This post doubles as an argument to my ENG 102 research writing students. On the first day–week even–I like to acclimate them to the classroom setting and to the idea of what we are trying to achieve here. I don’t teach them how to research in the traditional sense. Most of them operate google the way a landscaper operates a mower. They have that blunt force knowledge of how to get the information that they want. I want to turn them into precision instruments that know how to shape that data into something convincing.
Research writing is argument writing. Everything is about trying to convince the reader to listen to and understand your point of view. Even the more ‘exploratory’ writing meets this claim. Exploration of ideas in a paper is about you telling me what you learned and supporting that learning through carefully crafted statements about how this thing can mean what you say it means. So, what then am I teaching? How to insert that research into a context. How to create context and manipulate it to meet your ends. The research is the icing on this cake of convincing that you as a writer are doing. For example, Mark Bowden wanted people to see the Pablo Escobar assassination in a particular light, so he wrote Killing Pablo. We will read that book and dissect the argument and evidence chapter by chapter to uncover how he created the perception that he did.
later the students will learn to model those strategies and apply them to their own writing. Oh what fun!
Some Thoughts:
- Football is coming…
- Trump is suggesting that someone take Clinton (known to the Secret Service as Evergreen) out. He called on his second amendment people to handle it. Then he later suggested that he did no such thing. How he continues to behave like the shitty college kid who does something wrong and knows you cannot prove it continues to baffle me.
- Trump’s Secret Service nickname is Mogul. His wife is Muse. In contrast Obama is Renegade and the first lady is Renaissance. Mrs. Clinton is Evergreen and President Clinton is Eagle. There’s a joke in there if you look closely.