Friday's Task (after the vocab quiz)

For the rest of today's class, you will be crafting your own piece of writing that utilizes DEFINITION as the primary rhetorical strategy.

Your task will be to define an abstract noun (I have a list at the bottom of this post) for a purpose of your choosing. Once you have selected the noun and the purpose for your piece, you will also want to decide which mode of discourse would most logically allow you to achieve that purpose. For some of you, it may be easier to consider the mode of discourse after you write your piece.

As an example, a student could select the word "intelligence," and use the definition strategy to achieve the following purpose: "to explain why formal education is not the answer for everyone." With the abstract noun of "intelligence," the identified purpose, and the use of definition, the student may find that writing in the expository mode of discourse is best.

Bottom line: your writing should include an identifiable purpose, should use definition as a predominant rhetorical strategy, and should be written in one of the modes of discourse we have discussed (this one is inevitable; mostly, I want you to be able to identify the mode in which you wrote).

Please consider the pieces you read yesterday, and the "Moth" pieces we read earlier this week. I would like your pieces to be typed in a word document. Please shoot for 800-1,200 words, and please double-space them. At the bottom of your document, in italics or bold, please tell me your purpose and the mode of discourse you utilized.

Here is a list of abstract nouns (if you want to do a different one, let me know):

• Love
• Hate
• Fear
• Comfort
• Honesty
• Trust
• Ignorance
• Compassion
• Morality
• Anxiety
• Talent
• Pain
• Suffering
• Safety
• Stability
• Honor

Explanation of Tasks and Reminders of Terms

As you read the two texts you've selected and try to identify the mode of discourse in which it was written, keep in mind that the modes we went over yesterday include:

• Narrative
• Expository
• Description
• Argument

After you have identified the mode of discourse, please explain what it is about that text that makes you believe that it is written in that mode.

Please also remember that I want you to identify what you believe the author's purpose was as he or she wrote. What were we, as readers, supposed to take away from this text? How do you know?
Also, please identify any of the following rhetorical strategies that may have been utilized as the author developed his or her purpose.

• Definition
• Cause/effect
• Process
• Analysis/division
• Classification
• Comparison and contrast

To show your analysis of the mode of discourse and the rhetorical strategies, please post a comment on the passage that states the mode of discourse you believe it to be, the ways you identified it as that mode, the rhetorical strategies you see at play, and a discussion of the purpose. Please include your name IN THE POST because otherwise I will have no way of knowing who posted what.

Songhua River by Rui Liu

Songhua River

I grew up by the famous Songhua River in China. I could walk to the riverbank in only about five minutes from our house.The Songhua River is in Northeast China, flowing about 1,927 kilometers from Changbai Mountains through the Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces. When I was little, the water in the river was very clear. You could see through to the bottom of the river, and you could also see a lot of small fishes and tadpoles swimming around in the shallow water. There was no sand on the riverbank, but all kinds of rocks—some were very smooth; you could walk on them with bare feet; others were very rough and sharp edged. Sometimes if we were lucky, we could find unique and pretty patterned pebbles.

Along the riverbank, there were thickets of willow trees, which were my favorite trees, planted on the riverside. The long wicker drooping towards the ground looked like shy ladies. In springtime, when the light green leaves came out, you could smell a gentle fragrance radiating from those trees, and when winds blew, all the wicker drifted around like fairies dancing in the air.

In the spring season, the water in the river was very cold because it had just thawed, and it had its highest flows when the mountain snow melted during the spring. However, during summer time, the water was very nice and cool; therefore, it was the best time to swim in the river. The river was also very dangerous. There were many unpredictable whirlpools hidden under the deep parts of the water. Swimmers lost their lives in those whirlpools every year. I never dared to go to the deep parts of the river because I was not a very good swimmer. Most of the time, I enjoyed lying on the lifesaver letting the river float me wherever it went, and at the same time, I listened to the nature’s band playing the most beautiful music—the chirping from the birds, the croaking from the frogs, the water flowing sound from the river and the rustling from the wind blowing in the woods.

Sometimes my friend and I took a large piece of cloth, and we each held one side of the cloth standing in the down stream of the river so the upstream water could come through our cloth. We could catch a lot of small fishes and clams just by doing that. Once in a while, we could catch big fishes as long as ten inches. Of course, at the end of the day, we usually threw them right back into the river.There were crowds of frogs on the riverbank during this season. Each evening, we could hear a very loud croaking from our house. Those sounds always made me feel at home and safe.

When fall seasons came, strong winds blew day and night, and then the river would became very unstable and turbid. That’s when kids kept away from the river voluntarily without our parent’s warning because during that season, the river looked filthy and unfriendly.

The river froze from late November until March. That was the time we ice skated, sledded and played tops on the river. Actually, the surface of the frozen river was not very smooth. Some areas were very rough and bumpy, but we still loved it. When I was little, the winter in the northern most part of China was very long and cold. The river truly brought us a lot of joy and happiness.

The Songhua River gave people who lived in that area both happiness and sadness. But to me, the river only reminds me of my childhood friendships and joy. Perhaps my picture of the river was not spoiled by the careless brush of loss and frustration. Perhaps, because I left my hometown, I can only think of the river with fond nostalgia, much like a person does after moving away from a troublesome sibling.

From Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.
 
This American government — what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.


But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts — a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be

"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
 As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
 Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
 O'er the grave where our hero we buried."

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least: —

"I am too high-born to be propertied,
 To be a secondary at control,
 Or useful serving-man and instrument
 To any sovereign state throughout the world."

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How Much Wallop Can a Simple Word Pack? by Geoffrey Nunberg

How Much Wallop Can a Simple Word Pack? by Geoffrey Nunberg

THE long-term defeat of terror will happen when freedom takes hold in the broader Middle East,'' President Bush said on June 28, as he announced the early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis.

The ''defeat of terror'' -- the wording suggests that much has changed since Sept. 11, 2001. In his speech on that day, Mr. Bush said, ''We stand together to win the war against terrorism,'' and over the following year the White House described the enemy as terrorism twice as often as terror. But in White House speeches over the past year, those proportions have been reversed. And the shift from ''terrorism'' to ''terror'' has been equally dramatic in major newspapers, according to a search of several databases.

Broad linguistic shifts like those usually owe less to conscious decisions by editors or speechwriters than to often unnoticed changes in the way people perceive their world. Terrorism may itself be a vague term, as critics have argued. But terror is still more amorphous and elastic, and alters the understanding not just of the enemy but of the war against it.

True, phrases like ''terror plots'' or ''terror threat level'' can make terror seem merely a headline writer's shortening of the word terrorism. But even there, ''terror'' draws on a more complex set of meanings. It evokes both the actions of terrorists and the fear they are trying to engender.

''Do we cower in the face of terror?'' Mr. Bush asked on Irish television a few days before the handover in Iraq, with terror doing double work.

And unlike ''terrorism,'' ''terror'' can be applied to states as well as to insurgent groups, as in the President's frequent references to Saddam Hussein's ''terror regime.'' Even if Mr. Hussein can't actually be linked to the attacks of Sept. 11, ''terror'' seems to connect them etymologically.

The modern senses of ''terror'' and ''terrorism'' reach back to a single historical moment: ''la Terreur,'' Robespierre's Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794.

''Terror,'' Robespierre said, ''is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.''

It was the ruthless severity of that emanation that moved Edmund Burke to decry ''those hell-hounds called terrorists,'' in one of the first recorded uses of ''terrorist'' in English.

For Robespierre and his contemporaries, ''terror'' conveyed the exalted emotion people may feel when face to face with the absolute. That was what led Albert Camus to describe terror as the urge that draws people to the violent certainties of totalitarianism, where rebellion hardens into ideology.

With time, though, the word's aura of sublimity faded. By 1880, ''holy terror'' was only a jocular name for an obstreperous child and ''terrible'' no longer suggested the sense of awe it had in ''terrible swift sword.'' By the Jazz Age, ''terrific'' was just a wan superlative. Terror was still a name for intense fear, but it no longer connoted a social force.

''Terrorism,'' too, has drifted since its origin. By modern times, the word could refer only to the use of violence against a government, not on its behalf -- though some still claimed the ''terrorist'' designation proudly, like the Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881 and the Zionist Stern Gang (later the Lehi), which, in the 1940's used assassination and other violent means in hopes of driving the British occupiers out of Palestine.

It wasn't until the beginning of the post-colonial period that all groups rejected the terrorist label in favor of names like freedom fighters or mujahadeen. By then, ''terrorism'' was no longer a genuine -ism, but the name for a reprehensible strategy, often extended as a term of abuse for anyone whose methods seemed ruthless.

But the recent uses of ''terror'' seem to draw its disparate, superseded senses back together in a way that Burke might have found familiar. Today, it is again a name that encompasses both the dark forces that threaten ''civilization'' and the fears they arouse.

The new senses of the noun are signaled in another linguistic shift in the press and in White House speeches. Just as ''terrorism'' has been replaced by ''terror,'' so ''war'' is much more likely now to be followed by ''on'' rather than ''against.''

That ''war on'' pattern dates from the turn of the 20th century, when people adapted epidemiological metaphors like ''the war on typhus'' to describe campaigns against social evils like alcohol, crime and poverty -- endemic conditions that could be mitigated but not eradicated. Society may declare a war on drugs or drunken driving, but no one expects total victory.

''The war on terror,'' too, suggests a campaign aimed not at human adversaries but at a pervasive social plague. At its most abstract, terror comes to seem as persistent and inexplicable as evil itself, without raising any inconvenient theological qualms. And in fact, the White House's use of ''evil'' has declined by 80 percent over the same period that its use of ''terror'' has been increasing.

Like wars on ignorance and crime, a ''war on terror'' suggests an enduring state of struggle -- a ''never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts,'' as Camus put it in ''The Plague,'' his 1947 allegory on the rise and fall of Fascism. It is as if the language is girding itself for the long haul.

Shame by Dick Gregory

Shame by Dick Gregory

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that. I was about seven years old when I got my first big lesson. I was in love with a little girl named Helene Tucker, a light-complexioned little girl with pigtails and nice manners. She was always clean and she was smart in school. I think I went to school then mostly to look at her. I brushed my hair and even got me a little old handkerchief. It was a lady’s handkerchief, but I didn’t want Helene to see me wipe my nose on my hand.

The pipes were frozen again, there was no water in the house, but I washed my socks and shirt every night. I’d get a pot, and go over to Mister Ben’s grocery store, and stick my pot down into his soda machine and scoop out some chopped ice. By evening the ice melted to water for washing. I got sick a lot that winter because the fire would go out at night before the clothes were dry. In the morning I’d put them on, wet or dry, because they were the only clothes I had.

Everybody’s got a Helene Tucker, a symbol of everything you want. I loved her for her goodness, her cleanness, her popularity. She’d walk down my street and my brothers and sisters would yell, “Here comes Helene,” and I’d rub my tennis sneakers on the back of my pants and wish my hair wasn’t so nappy and the white folks’ shirt fit me better. I’d run out on the street. If I knew my place and didn’t come too close, she’d wink at me and say hello. That was a good feeling. Sometimes I’d follow her all the way home, and shovel the snow off her walk and try to make friends with her momma and her aunts. I’d drop money on her stoop late at night on my way back from shining shoes in the taverns. And she had a daddy, and he had a good job. He was a paperhanger.

I guess I would have gotten over Helene by summertime, but something happened in that classroom that made her face hang in front of me for the next twenty-two years. When I played the drums in high school, it was for Helene, and when I broke track records in college, it was for Helene, and when I started standing behind microphones and heard applause, I wished Helene could hear it too. It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine years old and married and making money that I finally got her out of my system. Helene was sitting in that classroom when I learned to be ashamed of myself.

It was on a Thursday. I was sitting in the back of the room, in a seat with a chalk circle drawn around it. The idiot’s seat, the troublemaker’s seat.

The teacher thought I was stupid. Couldn’t spell, couldn’t read, couldn’t do arithmetic. Just stupid. Teachers were never interested in finding out that you couldn’t concentrate because you were so hungry, because you hadn’t had any breakfast. All you could think about was noontime; would it ever come? Maybe you could sneak into the cloakroom and steal a bite of some kid’s lunch out of a coat pocket. A bite of something. Paste. You can’t really make a meal of paste, or put it on bread for a sandwich, but sometimes I’d scoop a few spoonfuls out of the big paste jar in the back of the room. Pregnant people get strange tastes. I was pregnant with poverty. Pregnant with dirt and pregnant with smells that made people turn away. Pregnant with cold and pregnant with shoes that were never bought for me. Pregnant with five other people in my bed and no daddy in the next room, and pregnant with hunger. Paste doesn’t taste too bad when you’re hungry.

The teacher thought I was a troublemaker. All she saw from the front of the room was a little black boy who squirmed in his idiot’s seat and made noises and poked the kids around him. I guess she couldn’t see a kid who made noises because he wanted someone to know he was there.

It was on a Thursday, the day before the Negro payday. The eagle always flew on Friday. The teacher was asking each student how much his father would give to the Community Chest. On Friday night, each kid would get the money from his father, and on Monday he would bring it to the school. I decided I was going to buy a daddy right then. I had money in my pocket from shining shoes and selling papers, and whatever Helene Tucker pledged for her daddy I was going to top it. And I’d hand the money right in. I wasn’t going to wait until Monday to buy me a daddy.

I was shaking, scared to death. The teacher opened her book and started calling out names alphabetically:

“Helene Tucker?”

“My Daddy said he’d give two dollars and fifty cents.”

“That’s very nice, Helene. Very, very nice indeed.”

That made me feel pretty good. It wouldn’t take too much to top that. I had almost three dollars in dimes and quarters in my pocket. I stuck my hand in my pocket and held on to the money, waiting for her to call my name. But the teacher closed her book after she called everybody else in the class.

I stood up and raised my hand.

“What is it now?”

“You forgot me.”

She turned toward the blackboard. “I don’t have time to be playing with you, Richard.”

“My daddy said he’d...”

“Sit down, Richard, you’re disturbing the class.”

“My daddy said he’d give...fifteen dollars.”

She turned around and looked mad. “We are collecting this money for you and your kind, Richard Gregory. If your daddy can give fifteen dollars you have no business being on relief.”

“I got it right now, I got it right now, my Daddy gave it to me to turn in today, my daddy said. ..”

“And furthermore,” she said, looking right at me, her nostrils getting big and her lips getting thin and her eyes opening wide, “We know you don’t have a daddy.”

Helene Tucker turned around, her eyes full of tears. She felt sorry for me. Then I couldn’t see her too well because I was crying, too.

“Sit down, Richard.” And I always thought the teacher kind of liked me. She always picked me to wash the blackboard on Friday, after school. That was a big thrill; it made me feel important. If I didn’t wash it, come Monday the school might not function right. “Where are you going, Richard?"

I walked out of school that day, and for a long time I didn’t go back very often.

There was shame there. Now there was shame everywhere. It seemed like the whole world had been inside that classroom, everyone had heard what the teacher had said, everyone had turned around and felt sorry for me. There was shame in going to the Worthy Boys Annual Christmas Dinner for you and your kind, because everybody knew what a worthy boy was. Why couldn’t they just call it the Boys Annual Dinner-why’d they have to give it a name? There was shame in wearing the brown and orange and white plaid mackinaw’ the welfare gave to three thousand boys. Why’d it have to be the same for everybody so when you walked down the street the people could see you were on relief? It was a nice warm mackinaw and it had a hood, and my momma beat me and called me a little rat when she found out I stuffed it in the bottom of a pail full of garbage way over on Cottage Street. There was shame in running over to Mister Ben’s at the end of the day and asking for his rotten peaches, there was shame in asking Mrs. Simmons for a spoonful of sugar, there was shame in running out to meet the relief truck. I hated that truck, full of food for you and your kind. I ran into the house and hid when it came. And then I started to sneak through alleys, to take the long way home so the people going into White’s Eat Shop wouldn’t see me. Yeah, the whole world heard the teacher that day-we all know you don’t have a Daddy.

It lasted for a while, this kind of numbness. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. And then one day I met this wino in a restaurant. I’d been out hustling all day, shining shoes, selling newspapers, and I had googobs of money in my pocket. Bought me a bowl of chili for fifteen cents, and a cheese- burger for fifteen cents, and a Pepsi for five cents, and a piece of chocolate cake for ten cents. That was a good meal. I was eating when this old wino came in. I love winos because they never hurt anyone but themselves.

The old wino sat down at the counter and ordered twenty-six cents worth of food. He ate it like he really enjoyed it. When the owner, Mister Williams, asked him to pay the check, the old wino didn’t lie or go through his pocket like he suddenly found a hole.

He just said: “Don’t have no money.” The owner yelled: “Why in hell did you come in here and eat my food if you don’t have no money? That food cost me money.”

Mister Williams jumped over the counter and knocked the wino off his stool and beat him over the head with a pop bottle. Then he stepped back and watched the wino bleed. Then he kicked him. And he kicked him again.

I looked at the wino with blood all over his face and I went over. “Leave him alone, Mister Williams. I’ll pay the twenty-six cents.”

The wino got up, slowly, pulling himself up to the stool, then up to the counter, holding on for a minute until his legs stopped shaking so bad. He looked at me with pure hate. “Keep your twenty-six cents. You don’t have to pay, not now. I just finished paying for it.”

He started to walk out, and as he passed me, he reached down and touched my shoulder. “Thanks, sonny, but it’s too late now. Why didn’t you pay it before?” I was pretty sick about that. I waited too long to help another man.