A Focused Explanation
A Clear, Logical Organization
Appropriate Explanatory Strategies
Smooth Integration of Sources
Use the following to help you analyze and evaluate how writers of concept explanations employ the genre’s basic features. The examples are drawn from the reading selections in this chapter.
A Focused Explanation
Read first to identify the concept. Then ask yourself, “What is the focus or main point?” This point is the thesis of a concept explanation, comparable to what we call autobiographical significance in remembered event essays and perspective in profiles. The point answers the “So what?” question: Why are you telling me about this concept? Why is it interesting or important?
Focusing requires that there be thoughtful selection of what to include and what to leave out. For college writing and some other contexts, the focus may be dictated by a specific question or prompt. For example, Patricia Lyu’s instructor asked students to do two things: explain a concept they had learned about in a course, and apply that concept to a passage in The Things They Carried, a book the class was reading. In the textbook for her Introduction to Psychology course, Lyu had recently read about infant attachment and the research that had been done to establish the concept in the field of developmental psychology. She saw immediately how the concept could be applied to The Things They Carried, in particular to explain Dobbins’s “peculiar” attachment to “his girlfriend’s pantyhose” (Lyu, par. 11).
A Clear, Logical Organization
Effective concept explanations have to be clearly and logically organized. As you read the essays in this chapter, notice how each writer develops a plan that does the following:
Let’s put love under a microscope.... When rigorous people with Ph.D.s after their names do that, what they see is not some silly senseless thing. No, their probe reveals that love rests firmly on foundations of evolution, biology, and chemistry. (Toufexis, pars. 1-2)
How does that bond develop and how does it affect romantic relationships later in life John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s theory of attachment answers both of these questions. (Lyu, par. 1)
Thus, Harlow’s research validated attachment theory...
As an adult, however,...
Moreover,...(Lyu, pars. 9, 12, 13)
If, in nature’s design, romantic love is not eternal, neither is it exclusive. (Toufexis, par. 8)
Concept
Main point
Rhetorical questions often announce the topics
Logical transitions often used in topic sentences
Topic sentence may summarize topic of preceding paragraph and introduce topic of current paragraph
For more on writing strategies such as definition and classification, see Chapters 14–19.
Appropriate Explanatory Strategies
Writers explaining a concept typically use a variety of writing strategies, such as definition, classification, comparison-contrast, example, illustration, and cause-effect:
Defining characteristic
Term to be defined
Cue signaling classification
Names the categories
Juxtaposition
| DEFINITION | Each person carries in his or her mind a unique subliminal guide to the ideal partner, a “love map,”...(Toufexis, par. 17) |
| CLASSIFICATION | From this research, Ainsworth identified three basic types (“attachment styles”) of attachment bond that children form with their primary caregiver: secure, anxious (or anxious/ambivalent), and avoidant. (Lyu, par. 4) |
| COMPARISON-CONTRAST | Shyness and introversion are not the same thing. Shy people fear negative judgment; introverts simply prefer quiet, minimally stimulating environments. (Cain, par. 9)In contrast,...(Cain, par. 19)The genetic component of intelligence...functions less like the genes that control for eye color and more like the complex of interacting genes that affect weight and height. (Hurley, par. 17) |
| EXAMPLE | We find them in recent history, in figures like Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust and Albert Einstein, and, in contemporary times: think of Google’s Larry Page, or Harry Potter’s creator, J. K. Rowling. (Cain, par. 11)Anxiety...can serve an important social purpose; for example,...(Cain, par. 22)Despite...side effects—nausea, loss of sex drive, seizures—drugs like Zoloft...(Cain, par. 3) |
| ILLUSTRATION (WITH VISUAL) | The infant monkeys were separated from their biological mothers and raised by a surrogate mother made of wood and covered with terry cloth or made from uncovered heavy wire (see fig. 2). (Lyu, par. 8) |
| CAUSE-EFFECT | How, then, could watching black cats...increase...fluid intelligence? Because the deceptively simple game...targets “working” memory. (Hurley, par. 7) |
Cues
Cues
Examples
Reference to a visual in the text
Cues
Smooth Integration of Sources
Although writers often draw on their own experiences and observations in explaining a concept, they almost always conduct research into their subject. As you read, think about how the writer establishes her or his authority by smoothly integrating information from sources into the explanation. Does the writer quote, paraphrase, or summarize the source material? How does the writer establish the source’s expertise and credibility?
Signal phrase plus background
Parenthetical citation
(qtd. in = quoted in)
| QUOTE | The association between infant attachment and adult relationships was first investigated in Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver’s appropriately titled breakthrough study, “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process.” Since then, attachment theory “has become one of the major frameworks for the study of romantic relationships” (Fraley and Shaver 132). This expansion of the concept of attachment should be no surprise given that Bowlby himself described the formation of attachment as “falling in love” (qtd. in Cassidy 5).(Lyu, par. 12) |
| PARAPHRASE | It is the difference between passionate and compassionate love, observes Walsh, a psychobiologist at Boise State University in Idaho. (Toufexis, par. 14) |
| SUMMARY | In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults...showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence. (Hurley, par. 4) |
How writers treat sources depends on the writing situation. Certain formal situations, such as college assignments or scholarly publications, require writers to cite sources in the text and document them in a bibliography (called a list of works cited in many humanities disciplines and a list of references in the sciences and social sciences). Students and scholars are expected to cite their sources formally because readers judge their work in part by what the writers have read and how they have used their reading and also so that those interested can locate the sources and read more about the topic for themselves. (See student Patricia Lyu’s essay for an example of academic citation.) For more informal writing?—magazine and newspaper articles, for example—readers do not expect references or publication information to appear in the article, but they do expect sources to be identified and their expertise established in some way. (See the articles by Toufexis, Hurley, and Cain for examples of informal citation.)