![]() ![]() Substantive update Ma(and the PDF now also contains an author-date bibliography with hyperlinks for easy lookup of some of the sources cited). This is a continuing project, with some unfinished business in it. NB While these sixty-plus pages of expository method can be helpful on their own, they are meant to be used in class (eight hours of classroom time, including the time needed to look at student work in class to see how it reads in light of the principles set out in the coursebook itself). We begin by applying these principles of clarity to the single sentence and then move on to the transition from one sentence to the next in composition, where the emphasis falls on cohesion and coherence. Basically, coherence refers to the rhetorical aspects of writing, which include developing and supporting argument, synthesizing and integrating reading, organizing and clarifying ideas. ![]() ![]() The approach is thus visual (prose as a window onto the world) as well as narrative (or “theatrical”), but it is also logical and cognitive: logical because we are asked to make explicit how our concepts as agents relate to one another cognitive in that we want to introduce these concepts in a way that can easily be processed by someone (our invisible reader) in whose mind they are new. 8 Unity & Coherence Preserving Unity Academic essays need unity, which means that all of the ideas in an essay need to relate to the thesis, and all of the ideas in a paragraph need to relate to the paragraph’s topic. In depicting this scene, we are also to imagine that its content (the argument we are making) contains concepts or ideas to which we assign roles as agents doing actions, or acting on a stage (this is the agent-action mode of thinking). So we start out with a framing device: We try to imagine ourselves as writers looking at a scene that we are depicting to a reader who cannot be assumed to have a full view of it. But that in turn means that in the act of writing we have to position ourselves in such a way as to be able to see what our readers see. We can do that if we can appreciate how readers read or want to read, or what they do with the words they read. This coursebook lays out an approach to expository and persuasive writing designed to make it easy for our readers to follow us, no matter how complex the ideas we are trying to put across. ![]()
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