Introduction
4
Explaining a Concept
Concepts are central to the understanding of virtually every subject—in the community, at work, and especially in college. Much of your reading and writing as a student involves learning the concepts that are the building blocks of academic subjects. Concepts include principles or ideals (such as equal justice or the American dream), theories (such as relativity or evolution), ideas (such as commodification or states’ rights), conditions (such as state of flow or paranoia), phenomena (such as quarks or inflation), and processes (such as high-intensity interval training or socialization). To communicate effectively and efficiently about a particular subject—whether you are writing to insiders or to novices—you need to be able to use and explain concepts clearly and compellingly.
In College Courses
For a cultural studies course, a student responds to a writing assignment to analyze the politics of sexuality in advertising. She decides to use the concept of framing she had learned in her first-year composition course the previous term. After reviewing her old class notes, she researches cultural framing theory in relation to sexual politics. She finds several sources and cites them to explain the concept. Then, she uses cultural framing to analyze a couple of advertisements she downloaded from the Web. Finally, she posts to her class Web site the final paper, along with the advertisements she analyzed.
In The Community
A manager at a marketing research firm gives a presentation on surveying, an important research method, to fifth-grade science students. She begins by having students fill out a brief survey on their television-watching habits, and then asks them to speculate on what they expect their answers to show and how this data might be used by advertisers and programmers. Then, with the students’ help, she selects the variables that seem significant: the respondents’ gender, the number of hours spent watching television, and the types of shows watched. At the next class, she distributes graphs detailing her analysis and asks the students to see whether the results match their assumptions. She concludes by passing out a quiz to find out how much the students have learned about surveys.
In The Workplace
At a seminar for small business owners with minimal knowledge of programming, a technology consultant gives a multimedia presentation on what has been called the Kinect effect. He begins by explaining what Kinect is and how it works, showing two clips from the film Minority Report to illustrate Kinect’s gesture-driven 3-D imaging (multitouch computer interface) and personalized advertising (retina-scanning talking billboards). Then he demonstrates some of its many potential medical uses—for example, enabling surgeons to use gesture to examine a patient’s MRI scans during surgery or providing navigational assistance for the visually impaired.
In this chapter, we ask you to explain a concept that is unfamiliar to your readers. Whether you tackle a concept you’ve studied in college or choose one from your work or your favorite sport, you need to answer your readers’ inevitable “So what?” Why should they want to understand the concept? Analyzing the selections in the Guide to Reading that follows will help you learn how to make your concept explanation interesting as well as informative. The Guide to Writing later in the chapter will show you ways to use the basic features of the genre, including how to use visuals and multimedia, to make an unfamiliar concept appealing and understandable to your readers.