Style Lesson Continued (20-30 min)
Let’s continue with last class’s work on style. We will focus on sentence rhythm, to include thinking about sentence type, length, and (for lack of a better term) coherence. We will save work on punctuation and register mixing for another day.
Examples (20-30 min)
Examples can be helpful for a number of things. To name a few, Miller mentions that they can generate interest, quantify differences across groups or time periods, translate complicated statistical or technical findings into more accessible form, illustrate implications of a statistical finding in a broader social or scientific context.
I thought there was a draft that had a few good examples. What do you think the following help to do?
We cannot forget about the vegetables as well! With a recommended serving size of 2 to 3 cups a day, Americans struggled to meet this goal. Averaging 1.42 cups as a total population, lower income families struggled to meet even this low number, and children (ages 2-19) excluded an entire cup of vegetables daily. If you lined up the amount of vegetables one child was missing over an entire year, you would have a football field lined end to end with 12-inch celery sticks .
And this one:
With a recommended serving size of 3 teaspoons for women and 6 for men daily, Americans nearly tripled this amount by consuming almost 18 teaspoons of sugar per day. This equates to nearly 4,281 teaspoons of excess sugar consumed a year, or 48 pounds of extra sugar. That is an extra 192 chocolate cakes consumed by one person a year. Sugar has run rampant into almost all foods eaten but is extremely prevalent in drinks and snack foods of today. One 12-ounce soda holds as much sugar as one orange, 16 strawberries, and 2 plums combined. If people elected to substitute even a can of Coke a day for these alternative snacks, not only would you quench your thirst through the juices in the fruit, but you would also exceed your daily fruit intake by a whole cup.
I want to mention another kind of example, especially when you are dealing with counting people or things related to people or non-human animals (e.g, money, medicine) that have implications for suffering.
Lynching was (and is) a terrible practice that has been part of U.S. history since the Revolutionary era (when loyalists were lynched) but really picked up in the late nineteenth century as a response to more freedoms for African Americans (though, while far fewer, other people of color were lynched as well as some Americans who would later be considered white like Italians).
Mobs of white people would find someone accused of a crime (and “accused” should be taken with a grain of salt here) and violently murder them. Beatings followed by a hanging were most common, but there was a diverse amount of cruelty applied. Ersula J. Ore has a recent book out connecting lynching to modern-day extra-judicial violence (i.e., violence to “punish” people before they get a chance to be tried in the criminal justice system) and Ore argues that lynching was a rhetorical act that showed who did and who did not belong to America–that is, who got full privileges as a citizen and who did not. This evolved from slavery, which showed explicitly a hierarchy in society. Lynching was one way (of several) to try to restore that balance.
I provide this information to help contextualize the two examples of using examples in quantitative writing. Both use methods of amplification to make a point about how lynching occurred not for the then commonplace idea that black men raped white women, but for many varied offenses (many of which were spurious). However, note the difference that the example makes compared to the version without an example.
- Chicago Tribune: “The Southern negro haters never have been at a loss to find reasons for lynching negroes. For instance, they have lynched in these eight years three for circulating scandals, three for defending themselves when attacked by whites, two for cutting levees, two for turning State’s evidence against whites, two for gambling, one for drinking, one for trying to poison a well, one for colonizing negroes, one for swindling, one for poisoning horses, and one for voodoism.”
- Ida B. Wells: “…the rest [of the lynchings] were for all manner of accusations, from that of rape of white women to the case of the boy Will Lewis who was hanged at Tullahoma, Tenn., last year for being drunk and “sassy” to white folks.”
What effect does the example have here on amplifying the variation in the data analyzed?
I know you all used other examples in your papers. Look back in your drafts. What does your example do? Does it do something like the above? Something different?
Let’s think about some tips on using examples. Use what we have talked about, but also from the Miller reading (she has several that are useful to think about).
Using what we talked about so far and the reason for using examples that Miller mentions, try to add one more example to your draft. Where should it go in your draft? What should it be about?
Rhetorical Situation Analysis (10-20 min)
Let’s pick back up where we started last time, but let’s more formally have a report on your publication or organization of choice. Answer the following:
- How would you describe the tone in general? What are the kinds of words that are used? Does it sound more conversational, more technical? Is it very serious? Is it lighter and more humorous? Etc. In your notes, record some examples that display this tone and explain how.
- How could you describe each “part” of the typical document among the documents you chose? How many parts are there? What would you name them? What are some common features of each part? In your notes, record some examples or explain further how these pieces are structured.
- What does the layout look like? Are there a lot of headings to break it up into explicit sections? Are the paragraphs typically on the longer or shorter side, or somewhere in between? Record examples in your notes.
- What other design features are notable? Anything about font, color, images, borders, the way figures or tables are presented, etc.?
- How can you use some of these texts as “models”–that is, how can you imitate some elements of the above into your own draft as you revise?
Save this information somewhere. Work on revising. So far, as you revise, you should be considering these writing concepts (which should also be what you see in my comments and your peers’ reactions to your writing):
- style (sentence level stuff: amplification, rhythm)
- the publication or org you are writing for
- how you talk about your data (e.g., limitations)
- how you communicate your analysis
- public audience considerations (tone, organization)
- your argument
- design, layout, accessibility (see document on CourseWeb)
Next week, we will talk about more quantitative concepts (e.g., probability), but we will also make time for talking about things like design, accessibility, and organization of an argument. Perhaps, too, some more on style.
Next Time
-do reading on probability linked on schedule
-work on public writing revision