50 Essays: A Portable Anthology - Samuel Cohen 2017

Introduction for students: active reading, critical thinking, and the writing process

Reading, writing, ’rithmetic

Hard work, preparation, and lots of reading can add up to good writing. That is the arithmetic of writing. We become active, critical, intelligent readers and writers by carefully reading the writing that others have done and then applying what we have learned to our own writing. Reading and writing are most of what you will do in your college courses. The strongest readers and writers have learned to see these activities as inextricably intertwined. You read, you write, then you read some more, then you write again. And this pattern applies in nearly all of your classes, not just those in English and history and other disciplines that come to mind as reading and writing heavy. Math, biology, and engineering classes require the same skills. Acquiring and strengthening them at the start of your college career will help you all the way to graduation and beyond, as reading and writing are central to so many of the careers you might find yourself in a few years down the road.

This introduction will briefly consider the best ways to approach the kinds of assignments you will encounter in your college writing courses. As you read it, think about the ways you read and write now. Do you do some of these things already? Have you tried them before? Be open to the advice, but remember, it is only the advice of one teacher. Your teacher may have different ideas, just as you may, and these ideas may change. Here’s an example: in the first edition of this book, I argued against reading while lying down, saying it was better to sit up so you could pay better attention and stay awake. Students, teachers, and my editor disagreed. I decided they were right. The point? As the introduction will explain, the best thing you can do with the texts you encounter in school and in the world is try both to understand them and to evaluate them, and be open to having your mind changed by them. And if you want, do so while stretched out on a nice comfortable couch.

Active reading

We read for a number of reasons. We want the news, we want information, we want to be entertained. We want to hear other people thinking. We want to be taken out of ourselves and live other lives. We also read because it is crucial to learning how to write. The poet Jane Kenyon gave this advice on becoming a better writer: “Have good sentences in your ears.” To write well — to express your ideas efficiently and clearly — you need to observe how others do it. You need to see examples of the ways writers write, the techniques and forms they use. Because good writing is about more than correctness, though, you also have to observe the ways writers think. Working with ideas — handling the ideas of others and presenting your own — is the most important thing writers do, and so the most important thing for writers to learn. Since it is so important, of course, it is difficult. Life is like that. But reading examples of good writing gives you access to models: it shows writers engaging with ideas, holding them up to the light, turning them this way and that, and maybe modifying them in some way, adding something, taking something away, taking them apart entirely, offering their own instead.

To learn to do the same, however, you need to do more than simply mimic what good writers do. You need to treat their writing the same way they treat ideas. Hold their writing up to the light, turn it this way and that, figure out how it works and also how it doesn’t, think about how it might be wrong — how you might think differently about their subjects. This activity is sometimes called active or critical reading.

The essays in this collection are here to be studied as models; they are also here to be read critically. While you might learn something from every essay, they are not chapters in a chemistry textbook. Your job is not to take what they say as the gospel truth. Instead, you should evaluate what you read. This doesn’t mean you should treat these essays as movie critics treat movies or restaurant critics treat food: these essays aren’t here for you to simply judge, to give a thumbs up or down to, to savor or spit out. Instead, you should evaluate their ideas and the way they present them as if in conversation with them. Ask questions of them, argue with their assumptions, examine how they connect their ideas, and test these connections. In learning to think this way about what writers create, you will learn to think like a writer.

There are many techniques that can help you read this way. What they boil down to is reading actively rather than passively. Think of passive reading as like watching television. While there are some good, thoughtful programs on TV, most of us watch TV passively — sitting on a couch, maybe eating, maybe doing something else simultaneously (but not our schoolwork, of course), and letting television wash over us. Active reading, in contrast, requires full attention. Posture aside, your mind needs to be sitting up straight, concentrating on the page, ready to reach down into the page and grab the words. Here are some tips to ensure that you get the most out of what you read.

Ways to read actively

Read consciously. In addition to being awake, it is important to be conscious of the situation you are in. Why are you reading? Merely for comprehension, or for observation of the writing itself, or for argument about the ideas? What are you reading? For what purpose or occasion or publication was the piece written, and by whom? Is it a selection from someone’s autobiography? Is it an article from a newspaper or an editorial? How has it been contextualized — is it in a chapter on a certain kind of writing or on a certain idea or theme? Keeping these questions in mind as you read makes you notice more, think harder, and make connections among ideas.

Read critically. Always ask yourself what you think about the writer’s arguments. Although doing this does not require you to take issue with every or any single thing an author writes, it does ask you to think of reading as conversation: the writer is talking to you, telling you what she thinks about something, and you are free to answer back.

Read with a pencil in hand. This is the best, easiest way to answer back. Many students leave their books untouched, thinking that they will remember what they read or that it is wrong to write in books or that they won’t be able to sell them back at the end of the semester if they write in them. These are common objections, but consider this: you won’t recall everything (nobody remembers everything he or she reads, and memorizing isn’t the only or even the most important thing we do when we read); it’s not wrong to write in a book (books don’t have feelings, but if they did, they’d like the attention); and bookstores will buy back marked-up books (go check out the used books in the bookstore). Making marks on the page — annotating — is the surest way to read actively. Underline important passages, circle words you haven’t heard of, scribble furious rants in the margin, jot down questions about content or writing strategy, use exclamation points and question marks and arrows and Xs. Grab the text with your bare hands. Reading with a highlighter is the passive version of marking your book because it is less suited to annotating and more suited to identifying chunks of text. The result of marking with a highlighter is that you haven’t engaged with your reading so much as prioritized parts of it a little bit — used fluorescent yellow or pink or green to say, “Hey, there’s something important here.” While a highlighter might be more appropriate in your chemistry textbook, even there it can be dangerous: while checking out the used books in the bookstore, notice how often entire paragraphs and even pages are afloat in seas of highlighter ink, and ask yourself how that helped the students whose books these used to be. Pencils are also good for chewing, sticking in your hair to hold your bun together, and sliding behind your ear to make you look smart and industrious.

Use a notebook or computer. Many readers like to take notes in a notebook or computer. Although there are disadvantages to this kind of note taking relative to annotation — your marks are not right in the text and so are less immediately accessible and less immediately tied to the lines on the page — there are also advantages. You can make lengthy notes. You can copy important and well-phrased sentences (making sure to enclose them in quotation marks and to note where they came from). You can paraphrase¹ ideas, you can summarize, you can note your reactions as you read. Doing these things can make you think more about what you’re reading. Some readers use a double-entry system in which they draw a line down the middle of the page, note or reproduce particular passages from the reading in the left column, and respond to those passages in the right column. Many variations on this kind of note taking are possible (and all of them, of course, can be reproduced on a computer).

Paraphrase

A rephrasing of a section of a work into one’s own words. A paraphrase is different from a summary in that it includes the details of a work and so is of similar length to the original; a paraphrase is similar to a summary in that both attempt to give some sense of another work without using its words.

An Example of Annotation and Note Taking from Brent Staples, “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space” (p. 339)

Strong emotion

Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal.

Living with rage would make him crazy

Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening.

Echoes the essay’s title

I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them.

“rare” implies that he even takes care to behave well when driving

I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when I’ve been pulled over by police.

His tension or other people’s?

And on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers.

People are comfortable with what they know

Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune.

“Every-body”? Seems like a stereo-type about white people

Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Powerful image

It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.

Notes

Staples’s essay started off making it sound like he was a criminal, but by the end I realized that was his whole point: he’s NOT a criminal, yet he’s often treated like one because of his race

Staples’s descriptions of how he copes with people perceiving him as a threat are really illuminating but also really disheartening

I found it weird that Staples counteracts the stereotypes people have of him by using other stereotypes — e.g., the idea that cultured people who know classical music can’t be criminals (I guess traditionally rap is associated with African Americans? Another stereotype …)

The last line of this passage is really powerful — Staples feels like he is being viewed as a hunter, when actually he’s the one being hunted (he’s in “bear country”). That image really emphasizes how the people reacting to him as a threat are, in reality, a threat to him …

Note the different kinds of entries here. The first is about the reader’s changing thoughts as he reads. The second is a moment of appreciation. The third and fourth are trains of thought that start from small parts of the essay. None of these sum up the reading, though that is a good thing to do also. Instead, these entries record reactions and thoughts inspired by the essay, and — like the notes made alongside the excerpt — could serve as ways back into the essay when it is time to write about it. See page 7 for a checklist of things you can annotate and make notes about as you read. Also see the sample student paper beginning on page 11. This paper builds on the initial ideas and notes presented here; as you read it, look for ways in which the student develops his preliminary thoughts into an argument.

Critical thinking/critical reading

The previous annotation sample shows how active reading is much more than reading to understand. Summarizing what has been read is important; moving beyond summary to active engagement is something else, and it is crucial to really making use of what you’ve read. One name for this something else is critical thinking.

A checklist for annotating a reading

As you read, consider marking or taking notes on the following:

· Main topics

· Secondary topics

· Main points

· Supporting points

· Examples, evidence, or other support

· Ideas or ways of saying things that you like

· Ideas or ways of saying things that you don’t like

· Ideas you want to think more about later

· References or words with which you are not familiar

evidence

The facts that support an argument. Evidence takes different forms depending on the kind of writing in which it appears, but it generally is concrete, agreed-on information that can be pointed to as example or proof. In “Serving in Florida” (p. 136), Barbara Ehrenreich supports the narrative of her experiences living as a low-income worker with both a detailed survey of the living conditions of her coworkers and statistical support gleaned from research. Ehrenreich’s argument is strengthened by inclusion of these different kinds of evidence.

Critical thinking doesn’t mean being critical in the everyday sense, that is, being negative. It means being inquisitive, evaluative, even skeptical. When reading, it means thinking not just about what someone says but about the unspoken assumptions that lie behind what she says, the unnamed implications of what she says, and the way she says it. It also means evaluating — asking if you agree with a writer’s implicit and explicit conclusions, even asking if you agree with the framing of the question asked or the topic addressed, and judging the eloquence and/or effectiveness of the writing. Critical thinking is a catchall term for a number of activities that add up to active, thoughtful engagement with a subject. For many, it is the single most important skill higher education makes possible: it allows people to actively judge and process the things they read and hear rather than passively accept them. For others, it has an arguably more powerful aspect: that of allowing individuals to accept or reject the common wisdom that is all around them, in everyday life, at work, in politics.

conclusion

The ending of an essay, which should bring the writer’s point home in a few sentences or even a paragraph or two. Good conclusions do more than repeat a thesis, and they can even sometimes point the way to extensions of the thesis, but they should not introduce entirely new thoughts. Conclusions can also be funny, as when Swift, at the end of “A Modest Proposal” (p. 353), insists he has no personal interest at stake in his ironic proposal that the people of Ireland eat their infants as, in his words, “I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past childbearing” (par. 33).

When applied to reading, critical thinking might be called critical reading. See page 8 for a checklist of critical reading questions, with follow-up questions, that you can ask yourself when reading critically (that is, always). While they will not all be applicable for every occasion, most will be helpful as you try to understand and evaluate others’ writing.

A checklist for critical reading

· What is the writing situation? Where did the text originally appear?

· What is the writer’s subject?

o Is she choosing to focus or not to focus on something important? Is she leaving something out?

· What is the writer’s main point about her subject?

o Do you agree? Do you disagree? Why?

· What is the writer’s purpose in making that point?

o What do you think of that purpose? Do you think that she achieves it?

· To what sort of audience does the writer seem to be addressing herself?

o Are you part of that audience? Who is, and who is left out?

· What are the assumptions behind the writer’s treatment of her subject?

o Do you agree with them? Do you disagree? Why?

· What further conclusions could be drawn from the writer’s point?

o Do you agree with them? Do you disagree? Why?

· What do you think of the way the writer makes her argument?

o Is it convincing? Logical? Does she fight fair?

· What can you borrow (without plagiarizing)?

o Are there particular techniques the writer uses to argue, describe, narrate, or just shape a sentence that you want to remember and use in your own writing?

The writing process

As the last critical reading question indicates, writers get better by paying attention to how the writing they like works and trying to duplicate those effects in their own work. This is not the same thing as plagiarism: you know not to take another’s work and pretend it’s your own. The very best writers got so good not by copying words and ideas without giving proper credit, but by imitating other writers — their styles, their tones, their patterns of organization — and using these as starting points for developing their own voices.

Plagiarism

Using another person’s words or ideas in one’s own work without acknowledgment.

style

The way a writer writes. Any of the choices writers make while writing — about diction, sentence length, structure, rhythm, and figures of speech — that make their work sound like them. The tone of a particular work can be due in part to a writer’s style. James Baldwin is known for his distinctive style, one aspect of which is the mixing of formal, sometimes biblical, language and an everyday, conversational style, as in this sentence from “Notes of a Native Son” (p. 44): “I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along” (par. 2).

tone

Attitude toward subject, readers, and even the writer and work itself; also sometimes mood or atmosphere more generally. Achieved through style as well as content. In his indictment of King George III in the Declaration of Independence (p. 193), Thomas Jefferson writes, “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people” (pars. 20—21). His tone in this passage comes from his choice of words, the shape of his sentences, and his imagery.

Reading actively, critically, and with an eye toward borrowing helps you to become a better writer. However, nothing helps you learn to write like writing itself. While there will be a number of occasions in your academic career when you will be required to hand in formal, typed, proofread essays, take advantage of the times when you have to write informally — in class, in journals, online. Think of times when you don’t have to write but could — sitting on the bus, waiting for your computer to boot up — and get out a notebook and write. Like strengthening a muscle through repeated exercise, the more you use your writing skills the stronger they will become.

This strength will help you when it is time to write formal, academic essays, and it can help to lessen anxiety about writing. Every writer, when faced with more demanding assignments, feels some form of dread, trepidation, or nervous excitement. In other words, it is far from rare for writers of all levels of experience to freeze up, space out, or throw in the towel. Many of the best ways writers have found to get past the difficulty of getting started involve recognizing that writing is a process. People often imagine a typical scene when they think of writing: they see the writer, hunched over the blank pad or in front of the blank screen, waiting for inspiration to strike, then, having been struck, finding the exact words to express this inspiration, and then, finishing, leaning back with a sigh of contentment at a job well done. Very few people actually write this way.

Rather than thinking that you must sit down and create a polished piece of work out of thin air, remember that writers can go through many stages when they write and that each stage can help produce a final product. Before you begin to write a first draft, try a number of prewriting activities, which can help you brainstorm or come up with ideas. You can work up notes or a formal or informal outline before you draft. At this point you can also make use of comments you wrote in the margins of your text. After taking a first stab at a draft, you can revise. As important as recognizing that you can break down the writing process into these stages is knowing that they don’t have to be followed. After producing a draft, you may return to outlining and brainstorming. You can even do this as you draft: as you see your main point (your thesis) changing or your argument taking a different course, go back to your notes or outline and modify accordingly. When you get to the revision stage, when you think you might be focusing on correctness and style, you may find not only that you need to rewrite what you wrote in the drafting stage but also that you need to rethink the ideas you came up with during the prewriting stage. While smoothing out the transitions between your paragraphs, you may find they are rough because the connections among your ideas are also rough, and so you will need to smooth out your ideas before you can smooth out your expression of them.

draft

An unfinished essay. A draft may have a conclusion, but it has not been completely revised, edited, and proofread. When still in the draft stage, writers can rethink not just the structure of their essay but their ideas as well.

Prewriting

Writing that happens before drafting. Prewriting is an early stage in the writing process during which writers brainstorm, come up with topics and theses, and begin to work on ways to develop them.

thesis

The main idea in a piece of writing, which the work is trying to argue or explore. Also sometimes known as the claim, a term which also has a more specific meaning related to argumentation. The thesis can be explicit, as in essays that make an argument (as in Alan Burdick’s “The Truth about Invasive Species,” p. 79), or implicit or even secondary, as in some narrative essays (as in Cristina Henríquez’s “Lunch,” p. 182).

argument

Writing that attempts to prove a point through reasoning. Argument presses its case by using logic and by supporting its logic with examples and evidence. When Thomas Jefferson, in “The Declaration of Independence” (p. 193), makes his case for why the American colonies should be given their independence, he introduces his list like this: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world” (par. 6). Making a claim and then making the transition to supporting examples, Jefferson’s writing is argument.

Transitions

The connective tissue among sentences, ideas, and paragraphs. Transitions help readers follow writers through their ideas and see the connections among the parts of an argument or the relation between scenes in a narrative. Through the use of transitional words (therefore, nonetheless, then), phrases (on the other hand, as a result, in the same way), effects (such as repetition or parallel sentence structures), and even whole paragraphs, good writers include signposts to show readers the direction the argument or story is going. Nancy Mairs in “On Being a Cripple” (p. 226) begins many of her paragraphs with transitions that help readers follow the line of her thought. Some examples: “Lest I begin to sound like Pollyanna, however, let me say that I don’t like having MS” (par. 9); “Along with this fear that people are secretly accepting shoddy goods comes a relentless pressure to please” (par. 18); “This gentleness is part of the reason that I’m not sorry to be a cripple” (par. 32).

paragraph

A series of sentences, set off by an initial indentation or a blank line, that develop a main idea. Paragraphs often have topic sentences that state that main idea, followed by sentences that offer support.

This may all sound daunting. It shouldn’t. Thinking about writing as a recursive process — one in which you loop back to the starting point as you revise and build on your work — means you don’t have to try to get everything perfect the first time. It allows you to get your ideas down on paper as they come to you because you know you can always go back and change them. It allows you to think critically about your work because it never feels like it’s too late to improve any aspect of it. Read as a writer reads — critically, actively — and write as a writer writes — in stages, recursively — and pretty soon (that is, before you even know it) you will be a thoughtful, fluid writer who enjoys practicing his or her craft. There is no complicated mathematical formula to explain the interrelation of critical reading, creative brainstorming, careful revision, and all of the other elements that are part of what makes good writing, but the basic arithmetic — reading + hard work = good writing — holds up.

I hope that you enjoy reading the essays in this book, and that you find that they help you with your writing. At the end of this introduction you’ll find an example of an essay written in response to readings in 50 Essays. Annotations have been added to highlight important parts of the essay — elements like the thesis statement, transitions, and a conclusion. Read it over for ideas about how to put together sentences and paragraphs, how to construct an argument, and how to document sources. This essay is also a good example of synthesis — the process of considering a number of different readings, putting them in conversation with each other, and forming your own claim or thesis, making your own statement. Remember, though, that there’s no one model you should follow, no one way to write about anything. Examples are good, but you need to find your own voice, your own way to say what you want to say.

conclusion

Synthesis

The use of outside sources to gather information and opinions, in order to develop ideas, amass evidence, and support arguments. Synthesis enables writers to do more than simply express their opinion — it enables them to enter the conversation about their topic already being held in the wider world. It also allows them to complicate their ideas, to see more than one side, and to marshal information and logical arguments in the service of their position.

claim

What an argument tries to prove; often called a thesis. In “The Paranoid Style of American Policing” (p. 99), Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an argument that police violence against the community delegitimizes the police force in the eyes of the people. His claim is straightforward: when citizens cannot trust the police, the system is broken. Supporting that claim requires evidence and the well-reasoned addressing of opposing viewpoint, but the claim itself remains simple and clear.

Schaff 1

Jonathon Schaff

Professor Cohen

English 101

17 February 2016

Dangerous Duality: How Racism Splits Us in Two

By Jonathon Schaff

I have never been told that I am a problem. I have been told that my behavior is problematic, but no one has ever told me that there was something wrong with me just for being me. As a white American, I’ve never been avoided on the street or denied a meal because of my skin color. Yet many African Americans have faced and continue to face this kind of discrimination in America.

Author discusses his own point of view

Point of view

The angle from which a writer sees his or her subject. No matter how objective or impartial a writer claims to be, he or she is always writing from a point of view influenced by age, race, gender, and economic and social status, to name just a few factors. In the personal essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (p. 188), Zora Neale Hurston acknowledges writing from her own point of view.

Since I am not an African American, I can only try to understand the African American experience of living in this country, both past and present, by submerging myself in the words and ideas of black writers.

Something can happen to the human mind when it is informed that it is a problem. When people are treated differently than the way they see themselves, the human mind creates a kind of divided sense of self.

Thesis statement makes the author’s claim

As a result, African Americans who have been victimized by racism oftentimes see themselves in two different, irreconcilable ways, and that divide can have dangerous consequences.

The idea that split identities form as a product of racism may have been first introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois in his important 1903 essay, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in which he refers to a state of “double-consciousness.” Du Bois argues that blacks, forty years after being legally freed, felt they were black and American at the same time, and yet not both at once. Du Bois wrote:

Use of quotation illustrates argument of the original author

Quotation

The inclusion of the words of another in one’s own work, indicated by surrounding quotation marks. Used to convey a sense of the person who wrote or spoke those words, or to reproduce a phrase or sentence or more that perfectly captures some meaning the writer wishes also to convey, or to borrow some authority from an expert or eyewitness. Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (p. 27) demonstrates a number of uses of quotation.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s worth by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (45)

Du Bois saw himself through the eyes of the white majority, and therefore could not fully separate his own identity from the way he was perceived by other people. Given this, it is easy to understand how his double-consciousness formed. Du Bois suggests that being both black and American, at least in 1903, was not only impossible but was an intersection where violence occurred.

Schaff 2

Du Bois’s essay has continued to echo in the work of black authors into the twentieth century. His ideas have persisted largely because African Americans continued to suffer indignities long after slavery was abolished. Until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws prevented blacks from having access to the same quality of life that whites enjoyed by means of segregation. Barring blacks from white swimming pools and restaurants, Jim Crow laws had a corrosive effect on the African American psyche. In his essay “Notes of a Native Son,” published in 1955, James Baldwin writes about his father, a severe man and the son of a slave. Baldwin’s father taught him to hate and mistrust whites because they would inevitably do blacks harm. As he grew up, Baldwin began to understand his father’s bitterness and the dangers it posed. Baldwin describes an encounter at a restaurant in New Jersey that had refused to serve him and which ended in his violent attack on the waitress:

I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart. (53)

Baldwin echoes Du Bois’s point that the hatred involved in double-consciousness is destructive for African Americans both externally and internally. In order to curb this hatred, Baldwin says that “[i]t began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition” (64). These two opposing ideas define the African American struggle between accepting life’s injustices and fighting against the corrosive powers of hate that permeated the country in the first half of the twentieth century. Would Baldwin feel the same way if he were alive today?

Topic sentence states the paragraph’s main idea

Topic sentence

The sentence in which the writer states a paragraph’s main idea. The topic sentence often appears at or near the beginning of the paragraph. When Gloria Anzaldúa in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (p. 27) begins a paragraph, “Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization, have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak” (par. 18), we should suspect the rest of the paragraph will develop that idea, perhaps with examples of these differences (and we would be right).

The work of contemporary African American authors reveals that today’s society continues to inform blacks that they are dangerous and frightening. Brent Staples’s 1987 essay, “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space,” offers a series of poignant anecdotes about his life as a graduate student and an adult. Staples recalls the fear he inspired in others as a habitual nighttime walker. He recollects crossing the street and hearing people in their cars lock their doors. He also remembers the way other people would cross the street if they were on course to pass him on the sidewalk (340). Similarly, John Edgar Wideman, a professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown University, identifies with being avoided based on his skin color in his 2010 essay “The Seat Not Taken.” The seat next to Wideman often remains empty for his entire commute on the Amtrak train from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island.

Author uses evidence from an outside source to support his claim

Despite the fact that Wideman is well-dressed and can obviously afford the expensive train ticket, he has observed that “9 times out of 10 people will shun a free seat if it means sitting beside me.”

Schaff 3

Staples and Wideman, both intelligent men and authors for the New York Times, seem to be able to keep healthy perspectives on who they are, but this is not easy.

Author uses summary to make a point in his own words

Staples remarks that he feels like he travels through “bear country,” late at night on the streets (342). People take on the ferociousness of animals when they see him coming around a corner. Wideman, on the other hand, initially claims that the empty seat next to him is a “privilege, conferred upon me by color, to enjoy the luxury of an extra seat to myself.” Yet he ultimately “can’t accept the bounty of an empty seat without remembering why it’s empty, without wondering if its emptiness isn’t something quite sad. And quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined.” The “danger” represented by the empty seat is the danger of seeing threats where there are none, of judging and avoiding others based solely on skin color.

Use of transition “because” connects two ideas

Because of these dangers, pressure is put on African Americans to go out of their way to appear nonthreatening. To alert and pacify the scared strangers he met on the street, Staples would whistle traditionally white classical music by Beethoven and Vivaldi. Viewing himself through white eyes, Staples found a way to avoid causing trouble. But walking down the street without whistling the Moonlight Sonata should not instigate an attack. Yet this is the reality for many black Americans. Based on how people react to their skin color, pressure is put upon them from the white majority to behave a certain way, even if that way is senseless, and the consequences for failing to conform to it can result in violence.

As a white person, I find it hard to imagine the world reflexively avoiding me. It must be difficult for Staples and Wideman to not feel as though they contribute to how people treat them or not feel as though there is something threatening locked up inside themselves. Neither have I ever felt the hate that Baldwin described with the power to destroy his father nor been compelled to violence because I’ve experienced injustice. Reading these authors tracing back from over a century ago to present day has made me more conscious of the division race still inserts into our modern lives and the emotional and personal consequences of this opposition in the human consciousness. Perhaps this lack of understanding is what enables the divide to continue today.

Schaff 4

Conclusion sums up main point and extends the author’s ideas

If blacks throughout our nation’s history have suffered from racism, is it realistic to think that there is an end in sight? Circumstances have changed — first slavery gave way to Jim Crow, which has given way to more subtle forms of discrimination, which coexist with the same old-fashioned, street-level racism Du Bois, Baldwin, Staples, and Wideman have all felt — but the underlying duality remains, and remains dangerous. As Baldwin put it, “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain” (56). Even though the United States elected an African American president, is the country truly post-racial? There is a lot of pain that this country will have to deal with if and when it lets go of its hate.

Author uses expressive diction and tone in concluding paragraph

diction

Word choice. Diction can be characterized in terms of level of formality (formal or informal), concreteness (specific or abstract), and other choices that reflect a level appropriate to the writer’s subject and audience. Diction is a central vehicle by which a writer makes her meaning clear, and it is a major element of a writer’s style as well, and so of her tone. The Declaration of Independence (p. 193) is an excellent example of careful word choice. In this important document, Thomas Jefferson had to make every word count, and in his choice of words, some repeated, such as equal, usurpations, tyrant, and independent, Jefferson made his meaning very clear indeed.

But if the era of healing lasts half as long as the epoch of prejudice, then we could be in for a better way of living, a way that prefers empathy to ignorance and unity to division.

Works Cited

· Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 50 Essays, 5th ed., edited by Samuel Cohen, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 44—65.

· Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Introduction by Randall Kenan, Signet Books, 1995.

· Staples, Brent. “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space.” Cohen pp. 339—42.

· Wideman, John Edgar. “The Seat Not Taken.” The New York Times, 7 Oct. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/opinion/07Wideman.html?_r=0.

¹ Words in boldface are treated in the glossary of writing terms, which starts on page 439.