Before skimming the following essay, apply the previewing techniques discussed above, and complete the Thinking Critically: Previewing activity on Paraphrase, Patchwriting, and Plagiarism.

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THE “FIRST AND LAST” RULE As noted above, authors often place main points of emphasis at the beginnings and endings of essays. They also place important material at the beginnings and endings of paragraphs and sentences.

When writing, you can emphasize main points by using the first and last rule. Don’t bury your most important material in the middle of sentences, paragraphs, or entire papers. Make it stand out.

Consider the following observations. Select two that you find to be most important.

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Now arrange these statements in a short paragraph, using the first and last rule to emphasize the two that you selected as most important. Compare your paragraph to your classmates’ paragraphs. How do they compare?

READING WITH A CAREFUL EYE: UNDERLINING, HIGHLIGHTING, ANNOTATING

Once you have a general idea of the work — not only an idea of its topic and thesis but also a sense of the way in which the thesis is argued — you can go back and start reading it carefully.

As you read, underline or highlight key passages, and make annotations in the margins. Because you’re reading actively, or interacting with the text, you won’t simply let your eye rove across the page.

In all these ways, you interact with the text and lay the groundwork for eventually writing your own essay on what you have read.

What you annotate will depend largely on your purpose. If you’re reading an essay in order to see how the writer organizes an argument, you’ll annotate one sort of thing. If you’re reading in order to challenge the thesis, you’ll annotate other things. Here is a passage from an essay entitled “On Racist Speech,” with a student’s rather skeptical, even aggressive, annotations. But notice that the student apparently made at least one of the annotations — “Definition of ‘fighting words’” — chiefly in order to remind herself to locate where the definition of an important term appears in the essay. The essay, printed in full on Charles R. Lawrence III, On Racist Speech, is by Charles R. Lawrence III, a professor of law at Georgetown University. It originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education (October 25, 1989), a publication read chiefly by college and university faculty members and administrators.

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“THIS; THEREFORE, THAT”

To arrive at a coherent thought or series of thoughts that will lead to a reasonable conclusion, a writer has to go through a good deal of preliminary effort. When we discussed heuristics in Generating Ideas: Writing as a Way of Thinking, we talked about patterns of thought that stimulate initial ideas. The path to sound conclusions involves similar thought patterns that carry forward the arguments presented in the essay:

All of these patterns can serve as heuristics or prompts — that is, they can stimulate the creation of ideas.

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Moreover, for the writer to convince the reader that the conclusion is sound, the reasoning behind the conclusion must be set forth in detail, with a good deal of “This; therefore, that”; “If this, then that”; and “Others might object at this point that….” The arguments in this book require more comment than President Calvin Coolidge supposedly provided when his wife, who hadn’t been able to attend church one Sunday, asked him what the preacher talked about in his sermon. “Sin,” Coolidge said. His wife persisted: “What did the preacher say about it?” Coolidge’s response: “He was against it.”

But, again, when we say that most of the arguments in this book are presented at length and require careful reading, we don’t mean that they are obscure; we mean, rather, that you have to approach the sentences thoughtfully, one by one. In this vein, recall an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“Can you do Addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

“She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen said.

It’s easy enough to add one and one and one and so on, and of course Alice can do addition — but not at the pace that the White Queen sets. Fortunately, you can set your own pace in reading the cumulative thinking set forth in the essays we reprint in this book. Skimming won’t work, but slow reading — and thinking about what you’re reading — will.

When you first pick up an essay, you may indeed want to skim it, for some of the reasons mentioned on Generating Ideas: Writing as a Way of Thinking, but sooner or later you have to settle down to read it and think about it. The effort will be worthwhile. Consider what John Locke, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, said:

Reading furnishes the mind with materials of knowledge; it is thinking [that] makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Often students read an essay just once, supposing that to reread would be repetitious. But much can be gleaned from a second reading, as new details will likely emerge and new ideas will be generated. Roland Barthes, a twentieth-century philosopher, warned against accepting a first reading as final. Far from being repetitive, “[r]e-reading,” he wrote, “saves the text from repetition, multiplies it in its variety and plurality.” What may actually be repetitious is reading something only once and, thinking you have it pinned down, repeating it (in your writing) and thereby sticking to your first and only impression.

DEFINING TERMS AND CONCEPTS

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Suppose you’re reading an argument about whether a certain set of images is pornography or art. For the present purpose, let’s use a famous example from 1992, when American photographer Sally Mann published Immediate Family, a controversial book featuring numerous images of her three children (then ages 12, 10, and 7) in various states of nakedness during their childhood on a rural Kentucky farm. Mann is considered a great photographer and artist (“America’s Best Photographer,” according to Time magazine in 2001), and Immediate Family is very well regarded in the art community (“one of the great photograph books of our time,” according to the New Republic). But some critics couldn’t separate the images of Mann’s own naked children from the label “child pornography.”

When reading, attend carefully to how terms and concepts are used for the purposes of advancing an argument. In this case, you might begin by asking, “What is pornography? What is art?” If writers and readers cannot agree on basic definitions of the terms and concepts that structure the debate, then argument is futile. And if an author doesn’t share your definition of a term or concept, then you might challenge the premise of his or her argument. If someone were to define pornography to include any images of nude children, that definition would include photographs taken for any reason — medical, sociological, anthropological, scientific — and would include even the innocent photographs taken by proud parents of their children swimming, bathing, and so on. It would also apply to some of the world’s great art. Most people do not seriously think the mere image of the naked body, adult or child, is pornography.

Pornography is often defined according to its intended effect on the viewer (“genital commotion,” Father Harold Gardiner, S.J., called it in Catholic Viewpoint on Censorship). In this definition, if images are eroticized (i.e., made erotic through style or symbolism), if they invite a sexual gaze, they are pornographic. This seems to be the definition that novelist Mary Gordon applied in a 1996 critique of Sally Mann:

Unless we believe it is ethically permissible for adults to have sex with children, we must question the ethics of an art which allows the adult who has the most power over these children — a parent, in this case a mother — to place them in a situation where they become the imagined sexual partner of adults…. It is inevitable that Sally Mann’s photographs arouse the sexual imaginations of strangers.

But is it enough to say something is pornographic if it “arouses the sexual imagination”? No, you might contend, because there is no way to predict what will arouse people’s sexual imaginations. Many kinds of images might arouse the sexual imaginations of different people. You might say in rebutting Gordon, “These are just pictures of children. Sure, they’re naked in some of them, but children have been symbols of purity and innocence in art since the dawn of civilization. If some people see these images as sexual, that’s their problem, not Mann’s.”

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Writers often attempt to provide a provisional definition of important terms and concepts in their arguments. They may write, for example, “For the purposes of this argument, let’s define terrorism as X” (a broad definition) or “According to federal law, the term ‘international terrorism’ means A, B, and C” (a technical definition). If you do this and a reader wants to challenge your ideas, he must argue on your terms or else offer a different definition.

So that we are consistent with our own recommendations, allow us to define the difference between a “term” and a “concept.” A rule of thumb is that a term is more concrete and fixed than a concept. You may be able to find an authoritative source (like a federal law or an official policy) to help define a term. A concept is more open-ended and may have a generally agreed-upon definition, but rarely a strict or unchanging one. Concepts can be abstract but can also function powerfully in argumentation; love, justice, morality, psyche, health, freedom, bravery, obscenity, masculinity — these are all concepts. You may look up such words in the dictionary for general definitions, but the source won’t say much about how to apply the concepts.

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Since you cannot assume that everyone has a shared understanding of concepts you may be using, it’s prudent for the purposes of effective writing to define them. You may find a useful definition of a concept given by an authoritative person, such as an expert in a field, as in “Stephen Hawking defines time as….” You might cite a respected authority, as in “Mahatma Gandhi defines love as….” Alternatively, you can combine several views and insert your own provisional definition. See “Thinking Critically: Defining Terms and Concepts” for an exercise.