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Plot-o-Mania:
Some Contexts for Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681); also useful for Crowne, City Politics; and Behn, The Lucky Chance

A. Pettit: Notes on Writing Persuasive Papers (for 3430; see Item 6 on the assignment sheet)

            The purpose of this handout is to give you some sense of the written work that I expect from you, to offer you assistance in meeting these expectations, and to enumerate the criteria that I or my assistant will apply when we evaluate your work.  My major point is that good writing takes time and energy.  I’ve known very few people who could write competent academic essays at the last minute. 

            My main example in what follows is Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717).  The poem concerns the love between a medieval student, Eloisa, and her teacher, Abelard.  Angered by their illicit affair, Eloisa’s brothers ambush and castrate Abelard.  They send Eloisa to a nunnery, where she lives a life of piety, often reflecting, however, on her passionate relationship with Abelard.  The poem is written in the form of a letter from Eloisa to Abelard.

I. What is a Persuasive Essay?    

            A persuasive essay states and defends a thesis.  A thesis is a claim that can be defended and that must be defended if it is to be accepted; it is a substantiated critical observation that can teach other people something about the material that you are reading.  Another angle: a thesis is a claim that your reader won’t take on credit, but should come to accept if you give him or her reason to.  The thesis is based on your own reading and interpretation of the literary work or works; the defense tells your reader precisely what about the work or works authorizes you to present your thesis.     

            Consider the following claims: 1) Shakespeare’s sonnets are often about nature; 2) Gulliver’s Travels is an attack on organized religion in which the Yahoos represent people who believe everything that they are told; and, 3) In Eloisa to Abelard, Pope suggests that the attempt to separate piety from passion is artificial and unhealthy.  The first claim disqualifies itself because it doesn’t need to be defended: anyone reading the sonnets will presumably notice that there is quite a bit of nature in them, so this isn’t “teaching.”  The second claim is a personal response, but is conclusively beyond the reach of textual support.  So it too can’t teach us anything about the text.  The third claim is intriguing.  There are certainly many other ways to read Pope’s poem, but this one might be meaningfully defended by a judicious reading of the poem.  I can imagine learning something from such a reading—if, that is, the author has demonstrated the validity of his or her reading.   

            Don’t despair if at first you come with more 1’s and 2’s than 3’s—they are okay for starters.  A large part of learning persuasive writing is allowing yourself to begin with simple and safe observations like #1, then challenging yourself to complicate and refine them: how does Shakespeare modulate his tone through his descriptions of changing nature? what does Shakespeare accomplish when he abandons natural images?  Posing and probing questions like these (and there are many more possibilities) are great ways to use what is self-evident to reach what is arguable and instructive.  Even #2 can be useful as an early “working thesis”: often a bold but tenuous claim will give way to a more reasonable thesis when it is checked carefully against the literature.  The point here is that great essays often don’t start with great ideas, but often do result from the smart handling of simple ones.      

II. Reading and Re-reading      

            Good writing about literature demands careful reading and re-reading of literature.  To read a work once is to sample it, not to understand it—it’s a first meeting rather than a meaningful conversation between people getting to know and to understand one another.  I’m a big believer in marginal notations—sometimes I annotate my book from the first reading on, sometimes I don’t start doing this until later readings.  I don’t try to come up with anything earth-shattering in my marginal notes, but I do try to keep writing.  My marginalia tell me what is really interesting me about the work that I’m reading. Chances are that if I have read through six or eight poems by a certain poet a few times, I will have jotted down comments on goings-on within the poem, or among the poem and others that I have been reading.  Then I review my notes and find out just what’s been on my mind--a curious approach, maybe, but it works for me and many of my students. 

            Marginal notes for Eloisa to Abelard, for instance, might develop like this: “Eloisa is passionate” (a Category 1, right?); “Abelard has been castrated” (a clarification of narrative fact); “El. longs for God--maybe the simple God of her youth?”; “Is Pope satirizing pious people untested by experience?  He doesn’t seem to be satirizing piety”; “El. imagines Ab. both as sexual (he can’t be, right?) and as remote/spiritual”; “Ab. can’t be what El. needs him to be”; “El. probably neurotic.”  And so on.  See?

III. Prewriting    

            Prewriting is a relatively undisciplined activity but a very important one.  The idea is to begin to collect ideas and to get some words on paper—maybe to sketch out tentative responses to some of the questions that you have posed in your notes or to elaborate on some of your responses.  To stick with the example from Pope, now you begin to work with the basic contradiction—the essence of the heroine’s sickness—that you are starting to see in Eloisa to Abelard.  This is not the time to worry about syntax, organization, spelling, punctuation, or anything that will keep you from writing.  Just “blow,” as jazz musicians say.

            One useful technique (“freewriting”) is to set a timer for ten minutes and to write without stopping for the whole time.  If you can’t think of anything to write, just write, “I can’t think of anything to write”: the activity at this point is so numbingly dull that more productive observations will tend to force themselves on you!  (Trust me.)  Another technique (“brainstorming”) is just to jot down phrases and ideas, perhaps drawing arrows among them to suggest connections that you would like to explore and perhaps cross-referencing them to passages from the literature.  Marginal notations can help fuel both techniques or some combination of them.     

IV. Drafting, Outlining, Drafting Again: from thesis-seeking to thesis-supporting writing

            The distinction between prewriting and early drafting is not absolute.  Both are “thesis-seeking” activities.  In both, you are writing to discover what you want to say rather than to say it and defend it; in both, that is, you are seeking the thesis that you will ultimately support.  Trying to start right off with a killer thesis is usually a lousy idea—how can you defend something that you don’t possess, after all?

            One way to move from prewriting to drafting is to identify a part of your freewrite that, upon reflection, seems interesting to you, however simple it might be.  (I usually find that 90% of the stuff that I put into a freewrite is pretty silly; but, more to the point, 10% of it isn’t.)  Jot down this section--or idea--at the top of a page and write out a few more, and more precise, thoughts on the matter.  Write out a (very) rough draft, again not worrying about spelling, syntax, and punctuation, but being a tad more mindful of overall organization (it’ll happen naturally, anyhow).  Chances are that you will still be seeking a thesis.  Often either at or near the end of a freewrite or an early draft, you will find an interesting idea starting to take shape—something that your thinking has led you to.  Many promising (but only promising) essays stop at this point; often I will comment to a student that his or her paper really began to make sense to me in the last paragraph or even in the last sentence.  Careful writers learn to identify moments at which they declare their own argumentative purpose and to highlight these moments, typically by moving the pertinent text from the end to the beginning of the essay.  Here that text—that idea, more importantly—serves as a “working thesis,” or a tentative claim that needs to be tested against the text and then modified, perhaps toned down or perhaps complicated (for instance by asking yourself questions like the ones I offered above).  By placing the working thesis at or very near the start of your paper, you’ve moved from a “thesis seeking” activity to a “thesis supporting” one and are probably within two or three drafts of your final version. 

            An outline might help at this point.  In my opinion, one of the best times to outline is right after you have structured a working thesis; the outline then becomes one of the first ways to “test” the working thesis.  You’ll probably monkey around with the thesis; the firmer the thesis gets, the more useful it is in helping you determine what stays in and what gets cut from the essay.  It might help to imagine the process as the gradual synchronizing of thesis and support: if your thesis and your evidence don’t match up, you either need to re-think the thesis or (carefully!) to re-appraise the evidence—maybe both.  Of course what you don’t want to do is suppress evidence that doesn’t fit your thesis; look at this complicating material as a challenge, not as an obstacle.

            Something that my students have found helpful is what I call the “assertion/ defense rhythm.”  Narrative literature (a detective story is a particularly useful example) often works from a position of uncertainty (something has happened, but we don’t know quite what it was or who did it) to one of certainty (we discover the details and retroactively make sense of the previous data).  And many of us, for good reasons, are accustomed to thinking of writing as a narrative process; after all, much of what we read, or see on television or at the movies, works this way.  But rhetoric—or persuasive writing—doesn’t work this way at all.  The rhetorician tells the reader precisely what he or she is going to argue, then goes ahead and does it.  Does this spoil the paper?  Of course not; it’s like being told what you are going to have for dinner and the order in which the courses will be served.  You know more or less what’s coming and your appetite is whetted, not stunted.  If  you don’t state your thesis promptly, I have data without context—observations serving no evident end.  Consider: if you tell me that Barry Bonds hit a home run in the fifth inning off of Randy Johnson after fouling off eight straight pitches, the information has narrative value (action tending toward a conclusion) but no rhetorical value.  But if you produce the home run as evidence in support of an argument that Bonds is particularly effective against left-handers, tall left-handers, or simply Randy Johnson, then you have a claim and some support for it.  Telling a story and arguing a case are inverse activities.  Early drafts are often more narrative than rhetorical, and that’s okay. But as you move through the drafting process, make sure that your essay is becoming more rhetorical.

V. The Final Edit    

            Now is the time to be really tough on yourself.  Check your work carefully against the grading criteria.  Is your thesis stated clearly and does everything in your paper have a clear relation to the thesis?  Make sure that your own voice is the strongest one in the paper; make sure that you have resisted the temptation to make a claim and then to replicate a bunch of quotations that address it.  It might help to imagine your final draft as the transcription of a discussion between you and your source or sources—a discussion that you are leading, controlling, if you will.  Note, to continue to example, that when Oprah Winfrey surrenders the microphone, she only does so when she wants to and only then to ensure, as much as possible, that she will get the effect that she is seeking.  What Pope (or Oprah’s guests) has to say is important, but only insofar as it relates to your (or Oprah’s) argument.  If I want to hear Pope first and foremost, I’ll go right to Pope.  What I want here are your observations about Pope, all tied clearly back to your single controlling idea, or thesis.  In general, avoid long quotations (4 or more lines) in short papers.

            Make sure that you are using clear topic sentences for your paragraphs.  Your reader should be able to get an accurate representation of your argument by reading the first sentence of every paragraph. Again, the point is that your voice predominates; and again, this is the assertion/defense rhythm.      

            I have three more suggestions that will help you produce readable final copy.  First, read your essay out loud before you make final changes.  Awkward sentences and murky transitions have a way of declaring themselves when you do this.  Read your work backwards, too.  This will help you pick up spelling and spacing errors--even spelling errors that your computer might not catch. Finally, whenever possible, have a friend or a colleague proofread your work.  The central questions that he or she should answer when reading your essay are simple: “Does it make sense?  And if it doesn’t, where doesn’t it and why?”  On the subject of computers, please remember that spell-checking is a part of proof-reading, but is not proof-reading itself.  “Two” doesn’t mean “to” or “too,” as you learned long ago.

VII. Grading     

            Here’s what I’m looking for, folks:

THESIS: Does your paper give a clear sense of why you’re writing, and why I should be reading?  Does it make a claim on your reader’s attention?  Does it supply a “So What”?

FOCUS: Does your paper focus clearly on your thesis, excluding what is irrelevant?  Do you make clear what the different parts of your paper have to do with each other?  Does the paper make organizational sense?

FULLNESS: Do you give your arguments enough time?  Do you stay with your subject long enough that you convince your reader that you know what you are talking about?  Do you develop your ideas sufficiently that your argument can be followed, and that your reader will grant you authority for what you say?

SPECIFICS (OR GROUNDS): Do you make your argument in terms that are as specific as possible?  Do you particularize each of the grounds you give for accepting your claim, or for following and understanding your thesis idea?  Do the particular grounds you give make sense?   Most importantly, are your claims based on solid evidence from the work or works in question?

MECHANICS AND STYLE: How well have you edited your paper?  Are there spelling errors?  Awkward sentences?  Punctuation problems?  Is documentation (when necessary) handled correctly; does it interfere with the flow of your paper?  Does your style fit your purpose?  Is the voice clear?  Is your diction appropriate?  Are your sentences varied?  Is your paper “readable”?

            Additionally, I am always looking for evidence that you have worked hard and challenged yourself.  I cannot describe every aspect of your paper in my notes.  But by referring to these categories you should be able to come to a good understanding of your grade.

Brief Timeline for the Civil War and the Restoration

1642.          Outbreak of the English Civil War, “an armed conflict between royalist and parliamentary forces, arising from the constitutional,    economic, and religious differences between Charles I and the [largely puritanical and anti-royalist] Long Parliament” (Kenyon, Dictionary of British History, “Civil War”).

1644–45.    Oliver Cromwell establishes himself as a brilliant general in the parliamentary cause, with Battles at Marston Moor and Naseby.

1648.          Charles I’s (Scottish) army defeated by Cromwell at Preston, thus enting the Civil War. The Rump, composed of those members of the Long Parliament not purged by the army by way of the puritan Thomas Pride (“Pride’s Purge”), declares England a Commonwealth and votes to try Charles, who is subsequently sentenced to death.

1649.          Charles I executed.  Cromwell brutally subjugates Ireland (an event celebrated in verse by Andrew Marvell, in “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”).

1650.          Cromwell becomes commander-in-chief of the army, thus in effect ruler of the Commonwealth; he moves to quell discontent in Scotland, assisted by General George Monck.

1651.          Cromwell repels Charles II’s (i.e., Charles Stuart’s) invasion at Worcester.  Perhaps apocryphally, Charles hides from parliamentary troops in an oak tree.

1653.          Cromwell’s soldiers force dissolution of the Rump, replace it with the Barebones Parliament, which fails almost immediately.  Cromwell then “promulgate[s] the Instrument of Government, which created for him the office of Lord Protector, assisted by a single-chamber parliament” (Kenyon, “Cromwell”).  England now a “protectorate,” not a “commonwealth” (or of course a monarchy).

1657.          Cromwell offered kingship by the newly purged unicameral Parliament; refuses, but accepted an increase in his own legislative power.

1658.          Cromwell dies and is replaced as Lord Protector by his weak and ineffective son, Richard.

1659.          Protectorate collapses under the weight of Richard Cromwell’s incompetence; army reconvenes the Rump, then quickly expels it, after having dismissed Richard. Monck begins marching southward from Scotland.

1660.          Monck arrives in London (Feb.); recalls Rump and its members who had been purged in 1648, thus in effect reestablishing the Long Parliament.  In April, Monck arranges for the dissolution of this interim body and for the subsequent election of the Convention Parliament.  Also in April, Charles II releases the Declaration of Breda, which “offered a free and general pardon (with certain exceptions [i.e., the regicides and Henry Vane]) to those who had acted against the crown during the Civil War and Interregnum” (Kenyon, “Breda.”)  The Declaration offered some promise of religious toleration and promised to pay old debts due to the army.  The Convention Parliament arranges the Restoration of Charles II, who arrives in London on 29 May.