the fragility and interconnectedness of human existence in the world, which lead to the etiquette of freedom. As in all worthwhile goals, the development of a more ecocentric self takes practice. (Definition and Textual Analysis Writing)

When I go to leave Sapphire Lake and the majesty of the white peaks of the White Cloud mountains, I know I am leaving my constant immersion in wildness and understanding of myself as apart of wilderness and wildness. With each step down the rock-strewn trail, I think of how interconnected perception is key to understanding of how linked seeing is to knowing. While I feel I am leaving a better part of myself behind, I know that my ecocentric self is never completely gone, but is just buried under the daily demands of modern life. When I receive my first sight of another human in a week and use speech for the first time, I know I have left my full immersion in wilderness behind. But the words of Gary Snyder return to me and I find comfort in the notion that:

The point is to make intimate contact with the real world, real self.

Sacred refers to that which helps take us (not only human beings)

out of our little selves into the whole mountains rivers mandala

universe...One should not dwell on the specialness of the extraordinary experience nor hope to leave the political quagg behind to enter a

perpetual state of heightened insight. The best purpose of such studies

andhikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the

land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same

territory-never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. It can be

restored, and humans could live in considerable numbers on much of it.

Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with

us, as we stroll a city street.

(123)

I now know that the point of sublime / sacred experiences in the wilderness is to form a new conception of the “real self” as participating in a world consisting of both wildernesses and backyards. In other words, seek out the “body-mind joy” on a hike in a wilderness area, but return to your immediate surroundings (urban, suburban, rural, agricultural, industrial) and know that you participate in a world in which geese migrate, glaciers melt, salmon spawn, and trees fall while you sleep, “not in a bed in a house in a county in a state in a nation,” but in a sandhill crane migration route after an ice age in a watershed of high desert and Douglas fir. (Narrative and Textual Analysis Writing)

Commentary: Notice how compelling the Definition and Textual Analysis become when framed with Descriptive and Narrative writing. The goal of this Writing Across the Curriculum course has been to expose students to the rhetorical patterns present in good writing and to empower them to use the different rhetorical patterns to create a dynamic and informative piece of writing.

You always have an opportunity to employ:

Description,

Narration,

Close Read,

Compare and Contrast,

Persuasive Argumentation,

Process analysis,

Definition Patterns

in each paper you write, so go forth and mix these rhetorical patterns to make you writing exciting to read.