Writing

➢ Writing: Composition

✓ The Little Red Schoolhouse structure of academic argument, including introductory paragraphs:

Lead, Context, Status Quo, Destabilizing Condition, Significance, Claim

✓ Use of anecdotes in arguments

✓ Use of examples as evidence

✓ Use of textual evidence in the form of integrated quotations

✓ Writing strong conclusions in two parts, summary and final appeal

Reading

➢ Literary Periods: know major periods, sequence of periods, estimated timeline, characteristics, and

major works and authors

Puritanism (~1620 to 1750)

We are agents on the terrestrial battlefield of good and evil, eyes fixed to a future life, an after-life.

Collectively, we are the chosen people, but nevertheless we are individually, intractably fated. This mix of expected exceptionalism and individual doubt is the source of our mortal anxiety.

“What are we, that we should think to stand before Him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?” Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards, 1741

Forms: Jeremiad sermons, religious poetry, elegies

Voices We Hear: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet

Rationalism in the Age of Reason (~1750 to 1800)

We each possess the faculty for reason, to individually consider and argue for what makes sense. This is the declaration of our national and individual sovereignty. We observe, contemplate, and weigh the evidence, deciding what is best for ourselves, our families, and our community by the tests of logic and reason. We decide, and this we call freedom. We reach for this ideal.

“In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense…” Common Sense by Thomas Paine, 1776

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.” Speech to the Virginia Convention by Patrick Henry, 1775

“Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung / I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat…”

To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth by Phillis Wheatley, 1772

Forms: Essays, speeches, articles, pamphlets, newspapers and almanacs

Voices We Hear: Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, Phillis Wheatley

Romanticism (~1800 to 1850)

There is more to this world than we know or ever can know. The world is infinite, far deeper, more glorious, darker, and more mystical than we can ever appreciate, much less measure and record. We are left to our imaginations, our fantastical visions; it is in fantasy that we come closer to seeing the truth, which may indeed be different for each and every one of us. Society itself is the bogeyman, the omnipresent crushing force that individually we must endure, oppose, succumb to, or vanquish.

“It was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed…” Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe, 1835

Forms: Short stories, fantasy fiction, horror, gothic novels, meditative, metaphysical poetry

Voices We Hear: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce (the Dark Romantics)

Transcendentalism (~1800 to 1850)

The philosophical arm of Romanticism. There are so few of us who truly separate from the daily, crushing forces of conformity, who unplug and become that floating eyeball that, untethered from the great bloated corpus of society, truly sees all. Most people — because it is easy and comfortable — are swallowed whole. The Transcendentalist does not seek to be comfortable, but rather to be themselves, for only then are they alive.

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide… For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Forms: Essays of natural metaphors and unusual, memorable syntax

Voices We Hear: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

Realism (~1850 to 1900)

The realist is sick and tired of what the world can be, what it’s supposed to be, or what it is sold as. They know you can’t treat an infection without taking off all of the layers of rotten, seeping bandages. The realist sees things for what they are, warts and all, and sometimes written in bloody lashes across the back. Say it straight, says the realist: No more BS.

“He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered in blood.”

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass, 1845

“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines… There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all.” The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 1885

Literary and Rhetorical Devices

✓ Diction (word choice)

✓ Theme

✓ Motif

✓ Imagery

✓ Metaphor and Simile

✓ Symbol

✓ Tone and Mood

✓ Sound system: assonance, consonance, alliteration, rhyme and meter

✓ Anaphora

✓ Dialect

✓ Idiom

✓ Satire, including

o irony,

o sarcasm,

o hyperbole,

o understatement, and

o parody

✓ Dramatic irony

✓ Paradox

✓ Juxtaposition

✓ Archetype

✓ Allusion

✓ Allegory

✓ Subtext

Persuasive Writing

✓ Logos, Pathos, Ethos

✓ Anecdotes

✓ Testimonials

✓ Statistics

✓ Emotional appeals: Bandwagon, Snob, Economic, Fear

Passages from Specific Works

❖ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” by Jonathan Edwards

❖ “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller

❖ “The Crisis” by Thomas Paine

❖ “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth” by Phillis Wheatley

❖ “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe

❖ “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe

❖ “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe

❖ “The Prophetic Pictures” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

❖ “A Watcher by the Dead” by Ambrose Bierce

❖ “Moxon’s Master” by Ambrose Bierce

❖ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M.R. James (an English author, but a good one for the period)

❖ “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

❖ “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau

❖ “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” by Lawrence and Lee

❖ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” by Frederick Douglass

❖ “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain

❖ “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald