English 120 – Rosichan
Analyze and Write – Pick One: Chapter 4
Anastasia Toufexis’ article (questions on pgs. 132-134):
A. Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Toufexis focuses her explanation:
1. What is the focus or main point of Toufexis’s essay? How do you think she answers readers’ potential
“So what?” question?
2. How do the title, epigraph, and opening paragraphs help you identify this focus or main point?
3. How do you think Toufexis’s purpose, audience, and genre (an article for a popular news magazine)
affected the focus she was assigned or chose?
B. Write a paragraph or two analyzing the strategies Toufexis uses to organize her essay for readers:
1. Skim the essay, and note where she announces her concept and forecasts the topics she uses to organize
her explanation. Then look at the passage where she discusses each topic. How well does her forecast
work to make her essay readable?
2. Study how Toufexis connects the topic of “love maps” (pars. 17–18) to the topics she discussed earlier
in the essay. Identify any sentences that connect the two parts of the article, and assess how well they
work.
C.Write a paragraph or two analyzing Toufexis’s use of the visual:
1. Analyze the visual included in Toufexis’s Time magazine article. Consider it apart from the rest of the
article. What can you learn from the visual itself? What makes it easy or hard to read?
2. Skim Toufexis’s essay to mark where she discusses each of the stages in the process described in the
flowchart. Considering her original audience, how well does the flowchart work as a map to help readers
navigate through the somewhat technical content of her explanation? Would it have been helpful had
Toufexis referred to and labeled the visual?
D. Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Toufexis establishes the credentials of her sources:
1. Skim the essay, underlining the name of each source she mentions. Then go back through the essay to
highlight each source’s credentials. When Toufexis provides credentials, what kinds of information does
she include?
2. Consider the effectiveness of Toufexis’s strategies for letting readers know the qualifications of her
sources. Given her original audience (Time magazine readers), how well do you think she establishes her
sources’ credentials? If she were writing for an academic audience (for example, for your class), what
would she have to add?
English 120 – Rosichan
Analyze and Write – Pick One: Chapter 4
Dan Hurley’s article (questions on pgs. 139-141)
A. Write a paragraph or two analyzing Hurley’s use of the example introduced in the opening paragraphs
describing Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl’s N-back game research to focus his explanation and
illustrate the concept of fluid intelligence:
1. Skim paragraphs 2, 12, and 13, look at Figure 1, and read the caption accompanying the figure. How
does this text and the figure, which was a sidebar included in the original New York Times article, help
readers understand the N-back game and its significance?
2. Consider how N-back game research answers the “So what?” question readers of concept explanations
inevitably ask. In other words, how does it provide a focus for Hurley’s explanation of the concept and
help readers grasp why the concept is important?
3. Reread paragraphs 15–20, where Hurley acknowledges the controversy surrounding research of this
kind. Why do you imagine Hurley includes information about the “debate” in his explanation (par. 15)?
B. Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Hurley creates cohesion in “Can You Make Yourself
Smarter?”
1. Reread paragraphs 1–4, 9, and 19–22. How does Hurley use the example of Chicago Heights to lend
cohesion to his essay? How effectively does this strategy help readers navigate this essay and understand
its main point?
2. Select a series of 3–4 paragraphs and analyze how Hurley knits the paragraphs together. Can you
identify any repeated words or concepts or any pronouns that refer back to terms in the preceding
paragraph? Did he use transitional words or phrases to link one paragraph to the next?
C. Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Hurley uses definition, classification, process narration, and
cause-effect reasoning to explain fluid intelligence:
1. Skim Hurley’s essay looking for and highlighting an example of each of these explanatory strategies.
2. Select one strategy that you think is particularly effective and explain why you think it works so well.
What does the strategy contribute to the explanation of fluid intelligence?
D. Write a paragraph or two analyzing the kinds of material Dan Hurley incorporates from sources and
how he identifies his sources so that his readers know that they can be trusted:
1. Skim the essay, highlighting places where Hurley quotes, paraphrases, or summarizes information from
sources, and consider the information Hurley provides to identify those sources. What information does
he provide, and how does this information help readers know the source is trustworthy?
2. Now skim the essay looking for places where Hurley quotes the researchers. Pay particular attention to
the quotations in paragraphs 2, 7, 9, 11, 13–16, and 19–20. Why do you think Hurley decided to use their
exact words in these places, rather than merely summarizing their ideas? Can you determine which of the
quotations come from published sources and which come from interviews? Can you tell from the text
itself or from the citations we added? Consider whether it is important to know if the quotations come
from published sources or from the interviews the writer conducted himself.
3. What do you think is the purpose of citing sources—including interviews—particularly for academic
audiences? Why is simply identifying sources with a word or two in the text generally sufficient for
nonacademic situations? Given your experience reading online, do you think hyperlinks serve a similar
purpose to formal citations? Why or why not?
English 120 – Rosichan
Analyze and Write – Pick One: Chapter 4
Susan Cain’s article (questions on pgs. 146-148)
A. Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Cain reports information and also presents her own
ideas:
1. Reread paragraph 5, in which Cain states her thesis. How does the phrase between dashes in the first
sentence (“or more precisely, the careful, sensitive temperament from which both often spring”) help to
unify the different phenomena she describes in this article?
2. Consider the second and third sentences in paragraph 5. How do these sentences help convey Cain’s
purpose?
3. Skim the rest of the article, looking for places where Cain restates the ideas she conveys in sentences 2
and 3 of paragraph 5. Highlight the words and phrases that restate this theme.
4. Consider how effective Cain’s tactics are: After reading the article, do you know what shyness is? Are
you persuaded that it is underrated? Why or why not?
B. Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Cain creates a sense of closure in her article:
1. Skim paragraphs 1–8 and 25–28 to remind yourself of how Cain begins and ends the reading selection.
What image does she start with? What image does she end with? How does she make sense of this image
for her readers? What context does she put it in?
2. Notice the pronouns she uses: she, we, us, they, I. How does the shift—from talking about the shy, the
introverted, the “sitters,” in the third person (she/he/they) to talking about them in the first person (I/we)—
change the context in which the Zoloft ad is presented? How does this shift in the pronouns Cain uses add
or detract from the sense of closure?
C. Write a paragraph or two analyzing Cain’s strategies for showing contrast:
1. Find and highlight two or three of the sentence patterns Cain uses for cueing contrast in paragraphs 3–
4, 9, 10, 13, 18, and 19.
2. Analyze what is being contrasted and how each contrast works. Why do you think Cain uses contrast so
often in this essay?
D. Write a paragraph analyzing how Cain integrates source material elsewhere in her article:
1. Examine paragraphs 18–19 or 20–21 to see how Cain uses a pattern similar to the one described above.
2. Find and mark the elements: Cain’s idea; the name(s) and credentials of the source or sources; what the
source found; text linking the source’s findings to the original idea or extending the idea in some way.
3. When writers use information from sources, why do you think they often begin by stating their own
idea (even if they got the idea from a source)? What do you think would be the effect on readers if the
opening sentence of paragraph 18 or 20 began with the source instead of with Cain’s topic sentence?