[Analyze]
| Use the basic features. |
Writing for her instructor and classmates in an English class, Patricia Lyu can assume that the psychological concept she is explaining is unfamiliar to her audience, and because it is a topic in her Introduction to Psychology textbook, she can be confident that it is widely accepted and a basic building block of the field. However, when she applies the concept to a book her readers know well and uses the concept to interpret Henry Dobbins’s “peculiar habit” in The Things They Carried (par. 11), Lyu’s purpose becomes more complicated. She is not only reporting established information about a concept but also presenting her own ideas. Her readers are not likely to question the concept, as long as she provides authoritative sources to back it up, but they may very well question her application of the concept. Therefore, Lyu needs to provide evidence, quoting from The Things They Carried to convince readers that her use of the concept makes sense and that it helps to explain Dobbins’s behavior. Concept explanations nearly always entail this kind of shift from reporting established information to presenting the writer’s own ideas about the concept and offering supportive evidence.
Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Cain reports information and also presents her own ideas in Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?:
| Use the basic features. |
Patricia Lyu refers to British psychologist John Bowlby near the beginning and the end of her paper. In paragraph 2, she introduces the concept of attachment as a survival strategy, and then in paragraph 11, she notes Bowlby’s assessment of attachment as “intertwined” with fear. With these two references to Bowlby, Lyu creates a sense of closure, a sense that readers have come full circle. Cain also uses this strategy.
Write a paragraph or two analyzing how Cain creates a sense of closure in her article, Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?:
| Use the basic features. |
Writers explaining concepts often use comparison and contrast. Research has shown that seeing how unfamiliar concepts are similar to or different from concepts we already know facilitates the learning of new concepts. Even when both concepts are unfamiliar, comparing foregrounds commonalities, while contrasting makes visible inconsistencies we might not otherwise notice.
Writers employ many strategies to signal comparisons and contrasts, including words that emphasize similarity or difference, and repeating sentence patterns to highlight the differences:
| COMPARISONS |
Same/also: words emphasizing similarity |
| CONTRASTS |
Repeated sentence pattern highlights the contrast |
Write a paragraph or two analyzing Cain’s strategies for showing contrast in her article, Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?:
To learn more about comparing and contrasting, see Chapter 18.
| Use the basic features. |
Cain’s article first appeared in the New York Times. So, like Toufexis and Lehrer, whose articles were originally published in popular periodicals, Cain names her sources and mentions their credentials but does not cite them as you must do when writing a paper for a class. While Cain does not cite her sources formally, as academic writing requires, she does integrated her sources efffectively by
Look at how Cain achieves these goals:
As a society, we prefer action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. Studies show that we rank fast and frequent talkers as more competent, likable and even smarter than slow ones. As the psychologists William Hart and Dolores Albarracin point out, phrases like “get active,” “get moving,” “do something” and similar calls to action surface repeatedly in recent books. (par. 10)
Cain’s idea
Research findings supporting Cain’s idea
Author credentials and signal phrase
Links Cain’s idea and research findings
Write a paragraph analyzing how Cain integrates source material elsewhere in her article: