panic! at the classroom (A+ E)

Upon our first writing assignment based on our summer reading, we were told to "write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies Horace’s assertion about the role that adversity (financial or political hardship, danger, misfortune, failure, disadvantage, etc.) plays in developing a person’s character and/or contributing to his or her success". Easy enough, I thought and began to type as quickly as I could. However, much to the despair of my perfectionism, I a.) didn't write the ever coveted five paragraphs and b.) didn't receive a perfect score.

Now as someone who always believed that they had a knack for writing, due to a book reading obsession in my childhood, this was a blow to my pride (although my classmates would probably crucify me for complaining about a 7). Faced with this, I listened closely in class and was slapped in the face with the classic "you need to explain, not just give examples".

Here is an excerpt from that essay:

In Boys In The Boat, Joe Rantz’s adversities due to being abandoned by his hateful stepmother, Thula, and his mentally weak father, Harry, sets him up for international success. Thrown into a world unbeknownst to him, he is forced to work and provide only for himself in the house his father never quite finished building. This mental and physical strain later proved to be helpful once he had joined the rowing team of the University of Washington. Like many of the other boys who would later make the varsity team, they were “western bumpkins” who had their foundation of strength lying in grunt work like farming and lumbering. Additionally, with barely a dollar to his name, Joe had a bigger incentive than the other boys as making the team would mean he could continue his education at the university. Joe goes on the point out that in the first week of rowing sessions, the first to leave were the boys in the clean clothes and oxford shoes. Furthermore, on the brink of the varsity boat decisions tensions were high in the boathouse. During the break, Joe had to make ends meet by working at Grand Coulee and by doing this, ends up befriending those in the other boats. Cracking Joe’s hard exterior proved beneficial as soon after the boats were rearranged, he was in a varsity boat with those whom he could rely on in a sport that was set on cohesion. Thus, abandonment for Joe Rantz was a catalyst that gave him the mental and physical strength to eventually win gold for rowing at the Olympics. 

My brain kicked into panic mode and immediately began to work on this new concept: work on the "why" rather than the "what". I have a bad habit of becoming obsessive on places where I falter, but I worked hard and meticulously to ensure that this would not repeat itself. It was a strong wake up call that I cannot assume that good grades will be handed to me in this English class.

Thus came the dawn of our first unit: Rhetorical Analysis.

I'll admit it. I almost completely lost hope when I got my first SOAPSTONE assignment, though I still don't know why the very concept of them was hard for me to grasp. Whenever we wrote ours on the board, I felt like mine stuck out like a spider on a ballet shoe and Ms. McMahon was quick to point out where I had missed the main element of what we were analyzing. At this point, my confidence wasn't very high for the rest of the school year.

I can easily recall the amount of stress I had towards our Santa Ana prompt. Correction on that: the amount of stress my ENTIRE class had. I even stayed after school for extra help, something I had never done for an English class before. After all, they say junior year is full of firsts.

What I had failed to understand was that I wasn't to learn English in this class. That, we were supposed already know. Instead, what we were to learn in this class was the wholly different language of persuasion. The concept of deconstructing the ways in which people try to manipulate was fascinating to say the least, but it wasn't something that came naturally. I remember poring over the examples given to us and drafting over and over again until I was happy with it.

An excerpt of my product is this:

A major divergence between Thomas and Didion’s writing is the tone each chose to better push their messages in order to create a pathos appeal. Thomas approaches the winds with a personal tone in order to drive her message that the fires are not a thing to be feared as long as humans stop ignorantly intervening in their paths. Using phrases like “‘Chaparral’ is a common word here in the lower third of the state’ (par. 9) as well as describing when she and her neighbors go to the hillside “to watch the orange flames color the sunset” (par. 9), create a conversational tone akin to a local talking about their hometown to an outsider. She also presents the fires as an event that brings people together to create a feeling of respectful awe towards nature. Conversely, Didion molds her message that the winds put those in Los Angeles on edge with a sinister tone. In the first paragraph, she claims that everyone knows when the winds are coming by stating, “We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks”. The syntax used with abrupt stops and short sentences creates a restless feeling to add to the anxiousness of the tone. Her utilization of violent diction also fortifies her tone with the use of words related to tragedy like “sirens”, “killed”, “murdered” and “apocalypse”. These words trigger feelings of fear which is the emotion the author is emulating in her writing from her own experience. To further connect to their readers, Thomas’s conversational tone is constructed with her anecdotes and personal touches while Didion’s ominous tone is driven by her choice of tense syntax and violent diction.

Evidently this is not perfect, however it was already a vast improvement from my humble beginnings in the class. My confidence in repair, I continued to persevere in my journey through the jungle of rhetoric.