1 Room and 2 Dads

1 Room and 2 Dads

The “My Room” exercise on page 19 of the Magee packet shows the stages of developing an idea. These go back to the philosopher Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric.

The 5 Canons of Rhetoric

Invention. In this step, you find the items you’ll use in your description.
Arrangement. You come up with distinct categories you’ll use to sort the items you found.
Style. Style concerns the artful expression of ideas. It addresses how to say what will be said.
Memory. The last two canons are for speeches rather than written essays. The speaker used different techniques to memorize the speech.
Delivery. There is an art to the effective delivery of a speech, using gestures, cadence, pitch, etc.

So our English 101 student in the example has been told to describe something. He has exercised his imagination and decided to write about what he sees around him. He starts by making a random list of what he sees as he looks around the room. This is the invention stage. It has the old meaning of its Latin root, invenio, to find.

As we move to the first paragraph, we see the student has converted his list into a number of sentences that are still in basically the same order. This first paragraph still has no real arrangement.

In the second paragraph, we see the student add arrangement and some style to his list. There are two focal ideas for the paragraph. The first half of the paragraph is governed by the sentence, "Most people first think of Indians." He then focused on Native American material and left out everything that did not pertain to that. The paragraph should be split into two, with this sentence serving as the second topic sentence: "Of course, my bedroom does not stay as clean as a tepee." He then goes on to describe the messiness of the room.

The first phase of writing a description is like finding a bowl of M&M's.

The second phase of writing a description is like sorting all the M&M's into their separate colors. You arrange them into different categories. This process of finding and sorting is critical to doing well in your essays. Each paragraph in the body has a distinct topic, as defined by the topic sentence.

Dad 1: Jan Gray

In addition to describing a place like a room, you can describe a person in your life. You should pick somebody you actually know as opposed to a historical figure like Abraham Lincoln.

There are two basic approaches to writing descriptions: objective and subjective.

An objective description attempts to describe the person, place, or thing with a minimum amount of emotion. Scientists, medical doctors, and police officers strive for objectivity in their reports.
A subjective description brings in the subjectivity of the writer. So the writer is both describing the person, place, or thing and his/her emotional reaction as the subject doing the writing.

The paragraph we read above is basically objective, with the author describing his room with very little of his emotional response included.

The two essays we read on fathers are both subjective. They are as much about the authors and their response to their fathers as they are to the fathers themselves. Other than that, they couldn't be more different. That's because the emotions can be any of the many emotions that humans experience.

The first two paragraphs of Jan Gray's essay are a description; the rest is a narrative:

My father’s hands are grotesque. He suffers from psoriasis, a chronic skin disease that covers his massive, thick hands with scaly, reddish patches that periodically flake off, sending tiny pieces of dead skin sailing to the ground. In addition, his fingers are permanently stained a dull yellow from years of chain smoking. The thought of those swollen, discolored, scaly hands touching me, whether it be out of love or anger, sends chills up my spine.

By nature, he is a disorderly, unkempt person. The numerous cigarette burns, food stains, and ashes on his clothes show how little he cares about his appearance. He has a dreadful habit of running his hands through his greasy hair and scratching his scalp, causing dandruff to drift downward onto his bulky shoulders. He is grossly overweight, and his pullover shirts never quite cover his protruding paunch. When he eats, he shovels the food into his mouth as if he hasn’t eaten for days, bread crumbs and food scraps settling in his untrimmed beard.

The thesis of the first paragraph is, "My father’s hands are grotesque," and the rest of the paragraph is about his hands. The primary emotions Gray feels and wants to evoke in us are revulsion and disgust. Some of her description could fit into an objective description:

a chronic skin disease
scaly, reddish patches

But the bulk of the description is carefully set up to elicit that revulsion and disgust:

grotesque.
Covers his massive, thick hands
Scaly, reddish patches
Periodically flake off
sending tiny pieces of dead skin sailing to the ground.

She moves from the psoriasis to his smoking:

his fingers are permanently stained a dull yellow from
years of chain smoking.

These items lead naturally to the concluding sentence "The thought of those swollen, discolored, scaly hands touching me, whether it be out of love or anger, sends chills up my spine."

Notice that Jan could have turned the description any way she wanted to; she chooses what emotion to evoke. The typical freshman essay I've been reading since I started teaching in 1988 runs something like this:

My father has psoriasis, a chronic skin disease that is very painful. But he never complains or lets it intefere with his being the world's greatest dad.

One reason Jan Gray's essay got reprinted is that it is so much different (and better) than the typical essay.

The second paragraph zooms out from the first to describe the appearance of the whole man. The topic sentence is, "By nature, he is a disorderly, unkempt person." Then she describes the way his whole body looks, continuing with emotions of revulsion and disgust. Here is the list she found in her invention stage.

The numerous cigarette burns,
food stains, and
ashes on his clothes show how little he cares about his appearance.
He has a dreadful habit of running his hands through his greasy hair and
scratching his scalp,
causing dandruff to drift downward onto
his bulky shoulders.
He is grossly overweight, and
his pullover shirts never quite cover his protruding paunch.
When he eats, he shovels the food into his mouth as if he hasn’t eaten for days,
bread crumbs and food scraps
settling in his untrimmed beard.

Again, she could have described her father in a more positive lights. She could have called his shoulders "broad" instead of "bulky." She could have said he's pleasantly plump rather than grossly overweight. So she not only chose what to describe, but how to describe it.

Dad 2: Phyllis Theroux

Theroux's description of her father puts a much more positive spin on her father than Gray does.

He was a tall, crooked‐toothed, curly haired man, who smelled of Lucky Strikes and St. Johns Bay Rum. He was the only father who wore penny loafers on business trips, a Mouseketeer hat to pick up my brother on his first movie date, and he had the delicious gall to invite the richest girl in my class (she had her own pool but an exclusive number of invitations) to come on over to the house (“When you're free, of course”) and watch our lawn sprinklers.

“Sometimes we get them going in opposite directions to each other, he said drily, “and it's terribly amusing.”

The richest girl in the class laughed nervously, I choked back my borrowed triumph, and savored the fact that once again my father had effectively punched‐out the opposition on my behalf. He had a gift for it.

Notice that the items she lists aren't automatically positive; she puts that spin on them. She could have described his smoking as negatively as Jan Gray does; instead, she chose to describe it positively. She could have called him "snaggle toothed" instead of "crooked toothed." She shares his sense of humor; if she didn't, she could talk about him wearing a Mouseketeer hat to her brother's date as a traumatic experience. Also, her father asking the school's richest snob to come watch their lawn sprinklers could have humiliated Phyllis had that been the way she reacted to such situations. Instead, she shares her father's amusement.