"When something can be read without effort, great
effort has gone into its writing."
-Enrique Jardiel Poncela , author
 What
they should do
• Arouse reader’s interest
• Offer statement of problem
• Establish topic, tone, and point of view
• Use a general-to-specific pattern
 Begin
with descriptive details
• “She has no arms or hands, although the stump of her upper right
arm extends just to her breast. Her left foot has been severed, and
her face is badly scarred, with her nose torn at the tip, and her lower
lip gouged out. Fortunately, her facial mutilations have been treated
and are barely visible, except for minor scarring visible only up
close. The scars, including a particularly large one between her
shoulder blades, one that covers her shoulder, and covering the tip of
her breast where her left nipple was torn out.”
From “Visualizing the Disabled Body”
By Lennard Davis
 Begin
with an anecdote
• When I was studying Intermediate Italian in a study-abroad program in
Italy, I wrote for our last assignment a brief essay “Un Viagio a Venezia”
about a trip to Venice I had taken some weeks before. In my simple
syntax and vocabulary, I explained the theme of my mini travel essay:
despite the fact that we travelers—four students, another professor and
I—had conflicting interests and itineraries, we managed to negotiate and
compromise so each person could do or see one thing she wanted to. We
managed to shop for jewelry, masks, and shoes, feed the pigeons on St.
Marks Square, eat pizza by the Grand Canal, and watch the parade of
boats in celebration of the Feast of the Redeemer.
From “Avoiding Appropriation”
By Carol Serverino
 Begin
with a startling fact or statistics
• Standing at the bar of an all-black VFW post in my hometown of Piedmont W.
Va., I offered fived dollars to anyone who could tell me how may AfricanAmerican professional athletes were at work today. There are 35 million
African Americans, I said.
“Ten million!” yelled one intrepid soul, too far into his cups.
“No way . . .more like 500,000,” said another.
“You mean all professional sports,” someone interjected, “including golf and tennis, but not
counting the brothers from Puerto Rico?” Everyone laughed.
“Fifty thousand, minimum,” was another guess.
Here are the facts:
There are 1200 black professional athletes in the U.S.
There are 12 times more black lawyers than black athletes.
There are 2 1/1 more black dentists than black athletes.
There are 15 times more black doctors than black athletes.
From “Delusions of Grandeur”
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Begin with a rhetorical question
• What if you were about to present a PowerPoint lecture to a large
undergraduate class, but found instead on your computer a series
of sexually explicit ads and material from pornographic Web
sites? That’s essentially what happened recently to Mary
Pederson, a nutrition-science professor at California Polytechnic
State University at San Luis Obispo. That incident and the
increasing presence of such imagery at Cal Poly have led to a
novel, although undoubtedly predictable, struggle over computer
content—one that is quite likely to be replicated at countless
campuses in the coming months.
From “What Limits Should Campus Networks Place on
Pornography”
By Robert O’Neill
 More techniques
• Begin with quotation—should be relevant and
appropriate and you should say something about it.
• Begin with a figure of speech—a metaphor or simile
(With faces like road maps of their lives, the women
lined up for their 5 lb. bags of rice)
• Begin with a strong, unexpected statement (The
United States should prohibit dog and cat owners
from living in cities. Period. End of discussion.)
• Begin with your thesis in the first sentence (“You do
not have to be an academician in an ivory tower to
think about religion and the destiny of humankind or
about questions of right and wrong” [Muller 676])
A
statement of problem varies in length
according to the type of writing from a
paragraph in a short essay or two to several
pages in a longer work like a thesis.
 If
you are arguing for a solution to a
problem, making a case for the cause of a
problem, or researching a problem, you
must:
• Clearly define the problem
• Offer the history of the problem
• Give the current status of the problem

Example
“The Bush Administration seems to be gunning to make history as the first
great unilateralist government of the twenty-first century. But if the notion of
going it alone appeals to the American public, it’s partly because America
routinely practices a less-noticed cultural unilateralism: If a work of art wasn’t
made in America, chances are Americans will never know about it.
Consider:
Approximately 92 percent of the US market in the year 2000 consisted of
music from domestic acts. That makes America the most insular music market
in the world except for Pakistan. The inward listening trend survives even
though most of the big labels—Sony, Universal and BMG—are now controlled
by non-US companies.
This summer the bestseller lists in both France and Argentina included
novels from the American author Paul Auster. (The top spot on France’s list,
however, was captured by our own Mary Higgins Clark.)”
From “The Culture Blockade”
By James Ledbetter
“Intelligence is not an absolute such as height that can be
measured simply, largely because people have multiple
intelligences rather than one single intelligence.
In all, I have identified seven forms of intelligence. The two
that are valued most highly in this society are linguistic and
logical-mathematical intelligences. When people think of
someone as smart, they are usually referring to those two, because
individuals who possess linguistic and logical-mathematical
abilities do well on tests that supposedly measure intelligence.
But there are five other kinds of intelligence that are every
bit a important: Spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic and two forms
of personal intelligence—interpersonal, knowing how to deal with
others, and intrapersonal, knowledge of self. None of these ought
to have a priority over others.”
From “Human Intelligence Isn’t What We Think It Is”
By Howard Gardner
“We all negotiate among multiple identities,
moving between public and private selves, living
in present shadowed by the past, encountering
periods in which time and circumstance
converge to realign or even restructure our
images of who we are. As increasing numbers of
non-Anglo students pass through the doors of
our writing centers, such knowledge of our own
shapeshifting can help us begin—if only begin—
to understand the social and linguistic
challenges which inform their struggles with
writing.”
 Conclusions
should
• Complete a “full” discussion
• Restate the thesis
• Leave the reader with something to think about
• Use a specific-to-general pattern
 Restate thesis
• “You have to give up a lot of superficially attractive
material benefits in order to preserve the quality of
your life and your sanity” (From “Why I quit the
Company” by Tomoyuki Iwashita)
• Original introductory thesis could have been,
“Quality of life is more important than the sacrifice of
benefits of a high salary.”
 Restate main points
• Be brief and use different wording than was used
earlier

Use emotion
• Ex. A subsidy of just $10 per child per year would guarantee that no more
innocent infants have to die unnecessarily and no more families have to suffer
the resulting grief.

Give a powerful fact or detail
• Nearly 2500 babies a year die for lack of a simple and inexpensive supplement.

Offer a compelling example
• If Baby Joan had received this simple medicine, she might have lived beyond
three days old to ride a bicycle, discover a sense of humor, or to get a college
degree.

Use a quotation: must be relevant and should be well integrated.
• One player, seventeen-year-old Kevin Jarrett of Granbury, Texas, wakes up at 7
a.m. every day to hang out with friends he originally met in an Internet Relay Chat
channel. “It was a chance to blow them up,” he says. “It’s become a community.”
For now, online gaming is a niche market catering to a devoted clientele. As beta
testers, gamers can go on fifteen hour binges . . . (Hafner 75).
 Refer
back to the introduction
 Recommend
a course of action (ex. Vote;
contact congressperson; change the way
you drive to save gas; recycle flourescent
bulb), and tell the effects of this action.
 End
with an appropriate anecdote.
 Use
more than one of the above.

Do not include new information that needs
development or justification earlier in the paper

Do not continue to add empty words and
sentences to fill out a word or page requirement

Don’t end with a “life’s lesson.”

Don’t tell the reader what he or she should be
thinking or believing or realizing. Ex. “As you
can see . . . . “As I have proved . . .” “All of this will
persuade you to . . .”
Davis, Lennard J. “Visualizing the Disabled Body.” On World, Many Cultures 5th ed. Eds. Stuart Hirschberg and Terry
Hirschberg. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. 180-187.
Gardner, Howard. “Human Intelligence Isn’t What We Think it Is.” Seeking Common Cause: Reading and Writing in
Action. Eds. Diane Durkin and Lisa Gerrard. Madison: McGraw-Hill, 2006. 232-240.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Delusions of Grandeur.” The McGraw-Hill Reader 10th ed. Ed. Gilbert H. Muller. Dubuque:
McGraw-Hill, 2008. 504-513.
Hafner, Katie. “Log on and Shoot.” The Wired Society. Ed. Carol Lea Clark. El Paso: Heinle and Heinle, 1999. 73-75.
Ledbetter, James. “The Culture Blockade.” 75 Arguments: An Anthology. Ed. Alan Ainsworth. Dubuque: McGraw-Hill,
2008. 169-172.
Muller, Gilbert H. “Philosophy, Ethics, and Religion: What do We Believe?” The McGraw-Hill Reader 10th ed. Ed.
Gilbert H. Muller. Dubuque: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 676-677.
Severino, Carol. “Avoiding Appropriation.” ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Eds. Shanti Bruce and
Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth: Boynton Cook,2004. 48-59.